ANTIDRUG PROGRAM SAYS IT WILL ADOPT A NEW STRATEGY

In a striking shift, leaders of the nation's most widely used program to
discourage drug use among schoolchildren have acknowledged that their
strategy has not had sufficient impact and say they are developing a new
approach to spreading their message.

DARE - for Drug Abuse Resistance Education - has grown so rapidly since its
founding 18 years ago that it is now taught in 75 percent of school
districts nationwide and in 54 other countries.

Police officers who teach the program have become central figures in the
lives of elementary school students, and the program's red logo has taken
on iconic status on T-shirts and bumper stickers in thousands of communities.

But with its efforts drawing increasing criticism that they don't work,
DARE officials and independent researchers have quietly worked for two
years to develop a new curriculum and plan to introduce it in Washington
today. The new program is aimed at older students than the current one and
relies more on having them question their assumptions about drug use than
on listening to lectures on the subject. Controlled studies of about 50,000
students will begin in six cities and their suburbs, including New York, in
the fall.

DARE has long dismissed criticism of its approach as flawed or the work of
groups that favor decriminalization of drug use.

But the body of research had grown to the point that the organization could
no longer ignore it. In the the past two months alone, both the surgeon
general and the National Academy of Sciences have issued reports saying
that DARE's approach is ineffective; several cities, most recently Salt
Lake City, have stopped using the program.

DARE is also responding to a new hardnosed mentality among federal
education officials, who distribute about $500 million in drug prevention
grants each year. Starting last year, the Department of Education said it
would no longer let schools spend money from its office of safe and
drug-free schools on DARE because department officials did not consider it
scientifically proven. The new curriculum buys the program time to prove
that it does work.

The revisions also reflect a shift in efforts to dissuade children from
using drugs. Founded by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1983, the DARE
program was infused with the spirit of then-First Lady Nancy Reagan's "Just
Say No" approach.

The new strategy reflects research that criticized that approach as
simplistic, and some other research that 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," said 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. "There was
a marked rise in drug use. Our job was to answer the question, how can we
make it better?"

The DARE approach has been a mix of different messages about drug abuse and
violence, but at its core it involves police officers visiting elementary
schools to tell students the dangers of drugs and the importance of
self-esteem, and offering them different ways to say "No."

More than 30 studies have been conducted of the DARE program, and the two
most frequently cited studies both reached the same conclusion: Any effect
the program has in deterring drug use disappears as students enter senior
year of high school or college.

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.

"There's quite a bit we can do to make it better and we realize that," said
Glenn Levant, president and founding director of DARE America, based in Los
Angeles. "I'm not saying it was effective, but it was state of the art when
we launched it. Now it's time for science to improve upon what we're doing."

The new DARE program is being developed at the University of Akron in Ohio
by Zili Sloboda, who as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse
wrote a list of principles to guide drug-prevention programs. The program's
development is underwritten by a $13.7 million grant from the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy devoted to health care.

The new program will work largely on changing what are known as "social
norms" among students. The idea, which has been shown in limited studies to
reduce drinking on college campuses, is that traditional prevention
programs may lead students to overestimate how many of their peers use
drugs. Because teenagers are so open to peer influence, the students then
begin to aspire to that "norm" and think they must use drugs to fit in.

DARE's focus will shift from its current audience of fifth-grade students
to those in the seventh grade, and will add a booster program in ninth
grade, because students in the higher grades are more likely to experiment
with drugs.

The new program also changes how police officers are used, 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.

Students are also to do more role-playing, with an emphasis on how to make
decisions, and to discuss the effects of media and advertising.

Dr. Sloboda said that, as head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she
had been concerned that DARE was not a proven program. But, she and others
emphasized, it is far from the only program that does not work - it has
simply drawn the most criticism because it is the largest.

Indeed, DARE has enjoyed broad support, from Congress to local school
boards and newspapers. It gets about $1.7 million from the Department of
Justice; $215 million in indirect benefits from police departments that pay
the salaries of the officers; and about $15 million in corporate support.
An industry has developed around the program and the sale of T-shirts,
bumper stickers and textbooks; DARE affinity credit cards are even available.

The new program took seed in 1999, when the departments of Education and
Justice, tired of the warring between researchers and DARE, brought the two
sides together at meetings in Washington.

At the same time, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was looking for a drug
prevention program to finance. DARE had the network in schools, but a
program that the foundation said was less than effective. Other researchers
had promising strategies but no access into schools.

"There's a gap between what we know and what we practice," said Nancy J.
Kaufman, vice president of the foundation. "We knew we had better
prevention technology that was not being applied, we knew there was this
increase in drug use among young people, and we said, 'You know what, we
think we can change this. Let's stop the rhetoric and fighting and see if
we can't craft something better.' "

DARE was open to change.

"Neither the message nor the messenger was sacred," said William F. Alden,
a former deputy director of DARE. "Only the mission was."

The cities tentatively selected to feature the new program are New York,
Baltimore, Houston, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The new
curriculum, Dr. Sloboda said, will be tested in 80 high schools and the 176
middle schools that feed them - half the schools will continue using the
curriculum they do now, including the old DARE program in some cases, and
the other half will use the new DARE program.

Students will be surveyed before and after seventh and ninth grade, and
inte rviewed more extensively after eighth, tenth, and eleventh grade.

"We'd like to see them never use drugs, but realistically, people
understand that for a great number of adolescents, they might try something
at least once," Ms. Kaufman said. "The later you can have them do that, the
older they are, and hopefully they will decide not to. With age comes reason."