HEROIN DEATH RAISES QUESTIONS ON EDUCATION

Disturbing, depressing and darned near too sad for words, the death of
17-year-old Sean Gahagan raises all sorts of questions.

Heroin? Really? A bright, artistic boy with a recently minted Kamiak
High School diploma died last week after using heroin?

That's what detectives with the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office
suspect. In addition to the teen's death, The Herald reported Tuesday
that two of his friends were rushed to emergency rooms after they also
allegedly used heroin.

Where and how the teen may have obtained the highly addictive drug are
questions for others. What I wonder is this: Could anything have
prevented this waste of a precious young life?

It's too late for John Joseph Gahagan VI, the Mukilteo area boy known
as Sean. It's not too late for kids who haven't yet encountered drugs,
or for those who may already be using them.

Some will say it's a naive throwback to the just-say-no Reagan era,
but news of Gahagan's death had me thinking about Drug Abuse
Resistance Education. Remember the DARE program? The snazzy black cars
painted with the program's logo?

My older kids, now 21 and 25, went through DARE classes taught by
Everett police officers when they were in fifth grade. Sgt. Robert
Goetz, an Everett police spokesman, said Wednesday that the department
no longer offers DARE, and instead has school -resource officers in
high schools and middle schools.

Those police officers still speak with students, but their structured
drug-prevention classes are gone from Everett schools and most others
around Snohomish County.

Cheol Kang, a crime prevention officer with the Mukilteo Police
Department, said the department hasn't had a DARE program since the
1990s.

As I recall my kids' experiences with DARE, it was heavy on resisting
peer pressure. If you were looking for nuance -- including any message
that some illegal drugs were more deadly than others -- you didn't get
that from DARE.

The program's effectiveness has been challenged by a number of
studies. A 2002 article in the online magazine Salon cited a string of
academic and government studies and experts -- the U.S. surgeon
general, the General Accounting Office, the University of North
Carolina, and the National Academy of Sciences -- contending there was
little difference in later drug use between students who took DARE and
those who didn't.

And yet, we ought to do more than teach nothing.

The Lynnwood Police Department is one of the few in the region that
still has DARE. The program is offered to fifth- and sixth-graders in
elementary schools within the Lynnwood city limits, and to two private
schools. "It's been going for 22 years," Lynnwood police spokeswoman
Shannon Sessions said. The cost, she said, is the salary of one
full-time DARE officer, who works in schools nine months of the year
and is on patrol in the summer.

"Drugs and gangs are just a piece of it," Sessions said. "The DARE
officer is a special person, a positive representative of police in
general. It's someone who cares about them."

Alan Correa, Lynnwood's DARE officer, sees middle schoolers going
through the physical and emotional changes of pre-adolescence. "They
naturally want to experiment with things. There's also a natural
tendency to rebel against authority and their parents," Correa said.

"And times have changed," the 45-year-old Correa added. "When you and
I were growing up, we weren't barraged with videos, music and
magazines that glorify this stuff."

Correa believes the success of DARE boils down to the teacher. "It's
how that individual connects with kids," he said. "The bottom line,
you're always going to have straight-A type kids and kids who are
probably going to fail. We're targeting that middle area. We have a
chance to make a change."

Andy Muntz, Mukilteo School District spokesman, is frustrated that
attention turns toward schools when kids get into drugs.

"We try as best we can, but we're kind of limited in what we can do,"
he said. "We're not the parents. We can try to teach kids that drugs
are not good. We can counsel kids who get into drug problems. We
discipline kids who bring drugs on campus. But we're not the courts,
not the jail and not a detox center."

Maybe Sean Gahagan took a drug-prevention class. Would anything have
worked to save him? Sadly -- so sadly -- no one will ever be able to
ask him.

DARE? I don't know. Perhaps a better prevention tool is to show other
kids a stark headline: "Heroin blamed in teen's death."