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now you're throwing the Patriot Act into it? You're a paranoid dude aren't you?

Jeesus Christ, where the fuck do you get this stuff from? Where in all of my responses to you have I mentioned the PATRIOT act? I do notice that you have provided ZERO rebuttal, not even a lightweight handwaving rebuttal, to my point that your criteria for simply being net more effective than abusive is absolute bullshit.

Meanwhile you still have not answered this question, which nows seems to be part of a much larger pattern with you:
Why are you deliberately replacing the text where I wrote exactly what happened to a grandmother - LOST HER HOUSE - with an ellipses?

THAT's the statement I'm looking for a link to. WTF did a grandmother EVER lose her house because her grandkid SMOKED a couple of joints? NOT SOLD a couple (big difference!)

I've already linked it for you, but if you want more details here is another link. In the particulars of this case the grandson was accused of selling but was not convicted as in the eyes of the law he never sold any drugs.

That web page, like the previous link I provided, is full of similar situations - like the case where simply having a lot of cash on him while on a flight to las vegas was considered prima facie evidence of drug trafficking and thus enough for a man who have $9000 confiscated but he wasn't even charged, or the man from whom the DEA and the Park Service conspired to steal his land by false testimony in a warrant because he refused to sell it.

I pray that the congressman who are responsible for the D.E.A. doing this have the most intense chronic pain for the last 20 years of their lives, and have no recourse to stop it. They've made their own bed.

Read more about it on http://www.drcnet.org/ among other places.

The D.E.A. is not supposed to make medical decisions. You, the voter, let this happen. And if there is any justice: You, the voter, will feel intense chronic pain for supporting this (note: comment applies only to those who voted for those who caused this to happen -- mostly republicans.)

Multiple studies have shown that students who complete their local D.A.R.E. program are no less likely to have problems with drug abuse than those who do not. Some of those studies have found that once students have found out about the lies and half-truths in the D.A.R.E. curriculum (which stresses rote parroting of anti-drug propaganda over critical thinking skills) they're less likely to listen to authority figures when they discuss drug abuse in the future.

D.A.R.E. is also treated as a sacred cow by local government; any elected official who is critical of the program is instantly metaphorically tarred and feathered and run out of office, despite any logical or fact-based arguments on its cost-effectiveness or usefulness. Police departments receive non-trivial funding from the program, which they use for a variety of purposes, not all of which are related to drug abuse prevention.

D.A.R.E. is broken. It's a substitute for parents having an honest, open dialog regarding the dangers of drug abuse with their children. Rather than "Son/Daughter, drug abuse causes a lot of problems in people's lives. It can be a monstrously destructive force, leading to things like addiction, unplanned pregnancy, accidental death, and imprisonment. You will have friends who will experiment with drugs; of that we're certian. This doesn't make them bad people, but the fact is that they're taking risks which we don't think you should take. If you find yourself in a situation where you feel pressure to try drugs, know that you can call us anytime and we will help you, no questions asked", they get "Drugs are bad, mmkay?", which is as insulting to their intelligence as it sounds.

I can think of a lot worse things my kid could do than puff a joint. I'd rather they be safe and responsible, and come home at the end of the day, regardless of anything else.

Is online gambling the Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century?

Uh, NO! The Alcohol Prohibition of the 21st century is the Drug War, especially the War On Marijuana. This was the first step in eroding our civil liberties, before it transformed into the War On Terror.

http://www.DRCNet.org.

Sorry, this thread has become so much offtopic now.

Closing the pusher street Christiania in Copenhagen is now discussed for more than 5 month very intensively.

Danemark: Aus fur "Pusherstreet"?

Silence on Pusherstrasse [DRCNet WOL#280, 28.03.2003]
http://www.drcnet.org/wol/280.html#christianiastri ke

Danish Politicians Seek Cannabis Crackdown in Christiania [DRCNet WOL#228, 15.03.2002]
http://www.drcnet.org/wol/228.html#christiania

and here are pictures from a police raid

http://www.hampenyt.dk/razzia%20i%20pusherstreet.h tm

Sorry, this thread has become so much offtopic now.

Closing the pusher street Christiania in Copenhagen is now discussed for more than 5 month very intensively.

Danemark: Aus fur "Pusherstreet"?

Silence on Pusherstrasse [DRCNet WOL#280, 28.03.2003]
http://www.drcnet.org/wol/280.html#christianiastri ke

Danish Politicians Seek Cannabis Crackdown in Christiania [DRCNet WOL#228, 15.03.2002]
http://www.drcnet.org/wol/228.html#christiania

and here are pictures from a police raid

http://www.hampenyt.dk/razzia%20i%20pusherstreet.h tm

There is no difference between drinking beer or smoking pot

I'd beg to differ, and so would a few Brits. That is right, being TIRED has more adverse effects on driving.

I only bring it up because of all of the anti-marijuana ads in the papers these days. How come the Christian wrong can refuse to allow their tax dollars to aid countries that MIGHT educate people on family planning, yet it doesnt matter that I am strongly opposed to a racist war on my fellow citizens that is funded with my tax dollars?

I have a problem with laws against the private use of relatively harmless substances such as marijuana, especially when enforcement of such laws reduces civil liberties and privacy for all citizens. (No, I don't use pot myself.) And I hope you can agree that the DMCA and Disney Copyright Extension Act are blatant abuses of government power.

as for your 80% stat--do you have any way of backing that up?

A quick google search came up with this and this.

Actually, that's only true from one set of perspectives. Think of it this way: Your title to the house is merely a piece of paper that says that the house is yours. All it means is that you can get men in blue uniforms with guns to show up and kick other people out of the house if you want, assuming the political climate stays roughly equivalent to what it is.

This does not mean you "own" the house, any more than having control of the police force and the ability to break into people's houses, kill them, and take their property means you "own" the house (but then, when has that ever stopped anyone?)

This was an awesome victory for those of us in the reform movement. Quite simply, the drug reform movement is about as grassroots as you can get, and most of our journalism is online: DRCnet, MAP, Cannabis News, and of course Narconews, as mentioned in the article.

The print media has begun to acknowledge the worldwide shift in attitude towards drugs (and especailly, the war on them) - but still mass media outlets including large American newspapers and especially TV still spew ridiculous retoric straight out of 1980's Just Say No propoganda.

What this article also didn't mention is that the EFF had a hand in helping Narconews with their court victory. Bravo to these brave individuals!

MarijuanaNews
DRCNet
Smokedot

Now, please educate yourself, come back, and lets have a nice discussion.

Sadly, this issue was hardly even discussed in this years US election. Even if you watch the nightly news you know nothing about the Wo(s)D's. You don't hear about the people killed by officers busting into the wrong house. You most likely didn't hear about the pit of 100+ dead bodies found just over the border in Mexico. If you want to know more you should go and read back issues of DRCNet's newsletter.

Lastly, support of the War on Drugs is tact support for the mob and cartels. Remember what prohibition does folks. This lesson should have been learned during the 1930's. It isn't a War on Drugs, it is a War on Personal Freemdom. Remember that at all times please.

Matthew

1. Open source library of knowledge for developing nations (making the world's intellectual wealth available to all)
http://www.oneworld.org/globalp roj ects/humcdrom/
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/& lt;/a>
http://www.oneworld .or g/globalprojects/humcdrom/copyrigh.htm
http://payson.tulane.edu:8888/
; http://www.globalprojects.org/
; http://www.humanitylibraries.net/ http://www.villageearth.org/
http://www.villageearth.org/ATLi bra ry/cdrom.htm

2. Open source knowledge management systems
http://www.bootstrap.org/
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/ar chi ves.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion /

3. Self-replicating space habitats (support trillions of humans in style without overrunning the earth)
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs /sp acsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

4. Pursue the "Ecocity Berkley" vision in the book by that name by Richard Register and look for related visions of sustainable development
http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob ido s/ASIN/1556430094/
http://www.co-intelligence.or g/y 2k_commtyorgs.html
http://www.fuzzylu.com/greencenter/h ome .htm
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sust vl. html
http://www.rmi.org/

5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/
http://www.drcnet.org/facts/

6. Teaching tolerance and compassion
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splcenter.or g/t eachingtolerance/tt-index.html

7. Open source educational simulations and simulation construction toolkits (one of the most meaningful ways to use computers in the classroom).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://riceinfo.ri ce. edu/armadillo/Simulations/simserver.html
http://www.creativeteachingsite .co m/edusims.html
http://www.workingmodel.com/
http://www.idsia.ch/~andrea/simtools.h tml

8. Preserving biodiversity (when it's gone, it's gone forever)
http://www.tnc.org/
http://www.environment.about.com/newsissues/enviro nment/library/weekly/aa091700.htm

9. Develop any specific sustainable technology in energy (e.g. solar), recycling (e.g. recycle computers), materials (e.g. plastics from starch), society (e.g. participatory democracy & social justice).
http://www.google.com/sear ch? q=sustainable+technology
http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.htm l
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/

10. Make corporations more accountable to human needs
http://www.adbusters.org/inform ati on/foundation/
http://www.adbusters.org/c amp aigns/charter/death.html
Previous link vanished, try instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.adbuste rs.org/ campaigns/charter/death.html+corporate+death+penal ty&hl=en
http://www.cwsl.edu/news/n_corpo rat e_death.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/340& lt;br> http://www.chaordic.org/

11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain.
http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)

12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc.
http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br> Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job.
http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l

When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away).
http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m
http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml

My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities.
http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity .ht ml
http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/ http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/ http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/

Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in.
http://www.idealist.org/

There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans.

