Dear teacher.

One of the most important things you can do as a teacher is to give your students information about the health effects of drug abuse. Together with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), we've put together this 16-page book of reproducibles, full of facts and activities on drugs of abuse. This book is just one component of our ongoing drug education program, "Heads Up: Real News About Drugs and Your Body," a partnership between NIDA and Scholastic Inc. These skills pages can be used alone or to support and extend the feature articles that appeared in your classroom magazine in the 2002-2003 school year and are continuing this year.

This book includes an introduction to the brain, that crucial organ so vulnerable to drugs of abuse. Then, we focus on the health effects of specific drugs, including marijuana, inhalants, nicotine, steroids, prescription drugs, club drugs, heroin, and cocaine.

While you can use these reproducibles to support a drug education, health, or human-body science curriculum, the activities extend into other areas. In order to complete the activities, students must read charts and graphs and complete diagrams. They must read and practice universal skills such as critical thinking, pre- and post-reading strategies, inferencing, and recall. We hope you find these pages useful across your curriculum.