TRUTH OR D.A.R.E.

The Dubious Drug-Education Program Takes New York

Thirty sixth-graders begin to shout as a police officer enters their
classroom at P.S. 20 on the Lower East Side. "Good morning, Officer Carla!"
they call out to their favorite teacher. Officer Carla is Carla DeBlasio,
35, a one-time transit cop who teaches weekly classes as part of the NYPD's
Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, known as DARE. On a recent
Wednesday, the officer strides into the classroom clutching DARE's mascot, a
fuzzy stuffed lion named Daren.

Officer Carla wears a DARE pin above her police badge and a gun tucked
discreetly inside the waistband of her navy blue slacks. But she seems more
like a dedicated teacher than a typical cop. Indeed, she knows every
student's name, and when she discovered that P.S. 20 did not have a
basketball team, she started her own. Such devotion has made Officer Carla a
star in the city's DARE program. At first, the students fired the usual
questions at her. "Have you ever used your gun?" "Have you ever shot
anybody?" But now, near the end of DARE's 17-week curriculum, any anxiety
the students may have had about cops, or at least Officer Carla, seems to
have dissipated. Officer Carla begins by recapping last week's lesson on
"positive alternatives." "What happens when we hang out with the wrong
people?" she yells. Tiny hands shoot into the air as students holler the
answers.

"Drinking!" "Smoking!" "Drugs!"

"Good," says Officer Carla, flashing a warm smile. Apparently, her students
have internalized DARE's message-- resisting peer pressure and choosing the
right friends will keep them away from drugs.

DARE America started in Los Angeles in 1983 with what seemed like a good
idea: put cops in fifth-and sixth-grade classes to teach kids about drug
abuse. Since then, DARE has become the world's dominant drug prevention
program. This $230 million operation conducts courses in all 50 states and
in 44 countries, from Sweden and England to Brazil and Costa Rica. Eighty
percent of U.S. school districts have DARE. The largest city program is
right here in New York, with DARE officers teaching in 271 public elementary
schools. By the end of the current school year, the total number of
graduates from New York City's DARE program will climb to 210,000.

As DARE America grows, so does criticism of its effectiveness. More than a
dozen studies have concluded that DARE has no lasting impact. And one
six-year study found increased drug use among suburban kids who graduated
from DARE. Even more damaging than these little-read reports were a pair of
stories penned by Stephen Glass, the prolific young con man who wove
fictitious anecdotes into his articles. Glass wrote scathing pieces about
DARE for The New Republic in 1997 and Rolling Stone in 1998. Now Glass
admits that many of the embarrassing allegations in his stories were false.
In February, DARE slapped Rolling Stone with a $50 million libel suit.

Glass's deceitful journalism has not, however, dispelled the doubts that
continue to dog DARE. The list of cities that have dropped DARE-- either
because they cannot afford it or do not believe it works-- has grown to
include Seattle, Oakland, Spokane, Omaha, Austin, Houston, Milwaukee,
Fayetteville, and Boulder. Despite DARE's uneven track record, New York City
adopted the program in 1996. "I really believe it is effective," says
Captain James Serra, who oversees the NYPD's DARE officers. "Any kind of
prevention we can give the kids of New York City is a great thing."

For the beleaguered DARE-- struggling to hold on to its schools and
reputation-- winning over New York City was a major coup. To woo the NYPD,
DARE offered an attractive deal. The national organization provides free
workbooks to New York City students-- a perk for which other cities usually
pay. When Safir announced that the NYPD would adopt DARE, he mentioned this
freebie as a convincing selling point. The price tag for the city's DARE
program is $10 million a year, most of which is paid for by the NYPD in the
form of salaries for 100 full-time DARE officers.

To further strengthen its relationship with the city, DARE's national office
hired a fundraiser just for New York. (DARE programs in other parts of the
country raise their own funds.) "It is very important to us to have a
successful program in New York City," says Bill Alden, DARE's deputy
director and a former agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. "It
took us four years to break through and finally see the impact. Whatever it
costs it's worth because we're reaching so many kids we couldn't reach
before."

