DARE REINVENTS ITSELF -- WITH HELP FROM ITS SOCIAL-SCIENTIST CRITICS

If anyone can deliver an antidrug message to teenagers with authority,it's
Officer Kevin Sayre. With his bulging chest, tanned and chiseled face, and
bleach-tipped crew cut, he could be the model for a DARE America action
figure. He runs through a lesson on "assertive behaviors" with a practiced
patter and a throaty Texas twang.

"Make eye contact."

"Speak with a firm voice."

"Use 'I' messages."

"Describe how you are thinking or feeling," he advises his audience,
glancing at the lesson plan in his hand. "Instead of saying, 'You are
stupid for drinking beer,' say, 'I don't want to drink because I don't
think it's a smart thing to do.'"

Then he leads the assembled through a role-playing scenario called "Hangin'
at Anthony's." One group proposes that "Trey" deflect Anthony's offer of a
beer by saying no thanks, he might have one later. "Is that responsible?"
Mr. Sayre quizzes the group. Realistic? Respectful? "How is that
respectful?" he bears in. "Is Trey being respectful of himself?"

At the back of the room, Richard Hawthorne, a drug-education-curriculum
expert at the University of Akron, has reason to be pleased. Mr. Sayre has
taken to heart his warning not to rely on yes-no answers, or rush through
the "three R's" of sound decision making like some rote checklist. But
whether his spiel is as impressive to adolescents remains to be seen.

As a veteran DARE instructor, Mr. Sayre has lectured before thousands of
children in Houston's elementary and middle schools. But today, in this
downtown Akron hotel, he's an eager novice again, taking his turn before a
small audience of fellow officers from around the country. DARE may offer
the most popular antidrug program on the planet, but this September it's
the DARE instructors who are going back to school.

DARE (which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education) America is beloved
by schools, police departments, parents, and politicians across the
country, but it has been far less appreciated by social scientists. For
most of the last decade, researchers in the drug-prevention field have been
arguing that DARE's core program produces no lasting reduction in
children's use of drugs, tobacco, or alcohol. The program's leaders have
disputed those findings in pugnacious and dismissive language, countering
with studies by less-eminent scholars who have been criticized for using
questionable methodologies.

But in a surprising turn, DARE has asked their critics to assist in a new
and costly effort to rehabilitate and evaluate the program. As the federal
agencies that helped finance DARE tightened their standards of
effectiveness, DARE offered its critics an unprecedented admission of failure.

"I'm not saying it was effective," Glenn Levant, DARE's founder and
president, said of his current curriculum when he announced its overhaul
last February. "But it was state of the art when we launched it. Now it's
time for science to improve upon what we're doing."

DARE's curriculum reflects mainstream theories about the best way to reduce
drinking, smoking, and drug use by children. By 1983, when the program
began as a collaboration between the Los Angeles Police Department and the
city's school district, scholars had long since rejected the assumption
that kids could be "scared straight."

Today most school-based prevention programs, including DARE, assume that
adolescents need grown-ups' help in resisting social pressures to use. So
they try to correct children's exaggerated beliefs about the prevalence of
drug use among their peers. They offer them information about the physical
and social effects of using. And they try to impart "resistance skills" for
making and acting on thoughtful decisions.

As the only prevention program relying on trained volunteers from local
police departments, DARE was inexpensive and instantly popular. Today, DARE
officers teach in 80 percent of U.S. school districts, reaching 36 million
children annually. Over the years, the program has tinkered with its
curriculum to take account of emerging knowledge. But as the dominant
player in its field, it could afford to ignore the naysayers.

"DARE was built on extensive research on smoking cessation," says Dennis
Rosenbaum, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at
Chicago, who has evaluated DARE and other prevention programs. "But the
problem is they tried to stuff too many things into a 17-week program."
Once the police-school-district partnership had adopted the fledgling
"social influence" curriculum, he says, "they began to isolate themselves
from feedback." At the same time, DARE brushed aside the concerns of
scholars that police officers might be ill-suited to delivering effective
drug education.

