CENTER FAULTS PROGRESS OF DARE

Courses Don't Stop Student Drug Abuse

WASHINGTON - Sixty-one percent of U.S. high school-age teens and 40 percent
of middle school-age children say drugs are used, kept and sold in their
schools, according to a survey released Wednesday by the National Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse.

The center, a nonprofit institute associated with Columbia University in
New York, also says. neither of the two most popular American systems for
controlling drug abuse by school-age children works very well. The most
popular, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, shows "little evidence ... of any
extended impact," the center concluded Another frequently used approach,
based on harsh penalties for even minor drug abuse, often discourages
students from turning in substance abusers.

The center says the report is the "first comprehensive analysis of all
available data on substance use in our schools and among our students."

The center, headed by Joseph Califano, who was secretary of health,
education and welfare under President Carter, says the amount of reported
drug use among teens nationwide generally has stayed the same or declined
in recent years, except for some new drugs such as Ecstasy. But Califano
said drug abuse would decline more sharply if parents stopped leaving the
problem to school-sponsored programs such as DARE and involved themselves
more deeply.

"Parents raise hell and refuse to send their kids to classrooms infested
with asbestos," Califano said at a news conference. "Yet every day they
ship their children off to schools riddled with illegal drugs.".

The center's survey, "Malignant Neglect: Substance Abuse and America's
Schools," is based on 10,000 random telephone interviews nationwide with
parents, teachers and students, coupled with reviews of outside research on
the effectiveness of conventional drug abuse-education programs.

"Drug Free School Zone" laws are prominent among those antiabuse efforts.
Many state legislatures passed such laws in the 1980s, which make
punishment extra-severe for drug dealing within 1,000 feet of a school.
Their effectiveness is "not clear," the center's report concluded. It cites
a Boston University School of Public Health study of three Massachusetts
cities that found 80 percent of drug cases occurred inside drug-free school
zones, although most occurred after school hours.

Zero-tolerance policies in schools, which require stiff penalties even for
minor drug offenses, don't work well either, the center found. The tough
penalties discourage students from turning in their drug-abusing peers.
Those expelled for drug abuse often wind up on the streets or in
alternative schools where drugs are plentiful.

The most widely employed antiabuse initiative is DARE, which is taught by
local police officers, to students from fourth grade through junior high
school. About 80 percent of the schools in the country use DARE, the
organization's president, Glenn Levant, said in a telephone interview from
his Los Angeles office.

The center's report cites two widely reported outside studies that give
DARE a low success rate. One, published in the journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology in 1999, found no differences 10 years later between
students who had and had not taken the courses. Another, which appeared in
the American Journal of Public Health in 1994, challenged the effectiveness
of DARE's concept.