New York City's DARE did not get off to a smooth start. In early 1998,
DARE's local fundraiser, Ronald J. Brogan, booked the Marriott Marquis and
was about to mail invitations to a $1000-a-plate dinner. That's when the
Rolling Stone story appeared. The dinner's honoree pulled out and DARE
cancelled the caterer. "Stephen Glass cost me $1 million," says Brogan, also
a former DEA agent. "He cost me a year's worth of work. If not for that
story, there could be a DARE middle-school program [in New York City] by
now."

The 11- and 12-year-old kids in Officer Carla's after-lunch class are
riveted. Today's topic is "role models." So a handful of students have moved
their chairs into a circle around visitor Steven Adorno, a 22-year-old
senior at Hunter College. Each child's DARE workbook is open to a list of 19
suggested questions. One student pops question number six: Why is it
important for you to be drug-free? "Drugs make you lazy," Adorno explains.
"You want to relax. You don't want to do your homework. You just want to
play video games."

After a few minutes, Adorno admits that he used to smoke weed. The
sixth-graders slide their chairs closer and begin peppering Adorno with
their own questions. "When you used drugs, did people still play with you?"
"Did your parents ever find out?" "Where in your house did you hide the
drugs?" "Did you have a girlfriend?"

Adorno answers every query and then delivers DARE's zero-tolerance message.
"It's fun in the beginning," he says. "But then it catches up with you. It's
hard to get out. You destroy your life by drinking, by smoking even
cigarettes."

In DARE's worldview, Marlboro Light cigarettes, Bacardi rum, and a drag from
a joint are all equally dangerous. For that matter, so is snorting a few
lines of cocaine. DARE's student workbook features an eighth-grade alcoholic
named Robert on page seven, Wendy the pot-smoking eighth-grader on the next
page, and by page 10 a ninth-grader named Laura is trying to score some
cocaine. After reading these tales, students are supposed to list what they
learned about each drug.

This zero-tolerance, just-say-no approach has attracted plenty of critics.
"It really is irresponsible to place all drugs in the same category," says
Marsha Rosenbaum, who heads the West Coast office of the Lindesmith Center,
a drug policy reform organization. "What I don't want kids to hear is that
all drugs-- and any amount you do-- will be the road to devastation. Once
kids get to an age where they're experimenting . . . they know that is not
true, so they throw away the entire prevention message. It isn't really
education. It's indoctrination."

The DARE curriculum condemns not only tobacco and drugs, but also graffiti
and tattoos. One section of the DARE workbook describes sticky situations
kids might confront, and it tells them to choose the best "way to say no."
These scenarios include Pete's friend urging him to scrawl on the wall of a
park bathroom, and Jana wandering into a party packed with dangerously
decorated strangers. "In a corner of the room they . . . noticed that all of
the boys and many of the girls had tattoos," the workbook states, ominously.
"There was even someone getting a tattoo."

Glenn Levant, DARE's cofounder and president, insists it makes perfect sense
to include graffiti and tattoos in a drug prevention curriculum. "What we're
endeavoring to do is to keep kids from getting involved in that type of
activity because it can lead to a dangerous situation," says Levant, a
former deputy chief with the Los Angeles Police Department. "You could be
involved in graffiti, and there are cases reported from time to time when a
property owner gets a shotgun and tries to shoot someone involved in that
type of thing. . . . It's a social peer pressure that really leads to most
of the trouble."

Back in the classroom, several students spend more time squeezing Daren the
lion, a foot-high stuffed animal dressed in a DARE T-shirt, than they do
studying their workbooks. The children play tug-of-war with Daren, poke him
with a pencil, and shake him so hard his mane stands straight up. "I'm
almost embarrassed to bring him," Officer Carla says. "But when I leave him
in my office, it's like 'Where's Daren? Why didn't you bring him?' "

At the end of a recent DARE class, Eleen Ahmed, 12, is particularly
enthusiastic. "It's great," she says. "They teach you not to use drugs, and
not to get into fights, and it's fun to hug that doll Daren."

