Not making a strong argument is a relief

When I was in middle school, one of our teachers gave us a “don’t do drugs” talk.Somebody asked him whether he had ever used drugs himself. He replied something along the lines of:I’m not going to answer that question, because it’s one that I can only lose.Either I say yes, and you can conclude that drugs aren’t so bad since I’m fine now.Or I say no, and you can conclude that since I haven’t tried them, I don’t know what I’m talking about.That stuck in my mind. I couldn’t fault the logic in what he said. But something about it still felt off.Surely it can’t be that any answer to a question makes it less likely for drugs to be bad?[1]Presumably it’s possible for drugs to really be bad. And if we are in a world where that is true... you need to be able to conclude that, somehow. He had concluded that somehow.There was also the question of, if any answer should update us against believing that drugs are bad, how does telling us that help? If he gives us the logic of why we’d update against him anyway, shouldn’t that cause us to update already?Even though he never stated this explicitly, I think I heard his comment as communicating something like:This is an adversarial game - you are teenagers who want to defy authority, so you’re looking for ways to disbelieve me. There are illegitimate maneuvers that you can pull to turn anything that I say against me, so I’ll refuse to play that game by not letting you make those maneuvers.So his move was, in a sense, trying to poison the well against those questions. Not only was he refusing to answer the question, but he was implying that even if we did get an answer, two possible things we could say in response were invalid.But why were they invalid?What his comment ignored was that if he said yes or no, he could also give the reason why he’d concluded that drugs were bad regardless:If he hadn’t tried them, maybe he knew people who had, or maybe he just trusted the judgment of others who had studied the topic in more detail.If he