THE PROBLEM WITH 'DARE' IS THAT IT DOESN'T WORK

The Popular, Widespread, School Anti-Drug Program Is Still Promoted
Despite Scientific Evidence It's A Failure

In November 2000, a 43-year-old man on Vancouver Island died from an
overdose of heroin.

Certainly not unusual, especially in British Columbia, you might say.
But two things made this case unique: One, the man, Barry Schneider,
was a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer. And two, he was a top
official with DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the popular,
RCMP-run, school-based drug prevention program.

Schneider's death was certainly an irony, and a tragedy. But there is
a continuing tragedy here, and it's that DARE continues to live.

After all, scientific evidence overwhelmingly confirms that DARE is
useless -- or worse than useless. Yet while certain interests,
including the RCMP, continue to attack harm reduction measures like
Vancouver's supervised injection facility despite its scientifically
proven benefits, DARE continues to fly below the radar, gradually
insinuating itself into more and more school districts despite its
lack of effectiveness.

Developed by former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates and the Los
Angeles Unified School District in 1983, DARE sends specially trained
police officers into schools to inform kids about the dangers of drugs
and to help them develop self-esteem and the confidence to resist peer
pressure to use drugs.

The program quickly became a hit after its inception and now is by far
the world's most popular drug prevention program, taught in at least
54 countries worldwide and reaching more than 35 million students each
year. As a testament to its popularity, the British Columbia RCMP says
on its website that DARE "is one of the most requested programs and
appears to be very successful."

But appearances can be deceiving, and none more so than the appearance
of DARE. According to the scientific evidence, countries receive
nothing of value -- and kids learn nothing of value -- for the
millions of dollars they've spent on the program.

To date, more than 30 studies of DARE have been conducted, and
virtually all have found the program has no effect on drug use. (The
few studies that have found an effect, including one by the Illinois
Police Department, discovered that kids who participated in the
program were actually more likely to use drugs than those with no
exposure to DARE.)

This is not news. Within 10 years of DARE's inception, scientific
studies attested to its ineffectiveness, yet the program still spread
across the United States like a virus.

In a study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 1994
- -- against the wishes of DARE officials, who tried to prevent the
study's publication -- scientists with the Research Triangle Institute
in North Carolina looked at 18 early studies and performed a
"meta-analysis" on the eight most rigorous reports, including one from
the B.C. solicitor-general.

They discovered that DARE had no statistically significant effect on
drug use or self-esteem, precisely the two factors the program was
intended to affect. Children who had participated in DARE did have
greater knowledge of drugs, but that means only that it helped make
them informed consumers if they chose to use alcohol or illicit substances.

In light of this, the authors concluded that "DARE could be taking the
place of other, more beneficial drug use curricula that adolescents
could be receiving."

One weakness of this meta-analysis was that since it examined studies
completed during the early days of DARE, it looked only at the
attitudes and behaviours of kids shortly after they completed the
program rather than assessing its long-term effects. The authors
therefore called for longitudinal studies, and some years later, their
calls were answered.

A widely reported 1998 study led by criminologist Dennis Rosenbaum
tracked more than 1,000 DARE students for six years and found the
program had no significant impact on drug use. Even worse, Rosenbaum
reported that suburban DARE students had significantly higher rates of
drug use than suburban students with no exposure to the program.

Similarly, a study by University of Kentucky psychologist Don Lyman
followed more than 1,000 students for 10 years -- from the time they
participated in DARE until they were 20-year-olds. Lyman found what
just about everyone else has -- that DARE had no effect on drug use
behaviour or attitude toward drugs.

Since the Rosenbaum/Lyman reports, other studies have replicated their
findings, and the responses of DARE officials have always been the
same. Chief among these rejoinders is the claim that the studies are
invalid because DARE has been improved in light of new social
scientific evidence, and the studies only addressed the effects of the
"old" DARE.

Now, I'm all for improving drug prevention programs on the basis of
the evidence, but every rejigging of DARE has failed to make a
difference. The changes have therefore functioned largely as an excuse
for DARE officials to ignore the scientific evidence rather than as a
way of making a failed program successful.

And DARE's tactics, if not the program itself, are evidently
successful since the United States -- which originated the program and
in which it remains enormously popular -- took a long time to come
around. But it appears that the weight of evidence against DARE has
finally convinced government agencies to disavow the program.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Education prohibited schools from
using federal funds on DARE; since then, the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences, the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. General Accounting
Office have all condemned the program. Consequentially, many U.S.
school boards have recently begun dropping DARE.

Despite the U.S. government's disastrous drug policies -- the country
still holds a National DARE Day, "blessed" by President George W.
Bush, which this year fell on April 12 instead of the more appropriate
April 1 -- the Americans are still light-years ahead of Canada, which
continues to support DARE.

There are many reasons for this, chief among them ignorance: Many
teachers and parents seem unaware of the scientific evidence. They
can't really be blamed for that but, astonishingly, Gary Bass, the new
commanding officer for the RCMP in B.C., recently visited The
Vancouver Sun's editorial board and said, after expressing his support
for evidence-based policy, that there have been only "one or two
studies" on DARE.

When I informed him of the dozens of studies, he repeated his claim,
and then finally conceded that he had seen only one or two studies.
Ignorance really is bliss, I suppose.

But ignorance won't help kids to make responsible choices regarding
drugs --that requires knowledge. So it's time for those who are
genuinely interested in addressing drug addiction to drop their
opposition to the supervised injection site and to support what works.
And that certainly isn't DARE.