DARE'S PROPAGANDA WON'T WORK WITH THINKING CHILDREN

I recently saw my 10-year-old stepson Vince "graduate" from the Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program - DARE for short. He sang "one-two- three
F-R-E-E" and "Talk It Out" and took a "solemn vow" to "say no to alcohol,
tobacco and illegal drugs, and yes to my own self-worth."

But I don't think he is, in the end, any less likely to use drugs than when
he began. What he has learned, if anything, is that the adults involved,
well-intentioned though they are, don't understand drugs or children.

Taught by police officers in 75 percent of the nation's school districts,
DARE is the dominant program for anti-drug education in this country. Its
red diagonal logo has become ubiquitous in schools, on cars, on T-shirts.

Born in Los Angeles in the era of Nancy Reagan and "Just say no," DARE has
had to weather a series of studies - including ones by the surgeon general
and the National Academy of Sciences - that suggest it is completely
ineffective.

As a recovering drug addict, I didn't need the studies. The DARE program -
as indicated by the materials that Vince brought home, the songs he and his
fifth-grade classmates sang at the graduation, the Web site and so on - has
only one idea of the cause of drug use: "peer pressure." And it has only
one approach to deal with it: screwing up your resolve to say "no." And it
has only one sort of person telling you how and why to do this: police
officers.

In response to the studies, DARE officials have unveiled a new version of
the program. Some of the studies seemed to indicate that DARE grads were
more likely to use drugs. Officials attribute this to DAREs supposed
emphasis on peer pressure, making drug use seem even more prevalent than it is.

So the new approach focuses on "social norms" and tries to show students
that they don't have to buckle under to a norm of drug abuse. Perhaps you
are thinking that this is exactly the "peer pressure" approach in slightly
more obscure words, and perhaps you are right.

So what's wrong with this approach? If you have ever been a serious drug
abuser, you understand. It's true that "peer pressure" can be the occasion
for people to try drugs. Certainly, if no one around you has any drugs, you
won't be trying them. And when your friends are doing drugs, it goes very
quickly from seeming impossible or worthless to seeming something like normal.

Drug abuse can also create a kind of small-group solidarity in which the
cool people who use drugs are opposed to the straights or cowards who do
not. But the situation is one of complicated inclusions and exclusions, of
membership and identification, of finding a cultural zone in which you feel
comfortable.

If you're happy in a cultural zone defined by police and what they want you
to do, then you don't have to worry about whatever pressure the freaks and
rappers might bring to bear on you. But it's not too much to say that few
teenagers with guts or creativity are so heavily identified with authority
that they aspire to police culture.

The cure provided for peer pressure by the DARE program is simply social
pressure from non-peers, and even on its own assumptions the strategy would
be workable only if "social norms" defined by teachers, administrators and
police officers operated more powerfully in the lives of young people than
the norms of the groups to which they actually belong. Any young person for
whom that is true is never going to be much of a drug abuser anyway.

One source of the peer pressure that the program tries to deal with is
popular culture, and Vince was subjected to a criticism of the various pop
icons he loves, such as Eminem. The people who designed the program might
think seriously for a moment about how effective a police officer is as a
rock critic. Even if the officer knows rock music, how influential would he
or she be in persuading fifth-graders not to listen to music liked by other
fifth-graders?

Implicit in the DARE program is a condescending view of young people,
according to which young people are incredibly easy to manipulate and are
constantly doing things they think are wrong because it seems cool or
Erninem is telling them to. This accounts for the program's diagnosis of
the causes of drug abuse and for its prescriptions.

The approach is exclusively slogans, posters, songs chanted in unison,
pledges of loyalty and so on. Really what this resembles is not education
on any reasonable account but the sort of indoctrination practiced by
authoritarian political regimes. Any self-respecting young person ought to
rebel against that sort of thing, and indeed Vince's final essay explaining
what he'd learned in DARE was titled "I Do Not Like the DARE Program."

As he put, it: "I think that some people (me, for example) like making
their own choices and don't like being told which way they should go or
what choice they should make."

The "peer pressure" approach to the explanation of drug abuse is generated
by people who really don't understand what drugs are for: The reason you do
drugs is because you like the way they make you feel.

Drugs are not a flight from external reality; they are a flight from
oneself. The use of drugs is about altering one's conscious state. If you
are happy with an unaltered conscious state and are doing drugs simply
because of peer pressure, you will never be a drug addict. But if you hate
who or what you are, if you hate the noise in your head, then when you
discover drugs you will feel like Columbus stumbling over America.

In addition, teenagers try drugs in a spirit of adventure and exploration,
as an expression of an urge to explore the boundaries of experience. That's
something that leads young people to take all sorts of risks and is an
important function of adolescence. Our role as people trying to raise kids
is to help them try to survive the experimentation, not to prohibit it
completely.

One attraction of drugs is precisely that they are prohibited, which makes
their use a adventure, an expression of rebelliousness and thus
independence. Standing a uniformed police officer in front of a classroom
to teach kids to say "no" very predictably has the effect of creating
considerable enthusiasm for drug abuse.

If you want to save kids who could eventually be addicts, impress upon them
that despite their pleasurable effects, drugs can break their lives. In the
long run they make the problems they seem to ameliorate worse. And
eventually, they kill or maim you.

The people most likely to be able to communicate these ideas effectively
are former drug users, adults who can speak honestly, realistically, and
with knowledge on the subject.

If the DARE program would actually educate in an interchange with kids
rather than merely subject them to propaganda, catechisms and loyalty
pledges, it would have a better chance of making a difference. If it would
recognize that children are capable making their own choices, and that they
will, that would help, too. But as it stands now, it seems to have little
hope of influencing anyone in any meaningful way.