SHERIFF'S RACE COULD HINGE ON SUPPORT FOR DRUG EDUCATION

Debate Flares Over DARE's Elimination

The race to become sheriff of one of Maryland's fastest-growing
counties might turn on a popular drug education program -- and whether
it does any good.

St. Mary's County Sheriff David D. Zylak (D) eliminated the Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program used to warn elementary school students
away from drugs two years ago, citing staffing shortages and questions
about its effectiveness. His opponent, Republican Tim Cameron, is
running on a platform of restoring DARE, saying parents want their
children to receive accurate information about drugs from trained
police officers.

But DARE, which began in the era of "Just Say No," has its critics.
Major studies began to question its effectiveness within a few years
of its 1983 launch. The U.S. surgeon general, the then-General
Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences and a host of
university professors came to the same conclusion: Young adults who
went through DARE as fifth-graders were just as likely to use drugs as
those who did not.

"Numerous well-designed evaluations and meta-analyses . . .
consistently show [DARE has] little or no deterrent effects on
substance use," the surgeon general's office wrote in 2001.

Advocates of the program take issue with the studies' methodologies
and cite personal testimonials by DARE participants who say the
lessons helped them.

Now the long-simmering fight over the future of how U.S. children are
taught about drugs has come to St. Mary's, a county rapidly developing
into an extension of the Washington suburbs. The population grew by 12
percent between 2000 and 2005.

Along with the growth, residents say, have come some big-city ills,
such as growing drug and gang problems. The county sheriff's office
recorded 689 drug-related arrests last year, up from 514 when Zylak
took office in 2003, and the value of drugs seized has risen from
$90,000 to $185,230. During that period, the sheriff reduced the
number of narcotics detectives from seven to four, citing the staffing
shortages that led to DARE's demise.

Nearly 80 percent of school systems nationwide use DARE, in which
police officers to teach 10 weekly sessions about the dangers of drug
use. When Zylak eliminated DARE in St. Mary's schools, the county
became one of three in Maryland without the program. About 100 of
Virginia's 134 jurisdictions use DARE.

"It's a case of misplaced priorities that a county with an emerging
drug problem is one of the only places in the state where you cannot
find drug education in school," said Cameron, the county public safety
director and a former sheriff's deputy.

But David J. Hanson, a prominent critic of DARE and professor emeritus
of sociology at the State University of New York at Potsdam, said
Cameron's belief in the program's benefit is common but misguided.

"All these police are out there proselytizing for DARE because they
believe they have something that is valuable even though it's not," he
said. "It may be that we want it to work so badly that we give it the
benefit of the doubt."

Some of the country's largest school systems, including those in the
District, Phoenix and Seattle, and dozens of smaller ones have
eliminated DARE programs. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is
expected to release results of a $15 million study of DARE's
effectiveness this year, a project whose results could fundamentally
change the program's methods.

"That will definitely tell us where we need to take the program in the
future," said Gene E. Ayers, DARE coordinator for the Virginia State
Police.

Some St. Mary's parents say they do not need a multimillion-dollar
survey to convince them that their children should be participating in
DARE, and they plan to vote against Zylak because of his decision to
cut the program.

"We've got this situation where the studies say it's not effective,
but everyone still loves it," Zylak said. "Clearly it's become an
issue in the campaign, but we eliminated the program because we didn't
have the manpower to staff a program that wasn't working."

DARE advocates generally play down the scientific studies questioning
the effectiveness of the program in favor of testimonials from parents
and former students who say it helped them make good decisions.

"I was at the county fair a couple of years ago, and a woman who was
probably 22 came running up to me and said, 'You were my DARE officer,
and you're the reason I didn't do drugs,' " said Mickey Bailey, a
former sheriff's deputy who taught drug education in St. Mary's
schools for 10 years. "That type of stuff happens all the time, and
that's what convinces me it's useful."

Mia Zimmerman, a former PTA president at Piney Point Elementary School
whose three children attend St. Mary's public schools, said the
program is crucial to children's development.

"It was so sad when they got rid of it because it brought so much to
the children," Zimmerman said. "It's information they're not able to
get anywhere else, and if you teach them at an early age, they'll soak
it in."

Zimmerman said she was elated to learn that voting for Cameron would
mean the return of the DARE program.

"I think that'll help him win over parents, definitely," she
said.

Cameron said it is clear to him that the community wants officers in
schools teaching kids about drugs. Hanson, the professor emeritus,
said Cameron is probably correct, adding that it would be unfortunate
if Zylak lost his job based on a decision that scientific research
rejects.

"Students love DARE, parents love it, and I've never met a school
principal who didn't love it," he said. "Everybody thinks it's
tremendously effective except the researchers who actually study it."

Bailey, who has retired from the sheriff's office and now teaches
criminal justice courses at a local high school, countered that
scientific evidence is unable to quantify a program's benefit to a
community.

"It was the type of job where you felt like you could make a
difference," he said. "On patrol you lock the same people up over and
over again. DARE was one of those rare things that was proactive
instead of reactive."