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/199 9/number_3/machine399.html ;

Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.

It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.

Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.

Was it drug related?

13% of African Americans cannot vote because of the drug war. No wonder why the Repubs like the drug war so much. African Americans are much more likely to vote Democrat.

Thanks for having an open mind. I won't attempt to defend Bush's drug policy because it's completely wrong. All I can suggest is that Gore is not an improvement. See this article. An excerpt:

Such analysis, however, is far from exculpatory of the Vice President. Under the Clinton-Gore administration, marijuana arrests increased from fewer than 350,000 in 1992 to more than 650,000 in 1998, 88% of which were for simple possession, according to the FBI's annual Crime in the United States report. On December 30, 1996, in the wake of California's passage of a medical marijuana initiative, the Clinton administration held a press conference to announce that they would aggressively prosecute doctors who so much as discussed medicinal marijuana with patients -- despite the fact that Vice President Gore recently admitted that his sister tried marijuana for relief of the pain and nausea associated with cancer.

As of yet, there's no hope of a rational drug policy from either of the two major parties. (Although Republican supporters of decriminalization are increasing in number, e.g. Gov. Johnson of New Mexico and William F Buckley).

The only candidates willing to end the war on (some) drugs are Ralph Nader (obviously unacceptable to libertarians) and Harry Browne. Compared to them, there's virtually no difference between Bush and Gore on this issue. Voting Democratic is going to have the opposite effect of what you want; if ending the drug war is that important, as I see it you have to vote for Browne.

Drug users are hurting themselves and I am dedicated to doing whatever it takes to stop them. This is a war, dammit, and there are casualties in a war.

Casualties 4Q 2000:

9/15/00 shot by police 10 years old

9/28/00 shot by police 60 years old

10/5/00 shot by police 62 years old (oops, wrong house.)

Refugees:

Renee Boje - waiting to receive refugee status in Canada while hiding out from American bounty hunters.

Ethnic cleansing in GWB's home state:

Tulia, TX

Brought to you courtesy of the war on drugs...

numb

What's wrong with D.A.R.E.?

Over the last several years, ever-louder questions and criticisms about the merits and wisdom of D.A.R.E. have emerged. This section attempts to share those that have come to the attention of authors of this web page.

1. Efficacy. Despite its huge popularity, and hundreds of millions in tax revenue and private contributions, no evidence exists that D.A.R.E. keeps kids off drugs. A large, developing body of studies documenting this conclusion is referenced in the accompanying list of references and other resources. The bottom line is that at best, in the words of the Justice Department-sponsored study by the Research Triangle Institute (338k), D.A.R.E. has a "limited to esentially nonexistent effect on drug use."

   The U.S. General Accounting Office reported, "There is little evidence so far that [D.A.R.E. and other "resistance training" programs] have reduced the use of drugs by adolescents" (U.S. GAO/GGD-93-82, "Confronting the Drug Problem," page 25).

   D.A.R.E.'s official response to this growing body of research is disdain for science. "Scientists tell you that bumblebees can't fly, but we know better," declared D.A.R.E. Executive Director Glenn Levant upon release of the government-sponsored report that D.A.R.E. doesn't work (USA Today, October 11, 1994). The local D.A.R.E. officers we talked to also claim that the anecdotal evidence is convincing that D.A.R.E. is working extremely well, citing the warm reception they have received by schools and parents. "Besides," they often add, "even if we are reaching only one kid, it's worth all the effort."

   (It is not clear why their standard of success is so low. We would hardly declare a math curriculum successful if only one kid learned to add.)

   In an editorial October 15, 1993, The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Herald observed, "If D.A.R.E. isn't doing the job it's supposed to, we owe it to fifth- and sixth-graders to find out why."

   Curiously, the web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the nation's preeminent anti-drug abuse agency, doesn't even mention D.A.R.E.

2. Content. The content of the D.A.R.E. curriculum is raising a variety of concerns about what D.A.R.E. is actually teaching our children. These concerns include:
   • D.A.R.E.'s message to children is muddled and confusing. It doesn't tell kids that they must not use drugs. Instead, D.A.R.E. tells them that they have the "right to say no," implying that they have the "right to say yes." Despite the term in its name, D.A.R.E. doesn't teach kids what "drug abuse" actually is, or how it can be identified.
   • D.A.R.E. is not respectful of parents and other civilian adults. The D.A.R.E. video, called "The Land of Decisions and Choices," shown to students as part of Lesson 2, portrays all adults as drunks or other drug abusers, or senile...other than the D.A.R.E. officer. Parents find this film a bizarre, brazenly exaggerated depiction of drug use. Although each child is given a D.A.R.E. "workbook," students are encouraged to leave them at school and not take them home. Some parents worry that the heavy emphasis on "resistance skills" subverts their own authority with their children.
   • It is a well established fact that children's greatest drug risk is with alcohol and tobacco, yet D.A.R.E. is soft on those drugs, hammering almost exclusively on illicit drugs. As a condition of "participation" in D.A.R.E., children are expected to abstain from all drugs. D.A.R.E. officers themselves are not required to meet that standard.
   • D.A.R.E. is based on unproven, and likely false, educational hypotheses, the most notorious one of which is that using drugs is a sympton of low self esteem, or of high stress. Thus casual, responsible use of any drug (alcohol, caffeine, tobacco) by parents or anyone else is to be seen as pathological, i.e., "abuse." From this dubious premise, it is alleged that self-esteem can be "built" by reciting state-sponsored catechisms. These catechisms consist of claims of "rights" which are said to have been conferred on fifth grade D.A.R.E. students. They include the "right to be happy" and the "right to be respected."

   Many parents take issue with the emphasis on "self-esteem" in schools these days, and the notion that it can be readily "taught." Lillian Katz, Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois, put it this way: "Self-esteem and self-confidence don't come from being told you are great. You get them by facing challenges and mastering them through hard work and persistence." (Readers Digest, April 1994, "Are We Demanding Enough of Our Kids?)

   To determine if students are experiencing a low, medium or high level of stress, students are given a test, in Lesson 8, called "My Stress Level." Among the causes of "high stress" are said to be: taking a test, being late for something, meeting someone new, being the first one to do something, or helping to plan a special event. In an earlier version, even "doing your chores" was said to cause stress.

3. Undermining the role and credibility of police. The role of police is to protect the public safety, and to respond to emergencies. It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect them to take on the job of teaching mental health and attitudes. Nor it is helpful for civics education for children to be taught fictitious "rights." When a child grows up and learns that she was lied to about her "right to be happy," how will she feel about the officer who taught her otherwise, or the school in which she was so taught?

4. Not fair to professional teachers. D.A.R.E. mocks their years of study, by asking them to step aside for a high school graduate with two weeks training to come in and teach mental health and psychology. If police officers have the education and training necessary to be good teachers, what is the point of requiring years of study and teaching certificates?

   If Johnny can't read, teachers bear accountability. If Johnny doesn't stay off drugs, will the police take responsibility for the failure of drug education in schools, and protect teachers from any attribution of blame?

5. Sacrifices excessive academic time. D.A.R.E. consumes approximately seventeen hours of academic time that would otherwise be available for science, math, reading or some other academic subject. In the absense of any proof that D.A.R.E. works, this is a substantial sacrifice of valuable school time.

6. Perpetuates the war. To many people, D.A.R.E. represents the strongest commitment our nation can make to curb drug abuse by young people, and that it deserves to be pursued, even when we know it isn't working. By thus deceiving America into thinking that we are doing something serious about keeping kids off drugs, D.A.R.E. is impeding the nation's efforts to find more efficacious ways to achieve the broader goals of national drug policy, viz., to protect the public health and safety, to prevent abuse, and to eliminate the crime and violence associated with illicit drug trafficking.

   Peter G. Arlos, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, city councillor, put it this way:

   "The tragic truth that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that may not work has not sunk in on the local or the national levels. A large D.A.R.E. bureaucracy has grown up that feeds on itself. The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs."
   Letter, Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), November 21, 1993

7. Subverts public education by transforming schools into instruments for the propagation of prohibitionist doctrine and the perpetuation of the war waged in its defense. Although a national debate is growing over whether prohibition, enforced by war, can reasonably be expected to achieve the goals listed above, D.A.R.E. defends prohibition zealously, disputing that the distinction between legal and illegal drugs is based solely on historical anomaly. ("Drug legalization: surrender is not the answer!," National D.A.R.E. Officers Newsletter, January, 1995). Looking at history, especially pre-war Germany, some parents compare D.A.R.E. to previous instances of installing uniformed, sometimes armed, agents of the state in classrooms to tell children what their attitudes ought to be, and to obtain information about family home life which may be of interest to the state.

   
   This van, pictured on a web site maintained by a DARE officer, was seized by the government under a controversial program known as asset forfeiture, in which drug defendants can lose their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.

   It is widely known that D.A.R.E. officers are instructed to put a "D.A.R.E. Box" in every classroom, into which students may drop "drug information" or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student "makes a disclosure related to drug use," the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the "drug use" was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents.

