EDUCATORS REASSESSING DARE CURRICULUM

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Today, we're going to take a look at drug use
among children and a popular school program designed to curb it.

DARE, short for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, is now taught in more than
three-quarters of the nation's schools. But leaders of the program admit
it's not working. So it's back to the drawing board.

And joining me to talk about this is Nancy Kaufman, the vice president of
the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The program is funding a new abuse
prevention curriculum.

Hi, Nancy.

NANCY KAUFMAN, ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON FOUNDATION: Good morning, Kyra.

PHILLIPS: All right, leaders have acknowledged that the program hasn't
worked. There's also been reports and criticism that DARE has actually
encouraged drug use among our children. What went wrong?

KAUFMAN: Well, we know now what we know about many, many prevention
programs that we've been using over the past 10 to 15 years in this
country, and that is that they're just not as effective as they could
possibly be. It's not just DARE. It's many other programs as well. But the
good news is that we now have newer prevention technology, and that's why
we're really setting off on this new venture with DARE to see if we can't
really improve the types of prevention programs that young people receive,
and hopefully, you know, prevent some pretty serious substance problems
from arising among our teenagers.

PHILLIPS: Well, let's talk about the state-of-the-art abuse prevention
idea, the new curriculum. Give me some examples. Tell me what kind of
changes we're talking about.

KAUFMAN: We're really going to be focusing on having the kids very much in
a more interactive mode in the classroom. If you walk into the new DARE
classroom, you're not going to see kids sitting behind desks being lectured
by a police officer up front. Instead what you're going to be taking a look
at is small groups of young people working on projects together in
self-corrected study. And they'll be taking a look at some of the
consequences of using these drugs, some of the new information we have
about how these drugs affect the brain, for example.

They're also going to be practicing what we call "peer refusal skills." You
know, what do you do in A kind of difficult situation when people are
offering you these drugs? And I think even more importantly, we now know
that young people grossly overestimate the number of their peers who
actually use these substances. It creates kind of a false peer pressure, we
call it, and so what we're trying to do is actually feed back the real
numbers to young people. And they'll find out that the great majority of
kids their age don't use these drugs and they're not going to be alone
anymore if they want to take a different path.

PHILLIPS: All right. Kids can hear about the numbers. They can sit through
a lecture. They can have interaction exercises. But don't you think it --
what really hits kids are real-life tragedies: a friend who dies, OD's? I
just remember that being so effective. I mean, has it come to the point
where that's kind of the only thing that's really going to work or hit home?

KAUFMAN: Well, that's certainly part of the wake-up call, if you want to
call it that. I know in our suburban, pretty affluent community we had a
heroin death in a young woman who no one would have guessed would have been
using that drug. And these kinds of things are the wake-up call. But that's
just not enough.

We know now that you really need some very strong school-based curriculum
that's focused on refusal skills and kids exploring the consequences of
use. We also need to have parent involvement. And lastly and I think most
importantly, we need the community to stand behind the kids and send the
right kind of messages to young people about these drugs.

PHILLIPS: What about changing social norms? Let's talk about that.

KAUFMAN: Well, that's very important. You know, young people are bombarded
with all kinds of messages these days: messages from the media, messages
from peers, messages from how their parents behave in the community. And we
really need to change that as well as let kids know that there are
different paths they can take and different choices they can make.

PHILLIPS: How do you change that, though, because it -- drugs and drinking,
even sex under age, all that seems so normal and so accepted nowadays? How
do you kind of stop the domino effect?

KAUFMAN: Well, we know that quite a few young people experiment with some
of these drugs once. What we want to do is delay that until they're much
older if they're going to do it at all. Of course, we wish they wouldn't,
but it happens. And so the older a young person is when they begin some of
that, the better off they are, the more reasoned they are.

We also want young people to take charge of their own lives. And that's
what we're calling the new DARE curriculum, because they have to make the
decisions for themselves. They have to be in charge. They are, in essence,
the masters of their own destinies.

And we want young people to come fully armed and prepared with knowledge.
And also, there are a lot of kids out there today that just don't want to
drink, just don't want to smoke. And I think often they feel pressured to
do that.

So we're going to be teaching them the skills that you need, the rehearsal
kind of things that you can go through to help them through those difficult
situations when they really want to take a stand but might be a little shy
about it.

PHILLIPS: Nancy Kaufman, we look forward to following the new curriculum
and seeing how well it works. Thanks for being with us.

KAUFMAN: Thanks so much for inviting me.