BLOWING SMOKE

There Is An Easy Answer To Why Children Are Ignoring Schools' Anti-drug Efforts

Taxpayers are spending millions of dollars to stop youngsters from drinking
and taking drugs. So why do so many still do it?

The numbers may be down from the heights of the 1970s, but they are still
alarming: Half the high school students surveyed in Massachusetts last year
said they drank alcohol in the past month, a third used marijuana. Almost
10 percent tried cocaine. The state has the largest percentage of teenagers
addicted to drugs and alcohol in the country.

The anti-abuse message has been widely ignored despite nearly $30 million
in state and federal money being spent last year on programs designed to
prevent drug and alcohol abuse among Massachusetts youths. There is a
full-time drug czar in the governor's office. Nationally, the federal
government last year poured $560 million into prevention programs. And
creating an effective anti-drug program is no mystery; specialists in the
prevention field say they know what works.

So what are we doing wrong? It's what we are not doing right. The programs
proven most effective are being largely ignored, as schools pursue other
approaches - such as the widely used, police-led DARE curriculum - that
many specialists deem ineffective.

The result, say those who have studied the problem, is a missed
opportunity, with lasting consequences.

''Criticizing DARE is like going after motherhood or apple pie,'' says
Lloyd Johnston, the head researcher of the Monitoring the Future study, a
federally financed study at the Michigan Survey Research Center that since
1975 has followed drug and alcohol use around the nation. ''A number of
rigorous scientific studies show no lasting drug prevention effects from it
at all. The real cost is the opportunity cost. Parents and school boards
think they are doing something when they're not, so a lot of kids pass
under the bridge of adolescence and are never touched by an effective
prevention program.'' DARE is the nation's most popular anti-drug program.
Started in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department, Drug Awareness
Resistance Education uses specially trained officers who teach a prevention
curriculum during school hours. More than 80 percent of schools nationwide
use the DARE approach. In Massachusetts, DARE is in 1,200 schools in 320
communities. The federal Safe and Drug-free Schools Program is aware of
criticism of DARE. While it has stopped short of endorsing certain programs
- - DARE or any other - it is requiring schools that take federal money for
prevention to use so-called ''science based'' approaches, or else document
the success of the ones they are using. The catch is enforcement is
difficult, if not impossible.

''The more important issue is to get people in the right mind-set, to be
accountable,'' says director William Modzeleski. ''Science-based is the way
we want people to go.'' So what does science tell us about what works to
stop children from pumping themselves up with drugs and alcohol?

''Scare tactics don't work,'' says Michael Roona, executive director of
Social Capital Development Corp. in Albany, N.Y., noted for its review of
all the research on effectiveness. ''Dealing with their lives, placing a
premium on things that are important to them, and being as interactive as
possible - that's what works, not simply lecturing.'' Roona says, ''The
average kid doesn't care if he'll die five years from now because that's a
lifetime away. But if you tell a young adolescent male that girls think
you're disgusting if your breath smells bad because you smoke pot and
you'll never get a date, that works.'' Teaching young people how to
negotiate the social scene also works, according to Roona; working out ways
to say no - without feeling uncool - helps, too.

''It's not profound. It's intuitive,'' he says. ''But despite the fact that
this is intuitive, these aren't the programs that are being used.'' Why
not? ''Researchers are great at writing things for peer review; they're not
great at marketing,'' says Denise Hallfors, whose University of North
Carolina study found that the most popular programs were the least
effective. DARE officials dispute the idea that their program is not
effective. Milt Dodge, DARE's deputy director, says critics have done
faulty or incomplete evaluations.

And DARE certainly has the kind of public support that most private
programs seek. In fact, not using DARE can be uncomfortable for some
schools, and some teachers. The head of the Governor's Alliance Against
Drugs in Massachusetts is also head of the state DARE Program, a former
DARE officer, and a strong advocate of the program.

