TIME FOR NEW TACK WAR ON DRUGS

The nation's most popular anti-drug education program is making a
change. After 18 years in which it has spread to about 75% of the
nation's schools, DARE is moving in a different direction. It will
attempt to reach students in grades seven and nine through group
discussions about drug-abuse issues, moving away from the lecture
format currently used in the fifth and sixth grades.

According to DARE America, the new curriculum will provide
seventh-graders with "the skills to make positive, quality-of-life
decisions" and focus on "the conditions leading up to violent
behavior, how to identify potentially violent situations, and some
basic ways to avoid or defuse such situations." DARE says "the skills
learned in the program will be reinforced in other curricular areas
and in subsequent years with a second program in the ninth grade."

The new program will be tested in six cities and evaluated by the
University of Akron over a five-year period.

DARE is making the change for two reasons. First, according to a
press release on its web site (www.dare.com), it is hoping to branch
out, taking advantage of a $13.7 million grant to the University of
Akron from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton.

The second and more telling reason is that it had no choice. Mounting
evidence of the program's ineffectiveness had it on the defensive and
the federal government told schools they no longer would be able to
use cash distributed by the Department of Education's safe and
drug-free schools office on DARE. The department, according to the
New York Times, "did not consider it scientifically proven."

DARE was created in 1983 by then-Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates
and as grown over the last 18 years into a program that serves more
than half of all US school districts. DARE puts uniformed police
officers into fifth-grade classrooms for an hour a week for 17 weeks
to teach students how to resist drugs. Students are required to sign
a pledge that they will "keep their body free from drugs."

DARE does remain popular. But popularity does not necessarily mean
the program is worthwhile. It's not that DARE doesn't work. It's
that, after 18 years, we still aren't sure -- even though we've spent
millions on the program across the country since it was first
instituted.

Dozens of evaluations have been done, many cited by DARE America as
proving the program's effectiveness and many others questioning it,
but the fact remains that no scientific study has discovered a
statistically significant difference in drug-use rates between
students who had taken DARE and those who had not. According to the
Times, "one six-year study by the University of Illinois found that
the program's effects were off by senior year of high school; in
fact, it detected some increased drug use by suburban high school
students who had taken the program. And a 10-year study by the
University of Kentucky found the DARE program had no effect on
students by the time they were 20 years old."

And that's the key piece of the puzzle. Without that scientific
support, all we have is conjecture. And conjecture is just not enough
to warrant the money and classroom time spent on the program.

DARE does offer some benefit. By having younger students interact
with officers, it takes away some of the adversarial relationship
that can grow as students grow into teen-agers. However, schools do
not need the DARE program to accomplish that goal. Officers can be
brought into schools to teach students about safety, about riding
bicycles, obeying traffic rules and resisting strangers. And they can
offer some guidance on the dangers of drugs.

But spending the kind of money and class time on a program that has
no proven benefit is problematic.

That's the reason Mayor Ross C. Anderson of Salt Lake City, Utah,
decided recently to pull money from the program. He told the Times
last year the program was "a complete fraud on the American people,
and has actually done a lot of harm by preventing the implementation
of more effective programs."

He said he based his decision on several studies showing that kids
exposed to DARE were no less likely to use drugs later in life than
children who did not take DARE. He told the Times "all the
peer-reviewed research shows that DARE is a complete waste of money
and, even worse, fritters away the opportunity to implement a good
drug-prevention program in schools."

Salt Lake City is not the first, nor is it the largest city, to cut
off DARE funding. Oakland, Calif., and Fayetteville, N.C., both
pulled the plug on the program after determining that it was not
doing what it advertised. And other towns have recommended changes in
the DARE curriculum.

The curriculum changes and the study are meant to address these
concerns, the Times said, addressing criticism that the program was
simplistic and that some research "suggested that the DARE program
occasionally encourages drug use, by making it seem more prevalent
than it is."

"Our feeling was, after looking at the prevention movement, we were
not having enough of an impact," Herbert D. Kleber, the head of
DARE's scientific advisory panel who is also medical director of the
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University, told the Times. "There was a marked rise in drug use. Our
job was to answer the question, how can we make it better?"

The changes will focus on changing "social norms" among students,
making it less acceptable to use drugs. It also will change how
police officers are used, the Times said, "having them serve more as
coaches than as lecturers. The officers are to encourage students to
challenge the social norms in discussion groups; the intended result
is that the students will conclude on their own that they do not need
to use drugs to fit in." There also will be more role-playing and
discussions.

While these are positive changes in the program, they still rely to
some degree on an anti-drug model that focuses on law enforcement
rather than public health. Police officers will remain the primary
teachers under the new curriculum, even though the proposals are
designed to soften their impact.

What we need is a change in direction, a move away from prohibition
and police work toward health-related concerns. That means making it
easier for addicts to gain help, decriminalizing some drugs and
legalizing others. It means treating the people who use drugs as if
they were sick, and not as if they were Public Enemy No. 1.