DARE: MORE HARM THAN GOOD?

Regarding the May 21 article on the Drug Abuse Resistance Education
(DARE) program, good intentions are no substitute for effective
anti-drug education.

While Canadian schools are just beginning to implement DARE, schools
in the United States are dropping the program. Every methodologically
sound evaluation of DARE has found the program to be either
ineffective or counterproductive. The scare tactics used do more harm
than good.

Students who realize they are being lied to about marijuana often make
the mistake of assuming that harder drugs are relatively harmless as
well. This is a recipe for disaster.

Anti-drug education programs need to be reality-based or they may
backfire when kids are inevitably exposed to drug use among their
peers. After almost two decades of DARE, heroin use among high school
seniors in the U.S. has reached record levels. Minimizing drug use
requires strategies based on proven effectiveness, not "feel good"
programs that please parents, educators and police.

Dr. Dennis Rosenbaum, a professor at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, recently completed a six-year study of 1,798 students and
found that:

* "DARE had no long-term effects on a wide range of drug use
measures";

* DARE does not "prevent drug use at the stage in adolescent
development when drugs become available and are widely used, namely
during the high school years";

* and that DARE may actually be counter-productive.

According to the study, "there is some evidence of a boomerang effect
among suburban kids. That is, suburban students who were DARE
graduates scored higher than suburban students in the control group on
all four major drug use measures."

Source - Rosenbaum, Dennis, Assessing the Effects of School-based Drug
Education: A Six-Year Multilevel Analysis of Project DARE, Abstract (April
6, 1998).

References for various DARE studies can be found following my contact
information. To verify record levels of heroin use claim please visit
the Monitoring the Future site at: http://www.monitoringthefuture.org

Robert Sharpe, Program Officer

The Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation

http://www.drugpolicy.org

Washington, D.C., United States of America