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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.?

DARE has many fundamental problems with it which are inextricably linked with the moronic attitude of the drug war.

The first is that "drugs" is ill-defined and is equated with the irrational schedule policies of the DEA/FDA. Everything you ingest is a drug. Every lipid, amino acid, carbohydrate, tryptamine, amphetamine, etc. etc. all have effects on your body and your brain- whether it be LSD or L-Tyrosine. To promote a healthy attitude in the populace, one needs to show the reality of cause and effect of everything you ingest. It is hypocritical of schools to be having anti-marijuana campaigns through DARE when such things are funded by PepsiCola or Mcdonalds- just as if not more deleterious to one's body as some "hard" drugs. Don't beleive me? Check out the increasing rates of hypoglycemia and diabetes among the youth generation, and compare that with the rates of, say, methamphetamine addiction (you'll find the former is much higher). The rational approach is a holistic approach- advocating the ability to regain bio and mental homeostasis even after extreme conditions (stress, drugs, lack of exercise)- which leaves the decision in the hands of well-informed youth, and not in horribly misinformed disempowered generation.

That said, there are positive effects to many illicit substances- enhancements in creativity, insight in self, stress relief, etc. Just like there are positive effects to eating a fatty and heavy meal, or taking medication to treat a disease. Ideally, one can avoid doing all of the above. Practically, its not going to happen- and teaching strategies for one to effectively using a state of homeostasis (sobriety) to get through life is critical, and is severly lacking in our bass-ackwards society.

The second problem is not only is a bad philosophy being taught, but misinformation is freewheelingly handed out, which not only destroys the credibility of the program, but also endangers the lives of many youth who may not have access to reliable information when drugs come their way. Yes, methamphetamine and heroin are not good- Ive had many a friends have their lives disrupted by it. On the same token, marijuana and and LSD dont kill- Ive taken them and am probably much more of a productive member of society than most, regardless. The harm prevention comes down to situations like: "When I am in a club scene, how much water should I drink, and what activity level should I have to prevent injury?" or "What dosages can cocaine have addictive effects?". Thanks to not having full factual disclosure, DARE has resulted not in the decline of drugs, but rather, the irresponsible use of drugs. In fact, I would go so far to say that the advent of the internet and sites like hyperreal, erowid and groups like rec.drugs have saved tens of thousands of lives in drug situations thanks to factual accounts.

The third problem, is by introducing police (and other legal strongarm elements in to the situation), DARE has created an antagonistic relationship with legal system and the youth right off. Youth immediately become part of a criminal class- a class which is suspect of being "bad" under any circumstances. At best, As everyone in the 10-25 age group knows, this mentality has blossomed into the "crucify the different" mentality with all the anti-geek, anti-punk, etc. crusades occuring after Columbine regardless of the productivity or general goodness of the kids involved (its a total lack of philosophy, thinking, and humanity on the part of the administrations). At worst, kids who may have bad lives and chemical dependency problems are physically abused, tortured, and shipped off to the gulag, where they descend further and further into complete alienation from the positive aspects of society. The police involvement in the DARE program in it's current use makes police into nothing more than at best a gestapo, and at worst into just another really violent gang of thugs, given license to brutality by society. What happened to "officer friendly"? If you are going to have legeal intervention, it should be for the positive, and not by blindly treating all kids who use drugs, or happen to associate with a particular group as cockroaches- needing to be wiped out from society.

All of what I say is coming from growing up in the American Public School system in the time of the drug war, and having been in all sorts of different social roles (as math/computer whiz kid, a disgruntled political student, an illicit substance user, teacher's pet, etc. etc.). My suggestion for DARE managers, and people who want to stop seeing substance abuse is to Stop the Madness- stop buying the bullshit about crime and drugs. Stop thinking of drugs as an evil force. Stop thinking of black and white. Realize that substance ingestment is a lifestyle and health issue- a holistic issue that cannot and should not be treated as something that is an ethical or moral issue, any more than the decision to be a couch potato or having promiscous sex. It is an issue that cannot be improved without realizing that drug use and drug abuse is inevitable within a population, and what needs to be aimed for is harm reduction through rational, factual information!

Of course, I'm probably typing all of this for naught, since the blindness of the legislation and the brutality of the uneducated folks working in the educationa and police systems right now, refuse to even recognize the existence of the content of what I am saying, much less consider a different approach.

..."Here Kids- here's a free voucher for a Big Mac and Coke since you've sat here listening to us preach for the past hour."... Yeah, great policy (*sarcasm intended*)

The anti-anti-drug movement has come so far, why stop fighting? Anyone who agrees with me needs to show their true colors and say something about it!!

Amen my brother !

I had a bad experience with LSD when I was younger, before I really knew much about drugs (besides marijuana). I ended up taking too much, not understanding what the drug would do to me in the first place, not knowing the drug could be laced with something really harmful (like PCP, which the doses I bought turned out to be combined with). Plain and simple I should have looked into the facts about the drug (hyperreal) before I ate too much and ended up in the hospital! And with kids today trying more substances earlier in thier lives, we need open information on drugs readily available.



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How long have you been listening to the world's famous?
'Bout six weeks.
Six weeks!

In an article I recently wrote for the WSU Association of Pagan Students' Mabon newsletter, I used you as an example of a Pagan individual who is technically competant (statistically 17 to 22% of the NeoPagan community in 1985 -- Adler - DDTM 2nd Ed.), and liken you in that reguard to VRML inventor Mark Pesce.

What is your conception of a "TechnoPagan" and do you consider this a viable and/or developing NeoPagan tradition?

No shit man, water is a killer:
FAQ-W on hyperreal