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