ANTI-DRUG PROGRAM COULD USE LESSON IN RELEVANCE

DARE: Its methods are just another form of the social pressure it aims to
combat, says a recovering addict.

IRECENTLY saw my 10-year-old stepson Vince "graduate" from the Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program - DARE for short. He sang "1-2-3 F-R-E-E" and
"Talk It Out" and took a "solemn vow" to "say no to alcohol, tobacco and
illegal drugs, and yes to my own self-worth."

But I don't think he is, in the end, any less likely to use drugs than when
he began. What he's learned, if anything, is that the adults involved,
well-intentioned though they are, don't understand drugs or children.

Taught by police officers in 75 percent of the nation's school districts,
including Baltimore, DARE is the dominant program for anti-drug education
in this country. Its red diagonal logo has become ubiquitous in schools, on
cars, on T-shirts.

Born in Los Angeles in the era of Nancy Reagan and "Just say no," DARE has
had to weather a series of studies - including ones by the surgeon general
and the National Academy of Sciences - that suggest it is completely
ineffective.

As a recovering drug addict, I didn't need the studies. The DARE program -
as indicated by the materials that Vince brought home, the songs he and his
fifth-grade classmates sang at the graduation, the Web site, and so on
- -only has one idea of the cause of drug use: "peer pressure." And it only
has one approach to dealing with it: turning up a kid's resolve to say
"no." And it only has one sort of person telling kids how and why to do
this: police officers.

In response to the studies, DARE officials have unveiled a new version of
the program. Some of the studies actually seemed to indicate that DARE
grads were more likely to use drugs. Officials attribute this to the
supposed fact that DARE's emphasis on peer pressure made drug use seem even
more prevalent than it is.

So the new approach focuses on "social norms," and tries to show students
that they don't have to buckle under to a norm of drug abuse. Perhaps you
are thinking that this is exactly the "peer pressure" approach in slightly
more obscure words, and perhaps you are right.

So what's wrong with this approach?

I think that if you have ever been a serious drug abuser, you understand.
It's true that "peer pressure" can be the occasion for people to try drugs.
Certainly, if no one around you has any drugs, you won't be trying them.
And when your friends are doing drugs, it goes very quickly from seeming
impossible or worthless to seeming something like normal.

Drug abuse can also create a kind of small-group solidarity in which the
cool people who use drugs are opposed to the straights or cowards who do
not. But note that even these factors make the whole situation much more
complicated than the question of whether you can say no when urged to do
drugs: The situation is one of complicated inclusions and exclusions, of
membership and identification, of finding a cultural zone in which you feel
comfortable.

If you're happy in a cultural zone defined by police and what they want you
to do, then you don't have to worry about whatever pressure the freaks and
rappers might bring to bear on you. But it's not too much to say that few
teen-agers with guts or creativity are so heavily identified with authority
that they aspire to police culture.

Indeed, the cure provided for peer pressure by the DARE program is simply
social pressure from nonpeers, and even on its own assumptions the strategy
would be workable only if "social norms" defined by teachers,
administrators and police officers operated more powerfully in the lives of
young people than the norms of the groups to which they actually belong.
Any young person for whom that is true is never going to be much of a drug
abuser anyway.

One source of the peer pressure that the program tries to deal with is
popular culture, and Vince was subjected to a criticism of the various pop
icons he loves, such as Eminem.

The people who designed the program might think seriously for a moment
about how effective a police officer is as a rock critic. Even if the
officer knows rock music, how influential can a cop be in persuading
fifth-graders not to listen to music they like?

Implicit in the DARE program is a condescending view of young people which
says they are incredibly easy to manipulate and are constantly doing things
they think are wrong because it seems cool or Eminem is telling them to.
This accounts for the program's diagnosis of the causes of drug abuse and
for its prescriptions.

The approach is exclusively slogans, posters, songs chanted in unison,
pledges of loyalty and so on. Really what this resembles is not education
on any reasonable account but the sort of indoctrination practiced by
authoritarian political regimes. Any self-respecting young person ought to
rebel against that sort of thing, and indeed Vince's final essay explaining
what he'd learned in DARE was titled "I Do Not Like the DARE Program."

As he put it: "I think that some people (me, for example) like making their
own choices and don't like being told which way they should go or what
choice they should make."

The "peer pressure" approach to the explanation of drug abuse is generated
by people who really don't understand what drugs are for: The reason you do
drugs is because you like the way they make you feel.

I always felt as though I was burdened by too much consciousness: I could
never make myself really relax, could never get a break from the monologue
in my head. I enjoyed smoking pot or tripping on LSD immensely because they
changed my mind. In my job as a college professor, I see a lot of young
people who feel too acutely conscious: Some of them treat their condition
with illegal drugs.

Drugs are not a flight from external reality; they are a flight from
oneself. The use of drugs is about altering one's conscious state. If you
are happy with an unaltered conscious state and are doing drugs simply
because of peer pressure, you will, in all seriousness, never be a drug
addict. But if you hate who or what you are, if you hate the noise in your
head, then when you discover drugs you will feel like Columbus stumbling
over America.

In addition, teen-agers try drugs in a spirit of adventure and exploration,
as an expression of an urge to explore the boundaries of experience. That's
something that leads young people to take all sorts of risks and, in fact,
is an important function of adolescence. Our role as people trying to raise
kids is to help them try to survive the experimentation, not to prohibit it
completely.

One attraction of drugs is precisely that they are prohibited, which makes
their use an adventure, an expression of rebelliousness and thus independence.

Standing a uniformed police officer up in front of a classroom to teach
kids to say "no" very predictably has the effect of creating considerable
enthusiasm for drug abuse.

If you want to save kids who could eventually be addicts, you're going to
have to impress upon them that despite their pleasurable effects, drugs can
break their lives. In the long run they make the problems they seem to
ameliorate worse. And eventually, they kill or maim you.

The people most likely to be able to communicate these ideas effectively
are former drug users, adults who can speak honestly, realistically, and
with knowledge on the subject.

As Vince wrote in his essay, explaining why he didn't need the DARE program
to choose to stay drug free:

"My dad had very serious problems with drugs before he died and two of my
uncles have died from drugs."

Vince knows this because his mom and I, who survived what so many we loved
did not, believe it is our duty to tell our kids what we have seen and what
we have been through. It may not, in the long run, stop them. But it is our
best shot.

If DARE would actually educate in an interchange with kids rather than
merely subjecting them to propaganda, catechisms and loyalty pledges, it
would have a better chance of making a difference. If it would recognize
that children are capable of making their own choices, and that they will,
that would help, too. But as it stands now, it seems to have little hope of
influencing anyone in any meaningful way.