The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE.) program—the
brainchild of former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates—turned
20 this year. DARE’s 20th anniversary was celebrated on April 10
at White Point Elementary School in San Pedro, in an event that merged
seamlessly into a cheerleading event for the invasion of Iraq. This PR
blend was typical of how DARE has managed to market itself over the years,
associating itself with popular impulses and keeping one step ahead of
serious public scrutiny, despite an ever-mounting body of evidence.
Measured in terms of popularity, DARE is a smashing success,
the “most widely used school-based substance abuse prevention program
in the United States,” according to Congress’s investigative
arm, the General Accounting Office (GAO). “DARE operates in about
80 percent of all school districts across the United States and in numerous
foreign countries,” the GAO said in a report, released on January
15.
But in terms of actual results, DARE is a big, fat failure.
The same GAO report (“Youth Illicit Drug Use Prevention”)
found that “DARE had no statistically significant long-term effect
on preventing illicit drug use,” according to all six evaluations
it studied. Ordinary anti-drug education in a normal health education
curriculum proved just as effective, without all the extra hoopla, expense
and diversion of scarce police resources. In fact, one study found that
DARE actually increased the likelihood of drug use amongst suburban school
kids.
The authors of another study, from the University of
Kentucky, attempted to understand why DARE remains popular, despite lack
of results, and came up with two possible answers. First, like other intervention
programs “these ‘feel-good’ programs are ones that everyone
can support, and critical examination of their effectiveness may not be
perceived as necessary.” Second, programs like DARE appear to work—most
kids exposed to DARE don’t use drugs. The catch is, most kids don’t
do drugs anyway, despite high levels of brief experimentation.
The DARE program is typically introduced in fifth or
sixth grade, in a series of 17 lessons taught by uniformed police officers
trained in the program. DARE also has middle school and high school programs
to reinforce the grade-school program, but these are much less widely
used, and were only implemented after 1994. The GAO report notes that,
“The majority of studies evaluating DARE focus on the elementary
school curriculum.”
That’s just the problem, according to DARE’s
defenders. “If you take German for 17 weeks, you’re not going
to speak German,” DARE’s New York spokesperson, Ronald J.
Brogan, told the Village Voice in 1999. The answer, defenders say, is
more DARE programs. But 17 weeks of German leaves a measurable effect,
specific skills and knowledge that form a foundation for further instruction,
which is why that instruction is warranted. The same cannot be said about
DARE.
In fact, DARE’s critics argue it can be counter
productive. DARE takes a zero-tolerance approach, and lumps all drugs
together—including alcohol and tobacco. The reincarnated “Reefer
Madness” approach—saying that any amount of any drug will
lead you to ruin—may fly with fifth graders, but Marsha Rosenbaum,
of the Lindesmith Center, warned the Voice, “Once kids get to an
age where they’re experimenting… they know that it is not
true, so they throw away the entire prevention message. It isn’t
really education. It’s indoctrination.”
Berkeley-based researcher Dr. Joel Brown is even more
emphatic. “The equation of all substances as just being ‘bad,’
with no possible benefits, ends up with young people rejecting the messengers
as well as the message,” Brown told the San Francisco Bay Guardian
in 1998. Thus, ill-conceived drug education can further the alienation
of youth, making the problem more difficult to address.
Speaking to Random Lengths five years later, he was even
more emphatic. “We were among the first in the country showing that
DARE is harmful to kids,” Brown recalled. The problem isn’t
just DARE, he explained, but a whole array of similar zero-tolerance programs.
“Most people don’t understand that absent the police uniform,
these programs are virtually identical, by funding mandate of the federal
government.”
Brown is not just a critic, however. He is one of a growing
number of researchers involved in developing better approaches, based
on solid research, rather than good feelings. His organization, the Center
for Educational Research and Development (CERD), draws heavily on research
from developmental, physiological and educational psychology, as well
as the experience of educators and helping professionals. It’s long
been realized that adolescence entails problems, which most adolescents
grow out of. CERD draws on these experts to craft an approach that builds
on this natural resilience, called, simply enough, “resilience education.”
As Brown puts it, “we are engaged in the critical difference between
preventing problems, versus supporting development.”
After 20 years of empty promises from DARE, it just might
be time for a little truth.
