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You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.

Hey, everybody, it's Mariel.

If you're old enough to remember the 80s or 90s, you may remember this PSA involving an egg and a frying pan.

This is your brain on drugs.

Any questions? Or this one, with a father standing in front of his 13-year-old son's grave.

If you don't teach your kids to say no to drugs, it's as good as saying yes.

Or maybe you remember the DARE program, where police officers went to classrooms and told kids to just say no to drugs.

Here's former Attorney General Jeff Sessions talking about the program in 2017.

There was, became fundamental to our success by educating children to the dangers of drug use.

I firmly believe that your work-same life.

Those Dare presentations and TVPSAs were part of a decades-long abstinence-only campaign around

drugs, one that's still popular today. The thing is, research has long shown only telling

kids to just say no doesn't have a significant impact on drug use.

And now overdose deaths among teenagers have skyrocketed, largely because of fentanyl.

So yeah, it's dangerous out there. But experts say there's another option that could help

save teenagers' lives. It's called harm reduction,

and it's designed to keep people safe when they do choose to use drugs. On this episode of Life Kit,

how to talk to teenagers about drugs and drug use. NPR's Education Desk has been working on a series

about the rise of fentanyl overdoses among teens. An editor Nicole Cohen and reporter

...