JUST SAY SO: D.A.R.E. DOESN'T WORK

DRUG CZAR Barry McCaffrey announced last week a plan to cut drug use in
half by 2007. His goal - getting mentors and role models more active in the
lives of kids - is laudable. But drug education and prevention will never
succeed as long as D.A.R.E. - the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program -
is ensconced in 70 percent of our children's schools.

Over the last five years, studies have been conducted for the federal
General Accounting Office and Justice Department and for the California
Department of Education. They describe how D.A.R.E. and other anti-drug
programs fail to reach the teenagers most at risk of drug abuse.

Joel Brown of Berkeley-based Educational Research Consultants was hired by
the state Department of Education to conduct one of the most extensive
qualitative studies of drug education programs to date. He found that
D.A.R.E. and other programs may actually be hurting our kids.

Brown's conclusions - eloquently articulated for him by the teens he
interviewed - were so disturbing that in 1995 the state education agency
buried the report. (The findings became public in 1997 when published in
the prestigious Education Evaluation and Policy Review Journal.)

If kids are taught that marijuana is as bad as heroin, and then try pot and
experience few consequences, they are often more likely to experiment with
the dangerously addictive hard drug.

There are other problems. Most teens oppose authoritarian measures used to
punish peers caught with alcohol or drugs. The teenagers Brown interviewed
questioned whether suspension from school is really the best way to deal
with kids caught experimenting with drugs.

You might wonder why the Republicans haven't attacked D.A.R.E. - which the
federal government subsidizes to the tune of more than $650 million a year.
Or why the Democrats, who consider education policy their domain, haven't
created a national commission to find something better.

The reason for the silence is that D.A.R.E., which relies on uniformed
police officers and scare tactics to drum the "just say no" message into
our kids, is an effective marketing machine. By combining grassroots PR -
including T-shirts, bumper stickers and rallies - with aggressive political
lobbying of local, state, and federal governments, D.A.R.E. has become its
own special interest group.

The core of the problem is that D.A.R.E. boosters refuse to recognize that
teenagers experiment with drugs. Government surveys show, however, that
half of high school students try an illegal drug before graduation. How do
we reach these youngsters?

We can turn around drug education by abandoning the "just say no" cookie
cutter approach. We can find funds for pilot programs that seek to reduce
the harms associated with drugs, including addiction. We should focus on
the capabilities, not inabilities, of our children. Most importantly we
should understand that drug experimentation is different from drug abuse,
and seek ways to help the most at-risk kids.

As in 12-step programs, the first step toward recovery is the recognition
that we have a problem.