DARE STUDENTS TAKE THEIR MESSAGE TO DETENTION CENTRE

SAINT JOHN - Grade 7 students of the city's north end schools have
some vivid imagination when it comes to depicting what can go wrong
for teenagers using drugs and alcohol.

Sgt. David Arsenault has been using this technique with students for
his DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) for seven years now, but
this time he has decided to place their posters in the hallway of the
detention centre at the City Hall perchance they strike a cord with
the visitors of the facility.

He said he tells the students to pretend they see in their dream
something bad is going to happen to someone they care about and how
they would want to warn them about it.

The sketches are drawn on regular notebook papers in black and white
or in colour. One student has drawn a highway going in opposite
directions with 'life' written on one side and 'drugs' on the other.

Another shows a stretcher in front of a hospital's emergency
department, while still another shows a girlfriend crying outside the
emergency room. One sketch shows a husband and wife in wedding attire
with a huge chasm between them as if they have been cut apart. Another
poster has a big E (ecstasy) on one side of the paper and jail bars on
the other side.

One poster has a big zero and at the bottom it says "Zero IQ if you
smoke weed."

There is one with just a tricycle and no child around to show the
child may have been hit by a drunk driver's vehicle. Another poster
has $100 drugs on one half of the paper and $10 food on the other
half. One other poster has a boy and a girl walking hand in hand on
the top of the page and a coffin at the bottom.

A poster puts the problem in simple mathematical terms: alcohol drugs
death.

Arsenault said the DARE program is offered one period a week for 11
weeks for Grade 5 students and 10 weeks for Grade 7 students. The
course focuses on consequences of using drugs.

The program teaches the students decision-making skills so they can
identify a problem, and choose a responsible course after looking at
the choices in front of them. It asks them, for example, to think what
they would do if they were offered drugs at a teen dance, he said.