GOOD INTENTIONS OFTEN GET GOOD PRESS EVEN WHEN THEY MAKE BAD POLICY

Drug Abuse Resistance Education's (DARE) long, free ride with the
press and the public may finally be coming to an end. Editorials
lately tend to oppose or question the program, rather than blindly
supporting it as has often been the case in the past. Early this year,
the Detroit News published a 13-part expose of DARE, including its own
study of the program, which matched the scientific research in finding
it ineffective.

DARE classes, which are taught by police officers to 5th and 6th
graders (and, increasingly, to high schoolers) teach that all drugs,
from marijuana to alcohol to heroin, are equally bad, and that peer
pressure and low self esteem are the major causes of drug use. When
the drug prevention program began in 1983 as a project of then-Los
Angeles Police Department chief Darryl Gates, it received mostly
positive news coverage, which continued for over a decade despite a
continually growing number of studies finding it either ineffective or
even slightly harmful.

Empirical research does not support the self esteem connection, nor
the notion that all drugs are equally harmful. Critics say that the
program loses kids because their experience of family and friends'
drug use shows that some drugs are more dangerous than others, and
because the idea that "users are losers" is contradicted when they see
popular kids taking drugs or drinking.

Nevertheless, DARE is utilized by over 80% of American schools, and
those who try to remove it by citing the data have an amazingly hard
time. Sure, there have been by "Dateline NBC" (2/21/97), the New
Republic (3/3/97) and Rolling Stone (3/5/98). But even after these,
and over a dozen other studies showing that it doesn't work, New York
City added the program to its public schools in 1997, and parents and
kids continued to cheerlead for it. As one DARE supporter said
recently in an op-ed in the Washington Times (9/10/2000, DARE was as
worth defending as "apple pie, motherhood and baseball."

And in fact, everything seemed to be going DARE's way after it turned
out that two of the most critical exposes - the Rolling Stone and New
Republic stories - were written by the arch-falsifier Stephen Glass.
In letters to the editors, DARE supporters point to these as examples
of malicious press, and imply that all the negative coverage was
equally removed from reality. DARE sued Glass and Rolling Stone for
libel.

This spring, it lost its case as Federal Judge Virginia Phillips found
the charges against the program to be "substantially true." Glass may
have fictionalized many of his other stories, but the truth about DARE
is that there is no scientific data to support it and that it has
repeatedly strong-armed and tried to silence reporters and researchers
who try to point this out.

The decision received surprisingly little media attention - just a 200
word business section mention in the New York Times and a similarly
short piece in the Los Angeles Times (both 4/18/2000). And it didn't
stop editorialists from trying to tar other DARE critics with Glass'
sins: an op-ed published in the Washington Times (9/14/00) mentioned
Glass' apology to DARE, but, interestingly, not the decision of the
federal court that the charges were substantially true.

The press has been largely complicit in accepting DARE's PR spin as
equal to the controlled research conducted by legitimate scientists
and published in peer-reviewed journals. In ill-advised attempts at
"balance," they have given equal time to supporters who cite anecdotes
and unpublished data and the research literature on DARE.

=46or example, an editorial in the Deseret News of Utah (June 24,
2000) reviews the negative research but then says, "Yet a handful of
other studies report positive outcomes. Among these is a recent Gallup
poll that showed that 93% of students who had participated in the DARE
program reported that they'd never tried marijuana, cocaine, heroin,
crack or inhalants."

Even if you could accept a Gallup poll as equivalent to peer-reviewed
research, there's a major problem here. Either Gallup surveyed
10-year-olds - over 90% of whom, DARE or not, have not tried drugs
yet, - or the kids are lying. Numerous other surveys, with thousands
of subjects conducted over decades for the National Institute on Drug
Abuse, found that over half of high school seniors have tried pot and
over one quarter of the class of 1999 used it within 30 days of being
surveyed. With DARE in 80% of the country's schools, there is no way
that 93% of its graduates have been drug-free for life. If they were,
the nation's drug problem would be virtually non-existent.

Other reports have been marked by similar lapses in logic

Consider the coverage of the decision of Salt Lake City to drop out of
the program. Salt Lake City Mayor Ross Anderson told the New York
Times (9/16/00) that he knew his decision to kill the program "is a
net political loss for me." The Times quotes DARE President Levant,
who, not surprisingly, disagrees with Anderson. Levant claimed that
Anderson "ignored the short term benefits of the program, primarily
that it discouraged drug use by elementary school children." The Times
didn't mention that drug use in elementary schools is virtually
non-existent, again, whether or not they use DARE.

The last several years have seen many school districts battle to drop
DARE, some successfully, some not. If the media wants to be a true
watchdog, it will have to give greater weight to science, not spin and
have the courage to stand up to entrenched interests who will support
their favored programs, whether they work or not.

Maia Szalavitz is author, with Dr. Joseph Volpicelli of the University of
Pennsylvania, of "Recovery Options: The Complete Guide: How You and Your
Loved Ones Can Understand and Treat Alcohol and Other Drug Problems."
[Wiley, 2000]. She has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post,
Newsday, Newsweek, Salon, New York Magazine and other major publications.