8. D.A.R.E. costs a lot of money. Glenn Levant, the D.A.R.E. executive director, states that D.A.R.E. consumes some $750,000,000 per year. The money goes to purchase paraphernalia--T-shirts, bumper stickers, caps, pens, pencils, etc.--from D.A.R.E. -licensed vendors, as well as for training and overtime salaries for police." It is important to realize that every dollar spent on D.A.R.E. is a dollar not available for a useful, educationally sound drug education program in schools. The overwhelming preponderance of federal "Drug-Free Schools" money goes into the D.A.R.E. program.
   • How much money is spent on D.A.R.E.?
   • Who gets the money?
   • Who really pays for D.A.R.E.?

What's wrong with D.A.R.E.?

Over the last several years, ever-louder questions and criticisms about the merits and wisdom of D.A.R.E. have emerged. This section attempts to share those that have come to the attention of authors of this web page.

1. Efficacy. Despite its huge popularity, and hundreds of millions in tax revenue and private contributions, no evidence exists that D.A.R.E. keeps kids off drugs. A large, developing body of studies documenting this conclusion is referenced in the accompanying list of references and other resources. The bottom line is that at best, in the words of the Justice Department-sponsored study by the Research Triangle Institute (338k), D.A.R.E. has a "limited to esentially nonexistent effect on drug use."

   The U.S. General Accounting Office reported, "There is little evidence so far that [D.A.R.E. and other "resistance training" programs] have reduced the use of drugs by adolescents" (U.S. GAO/GGD-93-82, "Confronting the Drug Problem," page 25).

   D.A.R.E.'s official response to this growing body of research is disdain for science. "Scientists tell you that bumblebees can't fly, but we know better," declared D.A.R.E. Executive Director Glenn Levant upon release of the government-sponsored report that D.A.R.E. doesn't work (USA Today, October 11, 1994). The local D.A.R.E. officers we talked to also claim that the anecdotal evidence is convincing that D.A.R.E. is working extremely well, citing the warm reception they have received by schools and parents. "Besides," they often add, "even if we are reaching only one kid, it's worth all the effort."

   (It is not clear why their standard of success is so low. We would hardly declare a math curriculum successful if only one kid learned to add.)

   In an editorial October 15, 1993, The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Herald observed, "If D.A.R.E. isn't doing the job it's supposed to, we owe it to fifth- and sixth-graders to find out why."

   Curiously, the web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the nation's preeminent anti-drug abuse agency, doesn't even mention D.A.R.E.

2. Content. The content of the D.A.R.E. curriculum is raising a variety of concerns about what D.A.R.E. is actually teaching our children. These concerns include:
   • D.A.R.E.'s message to children is muddled and confusing. It doesn't tell kids that they must not use drugs. Instead, D.A.R.E. tells them that they have the "right to say no," implying that they have the "right to say yes." Despite the term in its name, D.A.R.E. doesn't teach kids what "drug abuse" actually is, or how it can be identified.
   • D.A.R.E. is not respectful of parents and other civilian adults. The D.A.R.E. video, called "The Land of Decisions and Choices," shown to students as part of Lesson 2, portrays all adults as drunks or other drug abusers, or senile...other than the D.A.R.E. officer. Parents find this film a bizarre, brazenly exaggerated depiction of drug use. Although each child is given a D.A.R.E. "workbook," students are encouraged to leave them at school and not take them home. Some parents worry that the heavy emphasis on "resistance skills" subverts their own authority with their children.
   • It is a well established fact that children's greatest drug risk is with alcohol and tobacco, yet D.A.R.E. is soft on those drugs, hammering almost exclusively on illicit drugs. As a condition of "participation" in D.A.R.E., children are expected to abstain from all drugs. D.A.R.E. officers themselves are not required to meet that standard.
   • D.A.R.E. is based on unproven, and likely false, educational hypotheses, the most notorious one of which is that using drugs is a sympton of low self esteem, or of high stress. Thus casual, responsible use of any drug (alcohol, caffeine, tobacco) by parents or anyone else is to be seen as pathological, i.e., "abuse." From this dubious premise, it is alleged that self-esteem can be "built" by reciting state-sponsored catechisms. These catechisms consist of claims of "rights" which are said to have been conferred on fifth grade D.A.R.E. students. They include the "right to be happy" and the "right to be respected."

   Many parents take issue with the emphasis on "self-esteem" in schools these days, and the notion that it can be readily "taught." Lillian Katz, Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois, put it this way: "Self-esteem and self-confidence don't come from being told you are great. You get them by facing challenges and mastering them through hard work and persistence." (Readers Digest, April 1994, "Are We Demanding Enough of Our Kids?)

   To determine if students are experiencing a low, medium or high level of stress, students are given a test, in Lesson 8, called "My Stress Level." Among the causes of "high stress" are said to be: taking a test, being late for something, meeting someone new, being the first one to do something, or helping to plan a special event. In an earlier version, even "doing your chores" was said to cause stress.

3. Undermining the role and credibility of police. The role of police is to protect the public safety, and to respond to emergencies. It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect them to take on the job of teaching mental health and attitudes. Nor it is helpful for civics education for children to be taught fictitious "rights." When a child grows up and learns that she was lied to about her "right to be happy," how will she feel about the officer who taught her otherwise, or the school in which she was so taught?

4. Not fair to professional teachers. D.A.R.E. mocks their years of study, by asking them to step aside for a high school graduate with two weeks training to come in and teach mental health and psychology. If police officers have the education and training necessary to be good teachers, what is the point of requiring years of study and teaching certificates?

   If Johnny can't read, teachers bear accountability. If Johnny doesn't stay off drugs, will the police take responsibility for the failure of drug education in schools, and protect teachers from any attribution of blame?

5. Sacrifices excessive academic time. D.A.R.E. consumes approximately seventeen hours of academic time that would otherwise be available for science, math, reading or some other academic subject. In the absense of any proof that D.A.R.E. works, this is a substantial sacrifice of valuable school time.

6. Perpetuates the war. To many people, D.A.R.E. represents the strongest commitment our nation can make to curb drug abuse by young people, and that it deserves to be pursued, even when we know it isn't working. By thus deceiving America into thinking that we are doing something serious about keeping kids off drugs, D.A.R.E. is impeding the nation's efforts to find more efficacious ways to achieve the broader goals of national drug policy, viz., to protect the public health and safety, to prevent abuse, and to eliminate the crime and violence associated with illicit drug trafficking.

   Peter G. Arlos, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, city councillor, put it this way:

   "The tragic truth that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that may not work has not sunk in on the local or the national levels. A large D.A.R.E. bureaucracy has grown up that feeds on itself. The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs."
   Letter, Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), November 21, 1993

7. Subverts public education by transforming schools into instruments for the propagation of prohibitionist doctrine and the perpetuation of the war waged in its defense. Although a national debate is growing over whether prohibition, enforced by war, can reasonably be expected to achieve the goals listed above, D.A.R.E. defends prohibition zealously, disputing that the distinction between legal and illegal drugs is based solely on historical anomaly. ("Drug legalization: surrender is not the answer!," National D.A.R.E. Officers Newsletter, January, 1995). Looking at history, especially pre-war Germany, some parents compare D.A.R.E. to previous instances of installing uniformed, sometimes armed, agents of the state in classrooms to tell children what their attitudes ought to be, and to obtain information about family home life which may be of interest to the state.

   
   This van, pictured on a web site maintained by a DARE officer, was seized by the government under a controversial program known as asset forfeiture, in which drug defendants can lose their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.

   It is widely known that D.A.R.E. officers are instructed to put a "D.A.R.E. Box" in every classroom, into which students may drop "drug information" or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student "makes a disclosure related to drug use," the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the "drug use" was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents.

8. D.A.R.E. costs a lot of money. Glenn Levant, the D.A.R.E. executive director, states that D.A.R.E. consumes some $750,000,000 per year. The money goes to purchase paraphernalia--T-shirts, bumper stickers, caps, pens, pencils, etc.--from D.A.R.E. -licensed vendors, as well as for training and overtime salaries for police." It is important to realize that every dollar spent on D.A.R.E. is a dollar not available for a useful, educationally sound drug education program in schools. The overwhelming preponderance of federal "Drug-Free Schools" money goes into the D.A.R.E. program.
   • How much money is spent on D.A.R.E.?
   • Who gets the money?
   • Who really pays for D.A.R.E.?

What's wrong with D.A.R.E.?

Over the last several years, ever-louder questions and criticisms about the merits and wisdom of D.A.R.E. have emerged. This section attempts to share those that have come to the attention of authors of this web page.

1. Efficacy. Despite its huge popularity, and hundreds of millions in tax revenue and private contributions, no evidence exists that D.A.R.E. keeps kids off drugs. A large, developing body of studies documenting this conclusion is referenced in the accompanying list of references and other resources. The bottom line is that at best, in the words of the Justice Department-sponsored study by the Research Triangle Institute (338k), D.A.R.E. has a "limited to esentially nonexistent effect on drug use."

   The U.S. General Accounting Office reported, "There is little evidence so far that [D.A.R.E. and other "resistance training" programs] have reduced the use of drugs by adolescents" (U.S. GAO/GGD-93-82, "Confronting the Drug Problem," page 25).

