DARE TO QUESTION

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson is on firm if unpopular ground in
his recent criticism of the nation's largest anti-drug education
program, Drug Abuse Resistance Education or DARE, which uses police
officers in the schools to teach youngsters about the evils of drugs,
alcohol and tobacco.

Anderson wants to dismantle it. The Salt Lake City Police Department
spends about $289,000 annually on DARE in Salt Lake City elementary
and secondary schools.

Nationally, the program is used in 75 percent of the nation's school
districts and has grown since its beginning in 1983 as a Los Angeles
police program into a $750 million per annum industry, funded mostly
by taxpayers. It is marketed like such an industry, too, with
DARE-marked T-shirts, balloons, bumper stickers, police cars and even
garbage trucks.

Despite its heavy promotion and the copious spending upon it, a number
of studies show that DARE largely is ineffective in discouraging drug
use by young people.

University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston, for example, focused
on eighth-graders. He found that drug use -- marijuana, alcohol,
smoking -- among them increased between 1991 and 1994. A Justice
Department study in 1994 that analyzed eight DARE studies found that
the program had little or no effect on reducing drug use.

Other communities already have done what Anderson is proposing.
Snohomish County, north of Seattle, for example, dropped out of DARE
in 1997 largely because it was not achieving its purpose of
discouraging drug experimentation among youth.

Anderson likely will be criticized for daring to question DARE.
Despite its questionable success, the program is popular and plenty of
officials, like federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey, remain bullish
about it. DARE is one of the best-known components of the anti-drug
war, a long-running fight in which victory remains elusive.

The mayor's skepticism, however, is justified. However noble sounding,
however positive it seems, any program which spends nearly $300,000 of
public funds each year should have a clear, empirical track record of
measurable success. DARE does not.