DARE CHECKS INTO REHAB

A New Strategy For The Popular Anti-Drug Program

For more than a decade, Salt Lake City schools did as other schools did:
they taught kids about drugs the DARE way. There were cops in the
classroom, DARE T shirts and bumper stickers and the message "Just say no."
But last summer, Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson lambasted DARE (Drug Abuse
Resistance Education) as "completely ineffective," canned the city's budget
for it and booted it out of the schools. DARE "has been a complete waste of
money, a fraud on the American people," he says. "We should put our
resources behind programs that work."

It was one of the boldest strikes yet against the nation's most popular
drug-prevention program. Over the last decade, studies have repeatedly
shown that the simplistic message of the $226 million program has little
effect on keeping kids from abusing drugs--yet it continues to be used by
80 percent of schools. Now DARE is finally admitting it needs an overhaul.
Last week officials announced they will be revamping the program, with the
help of $13.7 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The new
DARE, to be launched in seventh and ninth grades in six cities this fall,
will reduce the lecturing role of local cops and involve the kids in a more
active way. "If someone can tell us a better way to do good, we do it,"
says DARE's Glenn Levant.

DARE was launched in 1983, trying "to do good" with a staunch abstinence
message that continues to have broad appeal among teachers, parents and
kids. At North School elementary in Villa Park, Ill., DARE Officer Bob
Budig gets high marks from fifth grader Jessica Ritter. "It felt really
good to know I was a DARE graduate and would be drug-free forever," she says.

But researchers have found that while DARE may feel good, it doesn't do
good: kids who go through the program in elementary school are just as
likely to use drugs later as kids who don't. One of the key flaws, says
Jerry Elsner of the Illinois State Crime Commission, is students are taught
that all drugs are equally dangerous. When kids find out that's not true,
it undercuts the message. "Kids are too smart," he says. "They want to be
told straight up there's a difference between marijuana and heroin."
Critics also say that using police, the ultimate symbol of authority, is
precisely what many kids rebel against.

The criticisms have gotten so bad that DARE was almost killed off by its
own advisory board. It has opted instead for a redesign. The new curriculum
will attack kids' false perception that their peers are doing drugs more
than they are. (Overall, teen drug use is steady or down slightly.) They'll
be told the real statistics--to help support the large number of
abstainers. And the program will show brain scans after drug use to hammer
home the harm. It will also shift cops to more of a coaching role and have
kids engage in role-playing about peer pressure.

But even a rehabbed DARE has many critics, who say the basic approach is
still flawed. And the new program is going only into some schools; lots of
kids will continue in the old DARE. Lost in the controversy are other
lauded but underused programs, some of which go beyond the anti-drug
message and teach basic social skills. But even the best program may not be
enough. "This isn't a war we're ever going to win," says Lloyd Johnston of
the University of Michigan. "It's a struggle we're going to contain."