   D.A.R.E.'s official response to this growing body of research is disdain for science. "Scientists tell you that bumblebees can't fly, but we know better," declared D.A.R.E. Executive Director Glenn Levant upon release of the government-sponsored report that D.A.R.E. doesn't work (USA Today, October 11, 1994). The local D.A.R.E. officers we talked to also claim that the anecdotal evidence is convincing that D.A.R.E. is working extremely well, citing the warm reception they have received by schools and parents. "Besides," they often add, "even if we are reaching only one kid, it's worth all the effort."

   (It is not clear why their standard of success is so low. We would hardly declare a math curriculum successful if only one kid learned to add.)

   In an editorial October 15, 1993, The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Herald observed, "If D.A.R.E. isn't doing the job it's supposed to, we owe it to fifth- and sixth-graders to find out why."

   Curiously, the web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the nation's preeminent anti-drug abuse agency, doesn't even mention D.A.R.E.

2. Content. The content of the D.A.R.E. curriculum is raising a variety of concerns about what D.A.R.E. is actually teaching our children. These concerns include:
   • D.A.R.E.'s message to children is muddled and confusing. It doesn't tell kids that they must not use drugs. Instead, D.A.R.E. tells them that they have the "right to say no," implying that they have the "right to say yes." Despite the term in its name, D.A.R.E. doesn't teach kids what "drug abuse" actually is, or how it can be identified.
   • D.A.R.E. is not respectful of parents and other civilian adults. The D.A.R.E. video, called "The Land of Decisions and Choices," shown to students as part of Lesson 2, portrays all adults as drunks or other drug abusers, or senile...other than the D.A.R.E. officer. Parents find this film a bizarre, brazenly exaggerated depiction of drug use. Although each child is given a D.A.R.E. "workbook," students are encouraged to leave them at school and not take them home. Some parents worry that the heavy emphasis on "resistance skills" subverts their own authority with their children.
   • It is a well established fact that children's greatest drug risk is with alcohol and tobacco, yet D.A.R.E. is soft on those drugs, hammering almost exclusively on illicit drugs. As a condition of "participation" in D.A.R.E., children are expected to abstain from all drugs. D.A.R.E. officers themselves are not required to meet that standard.
   • D.A.R.E. is based on unproven, and likely false, educational hypotheses, the most notorious one of which is that using drugs is a sympton of low self esteem, or of high stress. Thus casual, responsible use of any drug (alcohol, caffeine, tobacco) by parents or anyone else is to be seen as pathological, i.e., "abuse." From this dubious premise, it is alleged that self-esteem can be "built" by reciting state-sponsored catechisms. These catechisms consist of claims of "rights" which are said to have been conferred on fifth grade D.A.R.E. students. They include the "right to be happy" and the "right to be respected."

   Many parents take issue with the emphasis on "self-esteem" in schools these days, and the notion that it can be readily "taught." Lillian Katz, Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois, put it this way: "Self-esteem and self-confidence don't come from being told you are great. You get them by facing challenges and mastering them through hard work and persistence." (Readers Digest, April 1994, "Are We Demanding Enough of Our Kids?)

   To determine if students are experiencing a low, medium or high level of stress, students are given a test, in Lesson 8, called "My Stress Level." Among the causes of "high stress" are said to be: taking a test, being late for something, meeting someone new, being the first one to do something, or helping to plan a special event. In an earlier version, even "doing your chores" was said to cause stress.

3. Undermining the role and credibility of police. The role of police is to protect the public safety, and to respond to emergencies. It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect them to take on the job of teaching mental health and attitudes. Nor it is helpful for civics education for children to be taught fictitious "rights." When a child grows up and learns that she was lied to about her "right to be happy," how will she feel about the officer who taught her otherwise, or the school in which she was so taught?

4. Not fair to professional teachers. D.A.R.E. mocks their years of study, by asking them to step aside for a high school graduate with two weeks training to come in and teach mental health and psychology. If police officers have the education and training necessary to be good teachers, what is the point of requiring years of study and teaching certificates?

   If Johnny can't read, teachers bear accountability. If Johnny doesn't stay off drugs, will the police take responsibility for the failure of drug education in schools, and protect teachers from any attribution of blame?

5. Sacrifices excessive academic time. D.A.R.E. consumes approximately seventeen hours of academic time that would otherwise be available for science, math, reading or some other academic subject. In the absense of any proof that D.A.R.E. works, this is a substantial sacrifice of valuable school time.

6. Perpetuates the war. To many people, D.A.R.E. represents the strongest commitment our nation can make to curb drug abuse by young people, and that it deserves to be pursued, even when we know it isn't working. By thus deceiving America into thinking that we are doing something serious about keeping kids off drugs, D.A.R.E. is impeding the nation's efforts to find more efficacious ways to achieve the broader goals of national drug policy, viz., to protect the public health and safety, to prevent abuse, and to eliminate the crime and violence associated with illicit drug trafficking.

   Peter G. Arlos, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, city councillor, put it this way:

   "The tragic truth that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that may not work has not sunk in on the local or the national levels. A large D.A.R.E. bureaucracy has grown up that feeds on itself. The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs."
   Letter, Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), November 21, 1993

7. Subverts public education by transforming schools into instruments for the propagation of prohibitionist doctrine and the perpetuation of the war waged in its defense. Although a national debate is growing over whether prohibition, enforced by war, can reasonably be expected to achieve the goals listed above, D.A.R.E. defends prohibition zealously, disputing that the distinction between legal and illegal drugs is based solely on historical anomaly. ("Drug legalization: surrender is not the answer!," National D.A.R.E. Officers Newsletter, January, 1995). Looking at history, especially pre-war Germany, some parents compare D.A.R.E. to previous instances of installing uniformed, sometimes armed, agents of the state in classrooms to tell children what their attitudes ought to be, and to obtain information about family home life which may be of interest to the state.

   
   This van, pictured on a web site maintained by a DARE officer, was seized by the government under a controversial program known as asset forfeiture, in which drug defendants can lose their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.

   It is widely known that D.A.R.E. officers are instructed to put a "D.A.R.E. Box" in every classroom, into which students may drop "drug information" or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student "makes a disclosure related to drug use," the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the "drug use" was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents.

8. D.A.R.E. costs a lot of money. Glenn Levant, the D.A.R.E. executive director, states that D.A.R.E. consumes some $750,000,000 per year. The money goes to purchase paraphernalia--T-shirts, bumper stickers, caps, pens, pencils, etc.--from D.A.R.E. -licensed vendors, as well as for training and overtime salaries for police." It is important to realize that every dollar spent on D.A.R.E. is a dollar not available for a useful, educationally sound drug education program in schools. The overwhelming preponderance of federal "Drug-Free Schools" money goes into the D.A.R.E. program.
   • How much money is spent on D.A.R.E.?
   • Who gets the money?
   • Who really pays for D.A.R.E.?

What's wrong with D.A.R.E.?

Over the last several years, ever-louder questions and criticisms about the merits and wisdom of D.A.R.E. have emerged. This section attempts to share those that have come to the attention of authors of this web page.

1. Efficacy. Despite its huge popularity, and hundreds of millions in tax revenue and private contributions, no evidence exists that D.A.R.E. keeps kids off drugs. A large, developing body of studies documenting this conclusion is referenced in the accompanying list of references and other resources. The bottom line is that at best, in the words of the Justice Department-sponsored study by the Research Triangle Institute (338k), D.A.R.E. has a "limited to esentially nonexistent effect on drug use."

   The U.S. General Accounting Office reported, "There is little evidence so far that [D.A.R.E. and other "resistance training" programs] have reduced the use of drugs by adolescents" (U.S. GAO/GGD-93-82, "Confronting the Drug Problem," page 25).

   D.A.R.E.'s official response to this growing body of research is disdain for science. "Scientists tell you that bumblebees can't fly, but we know better," declared D.A.R.E. Executive Director Glenn Levant upon release of the government-sponsored report that D.A.R.E. doesn't work (USA Today, October 11, 1994). The local D.A.R.E. officers we talked to also claim that the anecdotal evidence is convincing that D.A.R.E. is working extremely well, citing the warm reception they have received by schools and parents. "Besides," they often add, "even if we are reaching only one kid, it's worth all the effort."

   (It is not clear why their standard of success is so low. We would hardly declare a math curriculum successful if only one kid learned to add.)

   In an editorial October 15, 1993, The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Herald observed, "If D.A.R.E. isn't doing the job it's supposed to, we owe it to fifth- and sixth-graders to find out why."

   Curiously, the web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the nation's preeminent anti-drug abuse agency, doesn't even mention D.A.R.E.