The trick to applied social science is translating experimental knowledge
into programs that work. By most accounts, the DARE program has failed to
clear that hurdle:

* In 1994, researchers from North Carolina's Triangle Research Institute
and the University of Kentucky reviewed the literature on DARE's
effectiveness and concluded that its grade-school curriculum had only
"limited immediate effects on students' drug use." Those results dismayed
DARE officials, who had expected the study to vindicate their claims, and
the U.S. Department of Justice, which had commissioned the review. After
the government refused to release the report, the authors published it in a
leading, peer-reviewed, public-health journal.

* In 1998, Mr. Rosenbaum and a colleague completed a six-year study of
nearly 1,800 Illinois children, some of whom had graduated from DARE's
grade-school curriculum. "DARE had no long-term effects on a wide range of
drug use measures," the scholars wrote, and "previously documented
short-term effects had dissipated by the conclusion of the study."

* In 1999, scholars at the University of Kentucky surveyed 1,000
20-year-olds and found no significant differences in drug use between those
who had participated in DARE in the sixth grade and those who had had other
prevention education.

In each case, scholars were taken aback by the ferocity of DARE's response.
The organization not only supported the Justice Department's decision to
reject the 1994 study, but urged the American Journal of Public Health not
to publish it.

In 1998, shortly after Mr. Rosenbaum released his study, he accused DARE of
misquoting his findings on its Web site to imply that he had declared it
effective in the long term. And in 1999, after the University of Kentucky
published its negative findings in a peer-reviewed journal of the American
Psychological Association, Mr. Levant publicly dismissed them as "voodoo
science" and charged, without evidence, that DARE's critics were biased by
their financial interest in prevention programs that compete with DARE.

"Anyone who raised questions about the efficacy of DARE was regarded as an
enemy," says Richard R. Clayton, a professor of prevention rapprochement
permanent. For one thing, no scholar who attended the 1998 tete-a-tetes is
serving on Ms. Sloboda's two advisory panels, and many say that they have
not been kept apprised of the new project.

And if DARE wants to reassure scholars that it now embraces social science,
it should take more care over its public comments. Charlie Parsons, a DARE
official known for his enthusiasm, promised the WebMD Web site last
February that "this largest-ever longitudinal study will show conclusively"
that the new program works. Mr. Parsons seems to have forgotten the first
rule of sound research: data first, results second.

The Rocky Road To Rapprochement

Since its inception, the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) America
program has had testy relations with scholars.

1983 DARE is started jointly by the Los Angeles Police Department and the
city's school district. William B. Hansen, then a researcher at the
University of Southern California, claims that DARE cribbed its program
from his own curriculum without his permission.

1994 At the behest of the U.S. Department of Justice, Susan T. Ennett and
colleagues at the Research Triangle Institute complete the first
comprehensive review of research on DARE's effects. But the department
disagrees with their conclusion that the program is ineffective and refuses
to release it. "I don't get it," says Glenn Levant, DARE's founder and
president. "It's like kicking Santa Claus. We're pure as the driven snow."
Ignoring DARE's protests, the American Journal of Public Health publishes
the study.

1998 Dennis Rosenbaum, a professor of criminal justice at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, publishes another long-term study with negative
findings. Later, at the urging of federal agencies that finance drug
education, he and other academic critics meet with DARE officials. Mr.
Rosenbaum charges that DARE's Web site mischaracterizes his study to imply
that its program is effective in the long term. DARE removes the quote by
lunchtime. At a second meeting, DARE officials admit the program should be
improved and ask the scholars for advice.

1999 Researchers at the University of Kentucky publish another negative,
long-term study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. "This
is directed, voodoo science," Mr. Levant replies. "I truly believe they are
setting out to find ways to attack our programs and are misusing science to
do it. The bottom line is that they don't want police officers to do the
work, because they want it for themselves."

2000 DARE announces a major overhaul and evaluation of its middle-school
curriculum, to be conducted by independent researchers at the University of
Akron. "I'm not saying it was effective," says Mr. Levant of his current
program. "But it was state of the art when we launched it. Now it's time
for science to improve upon what we're doing."