abstinence only education can be especially dangerous because it more often than not tends towards a heavy religious influence which will teach the children that their natural impulses are wrong and immoral. you have these children who grow up hating themselves because of such abuse.

This.  It can be particularly damaging if they follow through on the impulses, then feel as if they are somehow a bad person.  The worst are hardline catholics that teach that any orgasmic act outside of marital sex with the intention or willingness to have a baby is evil.  Then these poor kids think even masturbation (something nearly every human on the planet does after the age 13 or so) is paramount to murder.

A brief history of why the church takes this stance.  The thought on procreation used to be that the man's "seed" was just that, an actual human life, and  that the woman was just an oven in which the baby developed and grew.  This is why the early church was against any such acts, as they thought you were literally killing a person if you had an orgasmic act without the intention or willingness to have a child.  Obviously this is wrong, and a school? of sperm can no way be thought of as a human life, but the church has never been an organization to embrace scientific fact.

I think the following message is what is healthiest, most appropriate, and most effective at preventing teen pregnancy and STD transmission (again, you will NEVER prevent teen sex):

The urges you have are healthy, normal, and in no way immoral
Sex carries risks, such as pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases which can forever alter your life
The only way to be 100% safe is to not have sex (masturbation is fine)
IF you are going to act on your urges, protect yourself with an effective form of birth control, and ideally 2.

Except you know.  The guy argueing with me.

Which is why it's even more important... normalization of a dangererous act to teenagers is the exact thing that you more or less are trying to fight.

The study above seemed to suggest otherwise, but what your missing is that abstinience education is the base that starts off keeping things down.

To use another, sillier example.  Absitence education is like telling people that snakes are dangererous.  While condom education is snake handling lessons.  That snakes are dangerous are enough to dissuade most people from handling snakes... while snake handling lessons helps more people... and nothing really helps others.

It's at it's lowest point ever.... and has a similar decline as the above.

Incomplete charts found in a couple minutes....

Not sure what that bump was about. 

If I had to guess I'd say that it to peakk in 1997, which I believe is when Joe Camel was discontinued due to being seen as attracting kids to smoke, and when the industry was criticisized in general for targettting kids.

So i'd guess the tobacco industry was targetting kids then forced to stop, but who knows.

The vast majority of people aren't born with a drug addiction, but nearly all people will naturally experience sexual arousal. So no, it's not like saying to people don't do drugs at all.

There's a scene in the first episode of The West Wing, in which Toby is in a meeting involving some religious people. One of those people says "Show a teenage boy a condom, and his mind will turn to lust", to which Toby responds "Show the average teenage boy a lug-rench and his mind will turn to lust". There is simply no analogy with drugs.

People don't have a natural and extremely powerful biological urge to play with snakes. It's not a very good example at all. People simply want to have sex - their body tells them to and the combined might of the media tells them to. A teacher telling them not to doesn't seem to work according to the majority of studies.

Your right.  The fact that it's a natural urge is why absitence education is even more important to be at the forefront of education.  Otherwise EVERYBODY would be doing it. 

With snake handling, it would only deter a part of the population that is interested in that in the first place.  So such statistics for something that's less of a universal urge would be less impressive and harder to measure.   In general, this is an arguement AGAINST your point, not for it.  I was going to mention it but left it out for brevity's sake.

Outside which, I don't believe there has been another study that's actually studied it.

The other studies I've seen has compaired abstinence only vs a combined apporach INCLUDING abistinence.

Which is like arguieng a diet doesn't work, because in studies, people with a diet and exorcise has a higher amount of weight loss then just the diet.

That is, unless you can offer a study that says the opposite...  I don't think you're likely to find it though.

All i've ever seen is the above, the mentioned study and then studies that show people who go through absitence only studies tend to preform better in school, likely due to students being drawn to it being the same people who would pass the "marshmellow" test.

Oh, and a metanalysis that seems to show it generally has less to do with the method but how it's carried out.  IE the more moralistic your abistence only program is the more likely it is to fail.  IE focusing on it being bad, is worse then focusing on it's danger.

You mentioned the person arguing with you was saying abstinence does help.

Who is this person, because rath said that abstinence only is bad, but that abstinence should be invluded in teaching along with other things.

I get what you're trying to do, but I gotta say, we want to talk about silly examples, let's use a serious and closely related one. Obesity.
Either way, I have no quarrel with your point, I just think you're both saying the same thing and there's no reason for argument.