2. Content. The content of the D.A.R.E. curriculum is raising a variety of concerns about what D.A.R.E. is actually teaching our children. These concerns include:
   • D.A.R.E.'s message to children is muddled and confusing. It doesn't tell kids that they must not use drugs. Instead, D.A.R.E. tells them that they have the "right to say no," implying that they have the "right to say yes." Despite the term in its name, D.A.R.E. doesn't teach kids what "drug abuse" actually is, or how it can be identified.
   • D.A.R.E. is not respectful of parents and other civilian adults. The D.A.R.E. video, called "The Land of Decisions and Choices," shown to students as part of Lesson 2, portrays all adults as drunks or other drug abusers, or senile...other than the D.A.R.E. officer. Parents find this film a bizarre, brazenly exaggerated depiction of drug use. Although each child is given a D.A.R.E. "workbook," students are encouraged to leave them at school and not take them home. Some parents worry that the heavy emphasis on "resistance skills" subverts their own authority with their children.
   • It is a well established fact that children's greatest drug risk is with alcohol and tobacco, yet D.A.R.E. is soft on those drugs, hammering almost exclusively on illicit drugs. As a condition of "participation" in D.A.R.E., children are expected to abstain from all drugs. D.A.R.E. officers themselves are not required to meet that standard.
   • D.A.R.E. is based on unproven, and likely false, educational hypotheses, the most notorious one of which is that using drugs is a sympton of low self esteem, or of high stress. Thus casual, responsible use of any drug (alcohol, caffeine, tobacco) by parents or anyone else is to be seen as pathological, i.e., "abuse." From this dubious premise, it is alleged that self-esteem can be "built" by reciting state-sponsored catechisms. These catechisms consist of claims of "rights" which are said to have been conferred on fifth grade D.A.R.E. students. They include the "right to be happy" and the "right to be respected."

   Many parents take issue with the emphasis on "self-esteem" in schools these days, and the notion that it can be readily "taught." Lillian Katz, Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois, put it this way: "Self-esteem and self-confidence don't come from being told you are great. You get them by facing challenges and mastering them through hard work and persistence." (Readers Digest, April 1994, "Are We Demanding Enough of Our Kids?)

   To determine if students are experiencing a low, medium or high level of stress, students are given a test, in Lesson 8, called "My Stress Level." Among the causes of "high stress" are said to be: taking a test, being late for something, meeting someone new, being the first one to do something, or helping to plan a special event. In an earlier version, even "doing your chores" was said to cause stress.

3. Undermining the role and credibility of police. The role of police is to protect the public safety, and to respond to emergencies. It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect them to take on the job of teaching mental health and attitudes. Nor it is helpful for civics education for children to be taught fictitious "rights." When a child grows up and learns that she was lied to about her "right to be happy," how will she feel about the officer who taught her otherwise, or the school in which she was so taught?

4. Not fair to professional teachers. D.A.R.E. mocks their years of study, by asking them to step aside for a high school graduate with two weeks training to come in and teach mental health and psychology. If police officers have the education and training necessary to be good teachers, what is the point of requiring years of study and teaching certificates?

   If Johnny can't read, teachers bear accountability. If Johnny doesn't stay off drugs, will the police take responsibility for the failure of drug education in schools, and protect teachers from any attribution of blame?

5. Sacrifices excessive academic time. D.A.R.E. consumes approximately seventeen hours of academic time that would otherwise be available for science, math, reading or some other academic subject. In the absense of any proof that D.A.R.E. works, this is a substantial sacrifice of valuable school time.

6. Perpetuates the war. To many people, D.A.R.E. represents the strongest commitment our nation can make to curb drug abuse by young people, and that it deserves to be pursued, even when we know it isn't working. By thus deceiving America into thinking that we are doing something serious about keeping kids off drugs, D.A.R.E. is impeding the nation's efforts to find more efficacious ways to achieve the broader goals of national drug policy, viz., to protect the public health and safety, to prevent abuse, and to eliminate the crime and violence associated with illicit drug trafficking.

   Peter G. Arlos, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, city councillor, put it this way:

   "The tragic truth that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that may not work has not sunk in on the local or the national levels. A large D.A.R.E. bureaucracy has grown up that feeds on itself. The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs."
   Letter, Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), November 21, 1993

7. Subverts public education by transforming schools into instruments for the propagation of prohibitionist doctrine and the perpetuation of the war waged in its defense. Although a national debate is growing over whether prohibition, enforced by war, can reasonably be expected to achieve the goals listed above, D.A.R.E. defends prohibition zealously, disputing that the distinction between legal and illegal drugs is based solely on historical anomaly. ("Drug legalization: surrender is not the answer!," National D.A.R.E. Officers Newsletter, January, 1995). Looking at history, especially pre-war Germany, some parents compare D.A.R.E. to previous instances of installing uniformed, sometimes armed, agents of the state in classrooms to tell children what their attitudes ought to be, and to obtain information about family home life which may be of interest to the state.

   
   This van, pictured on a web site maintained by a DARE officer, was seized by the government under a controversial program known as asset forfeiture, in which drug defendants can lose their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.

   It is widely known that D.A.R.E. officers are instructed to put a "D.A.R.E. Box" in every classroom, into which students may drop "drug information" or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student "makes a disclosure related to drug use," the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the "drug use" was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents.

8. D.A.R.E. costs a lot of money. Glenn Levant, the D.A.R.E. executive director, states that D.A.R.E. consumes some $750,000,000 per year. The money goes to purchase paraphernalia--T-shirts, bumper stickers, caps, pens, pencils, etc.--from D.A.R.E. -licensed vendors, as well as for training and overtime salaries for police." It is important to realize that every dollar spent on D.A.R.E. is a dollar not available for a useful, educationally sound drug education program in schools. The overwhelming preponderance of federal "Drug-Free Schools" money goes into the D.A.R.E. program.
   • How much money is spent on D.A.R.E.?
   • Who gets the money?
   • Who really pays for D.A.R.E.?

What's wrong with D.A.R.E.?

Over the last several years, ever-louder questions and criticisms about the merits and wisdom of D.A.R.E. have emerged. This section attempts to share those that have come to the attention of authors of this web page.

1. Efficacy. Despite its huge popularity, and hundreds of millions in tax revenue and private contributions, no evidence exists that D.A.R.E. keeps kids off drugs. A large, developing body of studies documenting this conclusion is referenced in the accompanying list of references and other resources. The bottom line is that at best, in the words of the Justice Department-sponsored study by the Research Triangle Institute (338k), D.A.R.E. has a "limited to esentially nonexistent effect on drug use."

   The U.S. General Accounting Office reported, "There is little evidence so far that [D.A.R.E. and other "resistance training" programs] have reduced the use of drugs by adolescents" (U.S. GAO/GGD-93-82, "Confronting the Drug Problem," page 25).

   D.A.R.E.'s official response to this growing body of research is disdain for science. "Scientists tell you that bumblebees can't fly, but we know better," declared D.A.R.E. Executive Director Glenn Levant upon release of the government-sponsored report that D.A.R.E. doesn't work (USA Today, October 11, 1994). The local D.A.R.E. officers we talked to also claim that the anecdotal evidence is convincing that D.A.R.E. is working extremely well, citing the warm reception they have received by schools and parents. "Besides," they often add, "even if we are reaching only one kid, it's worth all the effort."

   (It is not clear why their standard of success is so low. We would hardly declare a math curriculum successful if only one kid learned to add.)

   In an editorial October 15, 1993, The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Herald observed, "If D.A.R.E. isn't doing the job it's supposed to, we owe it to fifth- and sixth-graders to find out why."

   Curiously, the web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the nation's preeminent anti-drug abuse agency, doesn't even mention D.A.R.E.

2. Content. The content of the D.A.R.E. curriculum is raising a variety of concerns about what D.A.R.E. is actually teaching our children. These concerns include:
   • D.A.R.E.'s message to children is muddled and confusing. It doesn't tell kids that they must not use drugs. Instead, D.A.R.E. tells them that they have the "right to say no," implying that they have the "right to say yes." Despite the term in its name, D.A.R.E. doesn't teach kids what "drug abuse" actually is, or how it can be identified.
   • D.A.R.E. is not respectful of parents and other civilian adults. The D.A.R.E. video, called "The Land of Decisions and Choices," shown to students as part of Lesson 2, portrays all adults as drunks or other drug abusers, or senile...other than the D.A.R.E. officer. Parents find this film a bizarre, brazenly exaggerated depiction of drug use. Although each child is given a D.A.R.E. "workbook," students are encouraged to leave them at school and not take them home. Some parents worry that the heavy emphasis on "resistance skills" subverts their own authority with their children.
   • It is a well established fact that children's greatest drug risk is with alcohol and tobacco, yet D.A.R.E. is soft on those drugs, hammering almost exclusively on illicit drugs. As a condition of "participation" in D.A.R.E., children are expected to abstain from all drugs. D.A.R.E. officers themselves are not required to meet that standard.
   • D.A.R.E. is based on unproven, and likely false, educational hypotheses, the most notorious one of which is that using drugs is a sympton of low self esteem, or of high stress. Thus casual, responsible use of any drug (alcohol, caffeine, tobacco) by parents or anyone else is to be seen as pathological, i.e., "abuse." From this dubious premise, it is alleged that self-esteem can be "built" by reciting state-sponsored catechisms. These catechisms consist of claims of "rights" which are said to have been conferred on fifth grade D.A.R.E. students. They include the "right to be happy" and the "right to be respected."

   Many parents take issue with the emphasis on "self-esteem" in schools these days, and the notion that it can be readily "taught." Lillian Katz, Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois, put it this way: "Self-esteem and self-confidence don't come from being told you are great. You get them by facing challenges and mastering them through hard work and persistence." (Readers Digest, April 1994, "Are We Demanding Enough of Our Kids?)

