DARE RETHINKS DURG PREVENTION

DARE, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, took its first step
toward recovery on Feb. 14 -- it admitted it had a problem.

Eighteen years after its inception, DARE finally acknowledged what study
after peer-reviewed study has found: Despite expending $700 million per
year, the DARE program has not helped reduce teen drug use. In fact,
according to the latest government study, teen drug use has risen since
1990 and remains stable at record-high levels.

As the rate of high school graduates reporting illegal drug use has swelled
to 54 percent, DARE has been hostile toward negative findings of its
efficacy. In 1994, a federally funded Research Triangle Institute study
found that DARE had no significant effect on illegal drug use compared to
schools that offered no drug education.

When a California Department of Education study concluded that DARE and
other programs may actually harm children, the 1995 findings were buried by
the state education agency and not made public until 1997, when the
prestigious Education Evaluation and Policy Review Journal published them.

In 1998, after completing a six year study of the program, the University
of Illinois at Chicago reported DARE had no long-term positive effects, did
not prevent drug use and may actually produce graduates who use drugs more
than their peers who did not participate in the program.

The American Psychological Association piled on in 1999, when it published
a study that found "no reliable short-term, long-term, early adolescent or
young adult positive outcomes associated with receiving the DARE intervention."

DARE claimed each study was flawed and attempted to discredit its critics,
but the program's fenders began to listen. Last year, the U.S. Department
of Education restricted schools from spending money on DARE because the
program could not illustrate its effectiveness. Some communities, like Salt
Lake City, dispensed with DARE altogether.

Publicly, DARE continued to promote itself as a successful drug prevention
program, and it was eventually adopted in 80 percent of America's schools
and fifty-four other countries. Behind the scenes, DARE was quietly
evaluating its program to determine how it might be improved and how to
rebuild its crumbling base of support. Two months after the surgeon general
and the National Academy of Sciences issued reports declaring the DARE
approach ineffective, the program finally acknowledged the need for some
changes.

In an attempt to cure DARE's ills, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will
spend $13.7 million to implement and study a revamped curriculum. Fifty
thousand students from 256 schools in six cities will participate in the study.

In this trial phase, DARE will shift its focus from elementary school
children to middle and high school youth. The core curriculum will be
reduced from seventeen weeks in the fifth grade to ten weeks in the seventh
grade plus a follow-up program in ninth grade. Uniformed police officers
will continue to act as educators for the DARE program, but they will
restyle their delivery to emphasize work groups and role-playing among
students rather than lecturing from the front of the classroom.

The revamping of DARE's curriculum is a powerful sign that reality can, on
occasion, reassert itself over bad policy in the drug war. However, critics
doubt the significance of the changes.

The curriculum is still based on the oversimplified "Just Say No" message.
The program fails to address students' home lives, one of the strongest
indicators of drug use. Uniformed police are not professional educators,
they are symbols of authority. Their presence in the classroom may even
encourage the natural tendency of teens to rebel, particularly in those
communities where the trust between police and citizens is strained due to
institutionalized policies such as racial profiling. And the huge cash
investment required for such a brief intervention seems unlikely to return
results.

The efficacy of DARE's new curriculum is unknown. DARE and the University
of Akron will evaluate the effectiveness of the retooled program over the
next five years. Self-evaluation is a start, but peer-reviewed research by
independent entities should be conducted to assure parents, educators and
taxpayers that the program is delivering on its promise to reduce drug use.

Unfortunately, DARE's history of hostility toward critics and resistance to
change creates the possibility that America could waste more millions of
dollars and inadequately educate millions more children if DARE does not
deliver. Further, during this trial phase, the majority of schools will
continue with the original unproven curriculum.

Rather than expend limited drug prevention dollars revising a program that
is a proven failure, it would make more sense to invest in existing drug
prevention models that have proven successful. The most effective
drug-prevention strategies include alternative activity programs that keep
kids busy after school, the hours of highest delinquency. Participants of
the Big Brother/Big Sister program are 46 percent less likely than their
peers to start using illegal drugs, and 27 percent less likely to start
using alcohol.

Another vital approach to redirecting those kids who are most at risk is
keeping them in school rather than expelling and abandoning them when they
do get into trouble with drugs. Drug treatment should be available upon
request. Treatment is ten times more cost effective than interdiction in
reducing the use of drugs. Most importantly, we should keep families
together by providing alternatives to incarceration for non-violent drug
offenders. Youth who live in families where one parent is absent are twice
as likely as their peers to be incarcerated sometime during their lives.

It is time to rethink our overall policy of drug education and drug
prevention. In America's 12-step program toward recovery, we have taken the
first and most difficult step -- we have admitted that DARE, the country's
core drug education program, has a problem. Now, let us finish the job for
our nation's families.