Michael Gill, Cohasset's health education coordinator, says he's gotten
grief over the years for not using DARE, not ''buying into the cult,'' as
he puts it. He thinks educators, not police officers, should be responsible
for teaching about drugs and alcohol in schools.

''I had a state official come to me and say, `Why don't you use DARE? We're
offering it free.' I said, `So what? I want to see proof that it's going to
be effective before I use it.' It's the same as asking if we would take a
math curriculum just because it was being offered free,'' Gill said. ''If
the goal is to improve youth-police relations,'' DARE works well,Gill said.
''And it can be a helpful supplement [to prevention work] if done right and
by the right people. I'm not anti-DARE.'' Joyce Allen, Braintree's former
health coordinator, also says DARE has its benefits - ''having a really
nice cop running around telling kids not to do drugs has to help'' - but
acknowledges it does not do well in objective studies, and that it promises
too much. She uses it only for fifth-graders. The schools in Harvard passed
on DARE, choosing a more flexible local program. ''I don't want this to
sound snobby, but the reading level was too low, and that was a turnoff for
our kids,'' says Delma Josephson, school health coordinator. ''The goals
were great, but it needed modification to better suit our community.'' All
the criticism of DARE has led to an attempt to upgrade the program. Zili
Sloboda, a senior research associate at the Institute for Health and Social
Policy at the University of Akron, has pulled together a team of
scientists, educators, and DARE officers to use the latest research to
rewrite the program's curriculum.

Sloboda's credentials are hefty. While at the National Institute on Drug
Abuse, she wrote the classic ''little red book'' of the prevention field -
''Preventing Drug Use Among Children and Adolescents, a Research-Based
Guide.'' As an epidemiologist and medical sociologist, she is convinced
that good prevention programs do work, especially when they are written to
age-specific groups and offered all through school. In fact, she's
frustrated that they are not used often enough.

''We have lives at stake - not only physical but social and
psychological,'' Sloboda says. ''We know how to address the problem, but
somehow we're not getting that message across.'' But marketing itself is
what DARE does beautifully, and that is what attracted Sloboda. ''The best
network we have is DARE,'' she says. ''If there isn't DARE, there's
nothing.'' Sloboda's group started with the DARE seventh-grade curriculum
and narrowed the focus to tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and inhalants. The
group got rid of the lecture format and concentrated on group discussion,
role playing, and problem solving. It built in family involvement, with
take-home material designed to stimulate conversation.

They wrote 10 lessons, each one incorporating what researchers found
worked: building communication skills and the ability to say ''no''
comfortably; changing misconceptions that everybody drinks or takes drugs;
and developing attitudes that drugs and alcohol are bad for you. One
session looks at the latest research on the effects of drugs on the brain,
with MRI pictures detailing the damage.

After testing the lessons on volunteer 13- and 14-year-olds, the group
started training DARE officers in Ohio this fall for a test-run of the new
curriculum. Sloboda is waiting to hear if she has money for a full national
study. The DARE organization, says spokesman Dodge, is excited about the
chance to improve the program.

Roona, who worked with Sloboda on the new curriculum, is skeptical that it
will work. ''I don't think having a uniformed officer in front of a group
of rebellious teenagers will send the message, especially in inner
cities,'' he says.

And Roona is not convinced that spending money on prevention programs for
all students is the right approach. It might be more important, he says, to
funnel the money into school counselors, who would reach the troubled
students most likely to misuse drugs or alcohol.

Kris Bosworth, who teaches prevention education at the University of
Arizona, also worked on the new DARE. She cautions that even good programs
will not work in bad schools.

''We know that kids with goals, with a sense of where they are going, are
less likely to use substances. You can have a good program, but if you have
a school that is in chaos, it is like taking good seeds and throwing them
on rocky ground.'' Others look beyond school to national drug policies, the
media and advertisers, and community action.

Sloboda, for one, wants to start by trying to make the program most used by
schools - DARE - the most likely to succeed. ''Can a prevention program
really change what kids do'' he asks. ''I think it definitely can. If it's
done right. And it's not being done right in this country.''