   To determine if students are experiencing a low, medium or high level of stress, students are given a test, in Lesson 8, called "My Stress Level." Among the causes of "high stress" are said to be: taking a test, being late for something, meeting someone new, being the first one to do something, or helping to plan a special event. In an earlier version, even "doing your chores" was said to cause stress.

3. Undermining the role and credibility of police. The role of police is to protect the public safety, and to respond to emergencies. It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect them to take on the job of teaching mental health and attitudes. Nor it is helpful for civics education for children to be taught fictitious "rights." When a child grows up and learns that she was lied to about her "right to be happy," how will she feel about the officer who taught her otherwise, or the school in which she was so taught?

4. Not fair to professional teachers. D.A.R.E. mocks their years of study, by asking them to step aside for a high school graduate with two weeks training to come in and teach mental health and psychology. If police officers have the education and training necessary to be good teachers, what is the point of requiring years of study and teaching certificates?

   If Johnny can't read, teachers bear accountability. If Johnny doesn't stay off drugs, will the police take responsibility for the failure of drug education in schools, and protect teachers from any attribution of blame?

5. Sacrifices excessive academic time. D.A.R.E. consumes approximately seventeen hours of academic time that would otherwise be available for science, math, reading or some other academic subject. In the absense of any proof that D.A.R.E. works, this is a substantial sacrifice of valuable school time.

6. Perpetuates the war. To many people, D.A.R.E. represents the strongest commitment our nation can make to curb drug abuse by young people, and that it deserves to be pursued, even when we know it isn't working. By thus deceiving America into thinking that we are doing something serious about keeping kids off drugs, D.A.R.E. is impeding the nation's efforts to find more efficacious ways to achieve the broader goals of national drug policy, viz., to protect the public health and safety, to prevent abuse, and to eliminate the crime and violence associated with illicit drug trafficking.

   Peter G. Arlos, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, city councillor, put it this way:

   "The tragic truth that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that may not work has not sunk in on the local or the national levels. A large D.A.R.E. bureaucracy has grown up that feeds on itself. The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs."
   Letter, Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), November 21, 1993

7. Subverts public education by transforming schools into instruments for the propagation of prohibitionist doctrine and the perpetuation of the war waged in its defense. Although a national debate is growing over whether prohibition, enforced by war, can reasonably be expected to achieve the goals listed above, D.A.R.E. defends prohibition zealously, disputing that the distinction between legal and illegal drugs is based solely on historical anomaly. ("Drug legalization: surrender is not the answer!," National D.A.R.E. Officers Newsletter, January, 1995). Looking at history, especially pre-war Germany, some parents compare D.A.R.E. to previous instances of installing uniformed, sometimes armed, agents of the state in classrooms to tell children what their attitudes ought to be, and to obtain information about family home life which may be of interest to the state.

   
   This van, pictured on a web site maintained by a DARE officer, was seized by the government under a controversial program known as asset forfeiture, in which drug defendants can lose their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.

   It is widely known that D.A.R.E. officers are instructed to put a "D.A.R.E. Box" in every classroom, into which students may drop "drug information" or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student "makes a disclosure related to drug use," the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the "drug use" was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents.

8. D.A.R.E. costs a lot of money. Glenn Levant, the D.A.R.E. executive director, states that D.A.R.E. consumes some $750,000,000 per year. The money goes to purchase paraphernalia--T-shirts, bumper stickers, caps, pens, pencils, etc.--from D.A.R.E. -licensed vendors, as well as for training and overtime salaries for police." It is important to realize that every dollar spent on D.A.R.E. is a dollar not available for a useful, educationally sound drug education program in schools. The overwhelming preponderance of federal "Drug-Free Schools" money goes into the D.A.R.E. program.
   • How much money is spent on D.A.R.E.?
   • Who gets the money?
   • Who really pays for D.A.R.E.?

What's wrong with D.A.R.E.?

Over the last several years, ever-louder questions and criticisms about the merits and wisdom of D.A.R.E. have emerged. This section attempts to share those that have come to the attention of authors of this web page.

1. Efficacy. Despite its huge popularity, and hundreds of millions in tax revenue and private contributions, no evidence exists that D.A.R.E. keeps kids off drugs. A large, developing body of studies documenting this conclusion is referenced in the accompanying list of references and other resources. The bottom line is that at best, in the words of the Justice Department-sponsored study by the Research Triangle Institute (338k), D.A.R.E. has a "limited to esentially nonexistent effect on drug use."

   The U.S. General Accounting Office reported, "There is little evidence so far that [D.A.R.E. and other "resistance training" programs] have reduced the use of drugs by adolescents" (U.S. GAO/GGD-93-82, "Confronting the Drug Problem," page 25).

   D.A.R.E.'s official response to this growing body of research is disdain for science. "Scientists tell you that bumblebees can't fly, but we know better," declared D.A.R.E. Executive Director Glenn Levant upon release of the government-sponsored report that D.A.R.E. doesn't work (USA Today, October 11, 1994). The local D.A.R.E. officers we talked to also claim that the anecdotal evidence is convincing that D.A.R.E. is working extremely well, citing the warm reception they have received by schools and parents. "Besides," they often add, "even if we are reaching only one kid, it's worth all the effort."

   (It is not clear why their standard of success is so low. We would hardly declare a math curriculum successful if only one kid learned to add.)

   In an editorial October 15, 1993, The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Herald observed, "If D.A.R.E. isn't doing the job it's supposed to, we owe it to fifth- and sixth-graders to find out why."

   Curiously, the web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the nation's preeminent anti-drug abuse agency, doesn't even mention D.A.R.E.

2. Content. The content of the D.A.R.E. curriculum is raising a variety of concerns about what D.A.R.E. is actually teaching our children. These concerns include:
   • D.A.R.E.'s message to children is muddled and confusing. It doesn't tell kids that they must not use drugs. Instead, D.A.R.E. tells them that they have the "right to say no," implying that they have the "right to say yes." Despite the term in its name, D.A.R.E. doesn't teach kids what "drug abuse" actually is, or how it can be identified.
   • D.A.R.E. is not respectful of parents and other civilian adults. The D.A.R.E. video, called "The Land of Decisions and Choices," shown to students as part of Lesson 2, portrays all adults as drunks or other drug abusers, or senile...other than the D.A.R.E. officer. Parents find this film a bizarre, brazenly exaggerated depiction of drug use. Although each child is given a D.A.R.E. "workbook," students are encouraged to leave them at school and not take them home. Some parents worry that the heavy emphasis on "resistance skills" subverts their own authority with their children.
   • It is a well established fact that children's greatest drug risk is with alcohol and tobacco, yet D.A.R.E. is soft on those drugs, hammering almost exclusively on illicit drugs. As a condition of "participation" in D.A.R.E., children are expected to abstain from all drugs. D.A.R.E. officers themselves are not required to meet that standard.
   • D.A.R.E. is based on unproven, and likely false, educational hypotheses, the most notorious one of which is that using drugs is a sympton of low self esteem, or of high stress. Thus casual, responsible use of any drug (alcohol, caffeine, tobacco) by parents or anyone else is to be seen as pathological, i.e., "abuse." From this dubious premise, it is alleged that self-esteem can be "built" by reciting state-sponsored catechisms. These catechisms consist of claims of "rights" which are said to have been conferred on fifth grade D.A.R.E. students. They include the "right to be happy" and the "right to be respected."

   Many parents take issue with the emphasis on "self-esteem" in schools these days, and the notion that it can be readily "taught." Lillian Katz, Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois, put it this way: "Self-esteem and self-confidence don't come from being told you are great. You get them by facing challenges and mastering them through hard work and persistence." (Readers Digest, April 1994, "Are We Demanding Enough of Our Kids?)

   To determine if students are experiencing a low, medium or high level of stress, students are given a test, in Lesson 8, called "My Stress Level." Among the causes of "high stress" are said to be: taking a test, being late for something, meeting someone new, being the first one to do something, or helping to plan a special event. In an earlier version, even "doing your chores" was said to cause stress.

3. Undermining the role and credibility of police. The role of police is to protect the public safety, and to respond to emergencies. It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect them to take on the job of teaching mental health and attitudes. Nor it is helpful for civics education for children to be taught fictitious "rights." When a child grows up and learns that she was lied to about her "right to be happy," how will she feel about the officer who taught her otherwise, or the school in which she was so taught?

4. Not fair to professional teachers. D.A.R.E. mocks their years of study, by asking them to step aside for a high school graduate with two weeks training to come in and teach mental health and psychology. If police officers have the education and training necessary to be good teachers, what is the point of requiring years of study and teaching certificates?

   If Johnny can't read, teachers bear accountability. If Johnny doesn't stay off drugs, will the police take responsibility for the failure of drug education in schools, and protect teachers from any attribution of blame?

5. Sacrifices excessive academic time. D.A.R.E. consumes approximately seventeen hours of academic time that would otherwise be available for science, math, reading or some other academic subject. In the absense of any proof that D.A.R.E. works, this is a substantial sacrifice of valuable school time.

6. Perpetuates the war. To many people, D.A.R.E. represents the strongest commitment our nation can make to curb drug abuse by young people, and that it deserves to be pursued, even when we know it isn't working. By thus deceiving America into thinking that we are doing something serious about keeping kids off drugs, D.A.R.E. is impeding the nation's efforts to find more efficacious ways to achieve the broader goals of national drug policy, viz., to protect the public health and safety, to prevent abuse, and to eliminate the crime and violence associated with illicit drug trafficking.