DARE may be fun, but does it work? Leonard Golubchick, the principal of P.S.
20, insists the program is a success. "The bottom line is that it creates
relationships between children, students, and parents that you rarely find
anywhere," says Golubchick, whose school hosted the city's first DARE. "My
opinion is that the national data does not tell the story of the great
effects on children."

But a growing pile of evidence suggests that DARE's impact is short-lived.
Dennis P. Rosenbaum, a onetime DARE supporter who heads the criminal justice
department at the University of Illinois in Chicago, published one of the
most recent studies. Funded by the Illinois State Police, Rosenbaum tracked
1800 kids at 31 schools over six years. He found that all of DARE's
effects-- including instilling negative attitudes toward drugs, positive
attitudes about cops-- had worn off after four years.

Such findings anger DARE fans. "If you take German for 17 weeks, you're not
going to speak German," says Brogan, DARE's New York fundraiser and
spokesperson. "The critics say the effect dissipates over the years. No
shit, Sherlock. Is that supposed to be surprising?" (DARE officials say the
solution to this problem is not less DARE but more of it, and they urge
cities to teach DARE in middle and high school.)

Another of Rosenbaum's findings was even more alarming. He discovered that
"suburban students who participated in DARE reported significantly higher
rates of drug use . . . than suburban students who did not participate in
the program." DARE's president Levant dismisses this explosive finding as
"not statistically significant." Also, Levant points out that DARE has
changed its curriculum nine times since 1983, which he claims raises doubts
about the accuracy of such critical studies.

Part of what makes DARE so popular is that participants get lots of
freebies. There are fluorescent yellow pens with the DARE logo, tiny Daren
dolls, bumper stickers, graduation certificates, DARE banners for school
auditoriums, DARE rulers, pennants, Daren coloring books, and T-shirts for
all DARE graduates.

Marsha Rosenbaum of the Lindesmith Center worries that sophisticated kids
will find these DARE items corny and eventually begin to mock DARE's
no-tolerance teaching. "What happens is that the culture takes these
messages and twists them around," Rosenbaum says, "which is what happened
with the 'This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs' commercials. And
now there's a whole T-shirt line that's a spoof."

DARE's just-say-no mantra and all its logo-bearing toys have also come under
attack from academics. Richard Clayton, director of the Center for
Prevention Research at the University of Kentucky, conducted a five-year,
31-school study that, once again, found DARE has no lasting impact. "It is
sad to say, but an overwhelming majority of people in the United States have
a rather naive view of . . . how to solve social problems such as drug use
and abuse by adolescents," Clayton cowrote in a 1996 book on drug
prevention. "Drug use is not a simple phenomenon. It will not be solved by
simple slogans and bumper stickers and T-shirts and a bunch of people
believing DARE is 'the' answer to drug abuse in America."

The NYPD captain who oversees the city's DARE officers shrugs off such
criticisms. "We'll never be able to measure how many kids do and don't get
involved with drugs," says Serra. "But whatever we are teaching them, it's
better than giving them nothing." This better-than-nothing argument is
popular among DARE boosters. But there are programs that have proven more
effective than DARE. The best known is Life Skills Training, which was
created by Gilbert J. Botvin, a professor of both psychiatry and public
health at Cornell University Medical College. This program targets
middle-school students and stretches its classes over three years-- longer
than DARE's 17-week core curriculum. A division of the U.S. Department of
Justice recently pledged $4.9 million to teach Life Skills Training at 70
sites across the country, while the National Institute of Drug Abuse plans
to spend $5 million over five years to study its impact. "This has got to be
scaring the hell out of [DARE]," says Michael Roona, an experienced
researcher who is now a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University studying
drug prevention programs. "DARE America is like any other
multimillion-dollar corporation-- they're very concerned about competition
in the marketplace. They were the IBM of drug-prevention programs for a long
time, and they don't want to go the same way as IBM, when suddenly PCs
transformed computing in America and they weren't there." So while DARE's
Levant publicly insists that DARE works, behind the scenes he is scrambling
to bolster it. Mounting skepticism-- and prodding from Congress-- has led
DARE to solicit advice from its fiercest critics. DARE leaders have met
twice in recent months with Dennis Rosenbaum, Richard Clayton, and other
drug-prevention researchers who have exposed DARE's failings. According to
Clayton, the first meeting was "blunt and bloody."

