Dare to Dump DARE

 

Well, the cat is finally out of the bag!  The truth about DARE has finally been accepted by even some of its strongest supporters.  The academic research has been very consistent about the effects of DARE, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education.  It has been a miserable failure, to say the least, but it has continued to be well-received by the mainstream media and all of the Atrue believers@ out there. The federal government finally put an end to the funding of this program.  The propaganda put forth by its ardent supporters even had millions of parents believing that their kids were not using drugs because they had graduated from a DARE program, go so far as to put the now ubiquitous bumper stickers on their cars, proclaiming that AMy child is a proud graduate of DARE@!

What these parents failed to realize is that, statistically speaking, their child would have not used drugs even if they had never been exposed to a drug program; or conversely, they may have eventually used drugs partly because they attended the program.  Why?  Simply because drug use is the result of a complex set of factors - family, community, economic, political, historical.  The fact that most Americans refuse to get into their collective heads is that drug use is normal in this society!  Everybody at one time or another uses or, more correctly, experiments with some kind of drug, including alcohol and tobacco.  And DARE was based in part on the erroneous belief that the way to combat drug abuse is total abstinence. 

DARE got its start in 1983 and was the brain-child of then-Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates.  This should have caused some immediate suspicious right away, for Gates became infamous after a series of deaths to black men because of the use of the police Achoke hold@ when he offered this theory of why so many had died: AWe may be finding that in some Blacks when [the cartoid choke hold] is applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal [sic] people.@  So Blacks are not Anormal@ people and this logic extended to Gates= repressive activities toward alleged gang members in South Central, which included the use of tanks and Abattering rams@ and even a mobile booking station near the Los Angeles Coliseum, resulting in the arrests of more than 1200 black youths on such serious charges as Aloitering@ and Acurfew.@  So here we have Gates suggesting that DARE will Atake a bite@ out of drug use by sending his storm troopers right into the elementary schools to warn kids about the dangers of drug use.

This came at the height of the AJust Say No@ mantra started by Nancy Reagan.  You know this one, the simplistic slogan that was based upon the naive belief that anyone, regardless of their life circumstances, their environments, their genetics, can just walk away from temptation!  And it became a public relations coup of sorts for the embattled Gates to send him some of his finest, most clean-cut young officers, decked out in their uniforms to impress the little kiddies in their 5^th grade class for one hour per week for 17 weeks, ostensibly teaching the little ones how to resist drugs.  The course even had a graduation ceremony!  Eventually the program spread to all 50 states with plenty of federal money, which bought plenty of advertising and sales of merchandise, and they even had an annual conference with plenty of Afeel good@ speakers telling everyone how wonderfully successful DARE was.

With so much hoopla and propaganda, not to mention all the positive attention heaped upon its supporters and their true believers, was it any surprise that they dismissed the research as coming from Apointy-headed academics@ and turned around and published their own, in-house Aevaluations@ that said it was working.  One of their reports Adiscovered@ that the 5^th grade kids who went through the program knew more about the consequences of drug use than kids who did not pass through.  Good grief, what an amazing scientific discovery that was!  But it was no wonder they knew more since such information was part of the curriculum!  And of course their famous rejoinder was always along the lines of Aif it prevents just one child from using drugs...@  Well, frankly, if some drug was only that effective, the Food and Drug Administration would never approve it!

Finally, the consistent reports of the academic researchers could no longer be ignored.  One study found that no significant difference in subsequent drug use between kids who went through the program and those who did not, while still another (University of Chicago six-year follow-up) found that the positive effects wore off by their senior year and in fact some had actually increased their drug use.  Still another evaluation (a 10-year follow-up) by the University of Kentucky found it had no effects on students by the time they reached their 20^th birthday.  The mayor of Salt Lake City even went so far as to claim the program was a Acomplete fraud@ and a Awaste of money,@ while it Afritters away the opportunity to implement a good drug-prevention program in schools.@Other cities have cancelled DARE for similar reasons.

So what can we conclude, after 18 years of DARE failures?  We had better beware of at least two things before we jump on the bandwagon.  First, never trust in simplistic Amagic bullets@ like DARE.  There is no Amagic bullet@ for any of our problems, especially drug abuse.  Second, too many people become Atrue believers@ that allow their own egos to become too identified with their pet programs so that they do not accept obvious failure.  There are plenty of other ways to effectively reduce drug abuse - the scientific literature provides many examples.

 

Las Vegas City Life, 4/26/01