   Peter G. Arlos, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, city councillor, put it this way:

   "The tragic truth that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that may not work has not sunk in on the local or the national levels. A large D.A.R.E. bureaucracy has grown up that feeds on itself. The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs."
   Letter, Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), November 21, 1993

7. Subverts public education by transforming schools into instruments for the propagation of prohibitionist doctrine and the perpetuation of the war waged in its defense. Although a national debate is growing over whether prohibition, enforced by war, can reasonably be expected to achieve the goals listed above, D.A.R.E. defends prohibition zealously, disputing that the distinction between legal and illegal drugs is based solely on historical anomaly. ("Drug legalization: surrender is not the answer!," National D.A.R.E. Officers Newsletter, January, 1995). Looking at history, especially pre-war Germany, some parents compare D.A.R.E. to previous instances of installing uniformed, sometimes armed, agents of the state in classrooms to tell children what their attitudes ought to be, and to obtain information about family home life which may be of interest to the state.

   
   This van, pictured on a web site maintained by a DARE officer, was seized by the government under a controversial program known as asset forfeiture, in which drug defendants can lose their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.

   It is widely known that D.A.R.E. officers are instructed to put a "D.A.R.E. Box" in every classroom, into which students may drop "drug information" or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student "makes a disclosure related to drug use," the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the "drug use" was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents.

8. D.A.R.E. costs a lot of money. Glenn Levant, the D.A.R.E. executive director, states that D.A.R.E. consumes some $750,000,000 per year. The money goes to purchase paraphernalia--T-shirts, bumper stickers, caps, pens, pencils, etc.--from D.A.R.E. -licensed vendors, as well as for training and overtime salaries for police." It is important to realize that every dollar spent on D.A.R.E. is a dollar not available for a useful, educationally sound drug education program in schools. The overwhelming preponderance of federal "Drug-Free Schools" money goes into the D.A.R.E. program.
   • How much money is spent on D.A.R.E.?
   • Who gets the money?
   • Who really pays for D.A.R.E.?

What's wrong with D.A.R.E.?

Over the last several years, ever-louder questions and criticisms about the merits and wisdom of D.A.R.E. have emerged. This section attempts to share those that have come to the attention of authors of this web page.

1. Efficacy. Despite its huge popularity, and hundreds of millions in tax revenue and private contributions, no evidence exists that D.A.R.E. keeps kids off drugs. A large, developing body of studies documenting this conclusion is referenced in the accompanying list of references and other resources. The bottom line is that at best, in the words of the Justice Department-sponsored study by the Research Triangle Institute (338k), D.A.R.E. has a "limited to esentially nonexistent effect on drug use."

   The U.S. General Accounting Office reported, "There is little evidence so far that [D.A.R.E. and other "resistance training" programs] have reduced the use of drugs by adolescents" (U.S. GAO/GGD-93-82, "Confronting the Drug Problem," page 25).

   D.A.R.E.'s official response to this growing body of research is disdain for science. "Scientists tell you that bumblebees can't fly, but we know better," declared D.A.R.E. Executive Director Glenn Levant upon release of the government-sponsored report that D.A.R.E. doesn't work (USA Today, October 11, 1994). The local D.A.R.E. officers we talked to also claim that the anecdotal evidence is convincing that D.A.R.E. is working extremely well, citing the warm reception they have received by schools and parents. "Besides," they often add, "even if we are reaching only one kid, it's worth all the effort."

   (It is not clear why their standard of success is so low. We would hardly declare a math curriculum successful if only one kid learned to add.)

   In an editorial October 15, 1993, The Chapel Hill (North Carolina) Herald observed, "If D.A.R.E. isn't doing the job it's supposed to, we owe it to fifth- and sixth-graders to find out why."

   Curiously, the web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the nation's preeminent anti-drug abuse agency, doesn't even mention D.A.R.E.

2. Content. The content of the D.A.R.E. curriculum is raising a variety of concerns about what D.A.R.E. is actually teaching our children. These concerns include:
   • D.A.R.E.'s message to children is muddled and confusing. It doesn't tell kids that they must not use drugs. Instead, D.A.R.E. tells them that they have the "right to say no," implying that they have the "right to say yes." Despite the term in its name, D.A.R.E. doesn't teach kids what "drug abuse" actually is, or how it can be identified.
   • D.A.R.E. is not respectful of parents and other civilian adults. The D.A.R.E. video, called "The Land of Decisions and Choices," shown to students as part of Lesson 2, portrays all adults as drunks or other drug abusers, or senile...other than the D.A.R.E. officer. Parents find this film a bizarre, brazenly exaggerated depiction of drug use. Although each child is given a D.A.R.E. "workbook," students are encouraged to leave them at school and not take them home. Some parents worry that the heavy emphasis on "resistance skills" subverts their own authority with their children.
   • It is a well established fact that children's greatest drug risk is with alcohol and tobacco, yet D.A.R.E. is soft on those drugs, hammering almost exclusively on illicit drugs. As a condition of "participation" in D.A.R.E., children are expected to abstain from all drugs. D.A.R.E. officers themselves are not required to meet that standard.
   • D.A.R.E. is based on unproven, and likely false, educational hypotheses, the most notorious one of which is that using drugs is a sympton of low self esteem, or of high stress. Thus casual, responsible use of any drug (alcohol, caffeine, tobacco) by parents or anyone else is to be seen as pathological, i.e., "abuse." From this dubious premise, it is alleged that self-esteem can be "built" by reciting state-sponsored catechisms. These catechisms consist of claims of "rights" which are said to have been conferred on fifth grade D.A.R.E. students. They include the "right to be happy" and the "right to be respected."

   Many parents take issue with the emphasis on "self-esteem" in schools these days, and the notion that it can be readily "taught." Lillian Katz, Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois, put it this way: "Self-esteem and self-confidence don't come from being told you are great. You get them by facing challenges and mastering them through hard work and persistence." (Readers Digest, April 1994, "Are We Demanding Enough of Our Kids?)

   To determine if students are experiencing a low, medium or high level of stress, students are given a test, in Lesson 8, called "My Stress Level." Among the causes of "high stress" are said to be: taking a test, being late for something, meeting someone new, being the first one to do something, or helping to plan a special event. In an earlier version, even "doing your chores" was said to cause stress.

3. Undermining the role and credibility of police. The role of police is to protect the public safety, and to respond to emergencies. It is neither fair nor reasonable to expect them to take on the job of teaching mental health and attitudes. Nor it is helpful for civics education for children to be taught fictitious "rights." When a child grows up and learns that she was lied to about her "right to be happy," how will she feel about the officer who taught her otherwise, or the school in which she was so taught?

4. Not fair to professional teachers. D.A.R.E. mocks their years of study, by asking them to step aside for a high school graduate with two weeks training to come in and teach mental health and psychology. If police officers have the education and training necessary to be good teachers, what is the point of requiring years of study and teaching certificates?

   If Johnny can't read, teachers bear accountability. If Johnny doesn't stay off drugs, will the police take responsibility for the failure of drug education in schools, and protect teachers from any attribution of blame?

5. Sacrifices excessive academic time. D.A.R.E. consumes approximately seventeen hours of academic time that would otherwise be available for science, math, reading or some other academic subject. In the absense of any proof that D.A.R.E. works, this is a substantial sacrifice of valuable school time.

6. Perpetuates the war. To many people, D.A.R.E. represents the strongest commitment our nation can make to curb drug abuse by young people, and that it deserves to be pursued, even when we know it isn't working. By thus deceiving America into thinking that we are doing something serious about keeping kids off drugs, D.A.R.E. is impeding the nation's efforts to find more efficacious ways to achieve the broader goals of national drug policy, viz., to protect the public health and safety, to prevent abuse, and to eliminate the crime and violence associated with illicit drug trafficking.

   Peter G. Arlos, a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, city councillor, put it this way:

   "The tragic truth that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that may not work has not sunk in on the local or the national levels. A large D.A.R.E. bureaucracy has grown up that feeds on itself. The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs."
   Letter, Sunday Republican (Springfield, Mass.), November 21, 1993

7. Subverts public education by transforming schools into instruments for the propagation of prohibitionist doctrine and the perpetuation of the war waged in its defense. Although a national debate is growing over whether prohibition, enforced by war, can reasonably be expected to achieve the goals listed above, D.A.R.E. defends prohibition zealously, disputing that the distinction between legal and illegal drugs is based solely on historical anomaly. ("Drug legalization: surrender is not the answer!," National D.A.R.E. Officers Newsletter, January, 1995). Looking at history, especially pre-war Germany, some parents compare D.A.R.E. to previous instances of installing uniformed, sometimes armed, agents of the state in classrooms to tell children what their attitudes ought to be, and to obtain information about family home life which may be of interest to the state.

   
   This van, pictured on a web site maintained by a DARE officer, was seized by the government under a controversial program known as asset forfeiture, in which drug defendants can lose their property even if they are never found guilty of any crime.

   It is widely known that D.A.R.E. officers are instructed to put a "D.A.R.E. Box" in every classroom, into which students may drop "drug information" or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student "makes a disclosure related to drug use," the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the "drug use" was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents.