But by the next meeting, held in New York last October, the researchers and
DARE officials had smoothed out their differences, and together drafted a
plan to conduct a long-term study testing other drug-prevention curriculums.
Herbert D. Kleber, the Columbia University psychiatry professor who chairs
DARE's scientific advisory board, says, "DARE has agreed to abide by the
results of the research." The project will last at least three years.

"We're very willing to change," says Levant, DARE's president. "If someone's
got a better mousetrap, we'll use it."

DARE supporters boast that their program is cheap. "The program costs a buck
a year per kid," Levant says. But this dollar covers only the price of
supplies, like workbooks and T-shirts. DARE America spends $1.5 million
annually on supplies for New York City, while the NYPD covers the bulk of
the program's costs. The NYPD's payroll includes $8.5 million a year in
salaries and benefits for the city's DARE officers.

DARE proponents insist the program is inexpensive because police departments
often redeploy officers rather than hiring new ones. To launch its program,
the NYPD trained cops in its Youth Division to become DARE officers. "A
critic would say the cops cost $10 million a year, and that money could be
better spent somewhere else," says Brogan of DARE. "But the officers are
already there."

Not every police department accepts this rationale, however. In 1987,
Rochester became the first city in New York State to adopt DARE, and its
DARE budget eventually climbed to almost $1.2 million. But last year,
Rochester dumped DARE. "We, as a police department, could not justify being
able to put in 30 or 40 officers just for this," says Officer Carlos Garcia,
spokesperson for the Rochester police department. "We chose to move away
from DARE because we needed more officers on the street."

The recent uproar following the fatal police shooting of Amadou Diallo, an
unarmed immigrant from West Africa, raises questions about what role, if
any, cops should have in the city's classrooms. "It's hard to face kids when
a tough situation like that hits the papers," says Officer Carla. "Kids will
come right out and ask why they shot this guy 41 times. I tell them,
'Listen, I can't explain why they shot this man 41 times, but don't pass
judgment on all cops.' I told them it's sad for both sides-- it's sad for
the man's family and it's sad for the families of the cops."

During such tension-filled times, DARE can perform a valuable
public-relations service. "DARE officers give a different face of law
enforcement," says Levant, DARE's president. "A child's first experience
with a uniformed police officer is in a friendly, helpful way. . . . You
have to have programs like DARE in place so police aren't viewed as an
occupying army."

>From the beginning, improving police-community relations was part of the
impetus for bringing DARE to New York City. "That seemed to me to be one of
the major benefits of the program," says Robert Strang, the former DEA agent
who chaired the mayor's advisory committee on antidrug initiatives. "Forget
about the drug education. . . . We saw a relationship that could be built
between the students and the police officers. There's no other vehicle for
that that we're aware of. . . . For critics who say it's good PR for the
police department, they're absolutely right and we should do more of it."

This is precisely what DARE plans to do. Hoping to double the program's
size, the NYPD recently applied for a federal grant to add 100 more DARE
officers and expand into the city's middle schools. But DARE doesn't intend
to stop there. Sounding like a proud father, DARE's president reveals that
over the next four years DARE will implement its full curriculum--
kindergarten through 12th grade-- in all of New York City's public schools.
Research assistance: Hillary Chute