DARE NEEDED TO ADMIT ITS FLAWS

After months of criticism, here and elsewhere, the people who head the DARE
program nationwide have admitted their program is a failure. Last week,
officials of the program, whose acronym stands for Drug Abuse Resistance
Education, said they are coming up with a revamped program - one they have
been working on for two years.

This raises several questions, not the least of which is why DARE's leaders
strongly defended it against recent criticisms when they apparently knew at
least some of the complaints were true. For two years they have been
working quietly on changes based on evidence that DARE wasn't working, yet
they were happy to continue accepting taxpayer money from school
districts. Not only that, they often impugned the motives of their
critics, attacking them as hiding an agenda to legalize drugs.

Recently studies by the National Academy of Sciences and the surgeon
general have shown the program to be flawed. Not the program's critics,
including Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson, who last year withdrew support
from DARE in the Salt Lake School District, have gained a good measure of
credibility.

- - - The Deseret News, Salt Lake City