8. D.A.R.E. costs a lot of money. Glenn Levant, the D.A.R.E. executive director, states that D.A.R.E. consumes some $750,000,000 per year. The money goes to purchase paraphernalia--T-shirts, bumper stickers, caps, pens, pencils, etc.--from D.A.R.E. -licensed vendors, as well as for training and overtime salaries for police." It is important to realize that every dollar spent on D.A.R.E. is a dollar not available for a useful, educationally sound drug education program in schools. The overwhelming preponderance of federal "Drug-Free Schools" money goes into the D.A.R.E. program.
   • How much money is spent on D.A.R.E.?
   • Who gets the money?
   • Who really pays for D.A.R.E.?

First off, here is the first paragraph from Chapter 20 of "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts" by Lynn Zimmer, Ph. D, and John P. Morgan, M.D.:

Today's adolescents have been bombarded with anti-marijuana messages. They were born during the early 1980's, just as President Ronald Reagan was focusing the drug war on marijuana, and just as Nancy Reagan was introducing her "just say no" slogan to American culture. Today's teenagers have had more drug education than any cohort of young people in American history. Aboutl half have received DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program... Despite this onslaught of anti-drug messages, the number of teenagers trying marijuana began rising in 1992, and has risen every year since... Mass campagins against drugs can even be counterproductive. The primary consequence of public warnings about glue sniffing in the 1960s seems to have been to introduce glue-sniffing to young people who otherwise might not have heard of it.

Here are some of the sources used in this chapter:

Baum, D., Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, Boston: Little Brown and Company (1996)

National Institute on Justice, "The DARE Program: A Review of Prevalence, User Satisfaction, and Effectiveness," National Institute of Justice Update, Washington, D.C.

Rosenbaum, D.P. et al., "Cops in the Classroom: A Longitudinal Evaluation of DARE," Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 31:3-31 (1994)

Every study that has examined the effectiveness of DARE has failed to show a correlation linking the program with a decrease in adolescent or adult drug use. If the purpose of the program is to get people to not use drugs, it has been a total failure. Total. TOTAL. It does not work.

DRCNet has a section dealing with DARE that is very enlightening. The Detroit News has an archived version of an anti-DARE article available here, and the American Psychological Association has a study showing DARE's lack of effectiveness here. And the Austin Chronicle has an article about how that city's police department dropped DARE due to its costliness and ineffectiveness.

And here's the counter site.

I take it you don't spend much time hanging out in the poorer neighborhoods of major cities. No, the reason you don't see many opium addicts is because they've all switched to heroin, originally developed as an opium substitute by a pharmaceutical company (Bayer). The reason people use heroin now and not opium is not due to the 'success' of the various drug laws, but because of the effects of illegality -- the black market demands a more potent, concentrated drug that is easier to smuggle than opium. (In other words, it's 'better' to try to smuggle a kilo of heroin than a kilo of opium -- you get more out of it.) Now if drugs were legal and regulated, people might well choose a less potent preparation of opium over some kind of suspect black market heroin. As an example, in the Alcohol Prohibition in the USA in the 1920's, a frosty cold well brewed lager was hard to come by, but a bottle of 140 proof backwoods-still moonshine could be bought from nearly anyone of a certain reputation.

You really need to open your eyes to the true effects of our misguided drug policies. If people with your impressive grasp of the issues were running the country, just think of the state we'd be in. Oh wait, never mind... drcnet.org

Reference: DeJong, W. A Short Term Evaluation of Project DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education): Preliminary Indications of Effectiveness. J. Drug Education, 17, 279-294 (1987).

Found no significant differences in knowledge and attitudes about ATOD use between DARE and non-DARE students.
---------------------------
Long Beach California DARE evaluation 1989
Reference: Becker H. and Agopian M. J. Drug Education, 22, 283-291 (1992).

Found no difference among DARE and non-DARE students on ATOD use.
---------------------------
Reference: Harmon M. Results from a DARE Study Conducted in Charleston, South Carolina. Institute of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of Maryland, 1991.

DARE students were equally likely to use tobacco and other drugs as compared to non-DARE students.
---------------------------
Reference: DARE in Kentucky Schools 1988-1989. An Evaluation of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program. Faine, J. and Bohlander E. (1989).

DARE students were actually had lower resistance to peer pressure to alcohol/drug use than non-DARE students (the opposite of expected direction).
---------------------------
Second Year Evaluation of DARE in Illinois. Rosenbaum, D. et al. University of Illinois, 1991.

DARE did not reduce adolescents' alcohol use.
---------------------------
Past and Future Directions of the D.A.R.E. Program
(Study done by RTP, see here for the full report)

limited to esentially nonexistent effect on drug use.
---------------------------
The U.S. General Accounting Office reported, "There is little evidence so far that [D.A.R.E. and other "resistance training" programs] have reduced the use of drugs by adolescents" (U.S. GAO/GGD-93-82, "Confronting the Drug Problem," page 25).
---------------------------
For full information about DARE, see A Different Look At DARE


Enough citations for you? Let's see some studies that show DARE is working. Ones not funded by DARE, of course.

As for the "Pro-Drug culture", we are not pro-drugs, we are pro-freedom. You remind me of the anti-abortion people saying that the pro-choice side is pro-abortion.

It's always "nice" to see Congress hand a big present to the vicious credit industry and banks via the bankruptcy "reform" (nee hard-nosed squeezing of consumers who run into bad financial times largely due to extremely high credit card interest rates and creditors extending waaaay too much credit to those who can't handle it, but I digress).

But the idea of extending the anti-human war on drugs in any way defies rationality. The fact of multitudes of otherwise innocent people in prison simply due to drug possession should make any decent person sick to their stomach, esp. those who have known people to have suffered in jail or prison (just because someone is convicted of a crime doesn't always make them a bad person or someone who actually committed a crime...there are many people who are framed, in many cases by prosecutors, but again, I digress). Also consider how blacks are especially picked on by the narcs and imprisoned in high proportion to non-blacks, as if blacks are using/dealing drugs *that* much more than non-blacks (get real!).

Big surprise, but I support the full legalization of marijuana and the decriminalization of using other "illicit" drugs. And guess what? I've never used any of these drugs. I could give a laundry list of reasons for my position (like "treatment works", "saving people's lives from the hard time of prison" and "using hemp will save trees"), but I'll just say this: I dare say that anyone who open-mindedly examines the "war on drugs" closely enough for a good period of time will come to the same conclusions.

The war on drugs is an evil scourge and must be ended. For more info on drug policy reform, go here.

Steve Magruder

One of the main problems with the bill is this:

Additionally, the bill would allow federal law enforcement officers to search people's homes while they're not there and copy their computer files without notifying them for months, possibly years, that the police were in their homes.

Some coverage can be found here.

I can't say more. Join some people who are fighting this sort of thing.

• Students for Sensible Drug Policy
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Drug Reform Coordination Network

There are many more. You can always get in touch with Columbia University NORML for more information. That is my current vehicle for my activist tendencies. We are also in the process of changing into an SSDP chapter.

Stay strong.

This Goner posting this by the way... I thought I knew my password...

From this week's DRCNet Week Online, an excellent newsletter on drug policy, the following article:

The U.S. government has moved a step closer to placing a drug popular with club goers on its list of most-hated substances along with marijuana, heroin, crack cocaine and LSD. The Hillory J. Farias Date Rape Prevention Act, a bill that would make GHB, or gamma y-hydroxybutrate, a Schedule I drug passed the House of Representatives this week by a vote of 423-1. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas was the lone dissenter.

GHB is the latest in a wave of recently demonized drugs nicknamed "date rape" drugs by politicians and the media, after reports of young women who were attacked after men put the drug into their drinks. The bill itself is named after a woman who died after visiting a nightclub in 1996. An autopsy found traces of GHB in her system.

Although GHB has become a familiar presence at nightclubs and raves in recent years, the drug has also shown promise as a treatment for narcolepsy. Federal classification of GHB as a Schedule I substance would likely hinder future research, because Schedule I drugs are deemed to have no medicinal value and cannot be prescribed by doctors under federal law.

My best friend's ex-girlfriend has narcolepsy and it's a disorder that I wouldn't wish upon my enemies. Here's a drug which is giving narcolepsy suffers their first hope in years of a treatment that might actually work well, and they're taking it away from doctors due to mass hysteria over one highly publicized incident (neglecting the fact that club-hoppers will be able to get GHB no matter what its legality is)! Note also the inflammatory name of the bill ("Date Rape Prevention Act") and the fact that only 1 Congressman was brave enough to go against the tide on this one (I guess the others figured that their opponents would claim they were "for date rape" if they didn't vote for it).

Keeping this in mind, I propose a new bill which we should try to find a representative to sponsor pronto:

The Rob Malda Just Say No To Microsoft Date Rape Prevention HIV Awareness Red Ribbon America First Drug Free CyberPromotion Internet Pornography Anti-Spam Terrorism Eradication Protect the Children Act of 1999

In an effort to protect the children from the evils of Microsoft products, recreational drug use, HIV infection, date rape, terrorism, partial birth abortions, and unsolicited email, we hereby commit to a $100 million appropriation for the establishment of a National Slashdot Fund. Slashdot is one of our nation's greatest resources, and we must protect it for our children, and our children's children, to enjoy. Amen.

Nobody would dare to vote against it, it'll be great!