DARE AND PROGRAMS LIKE IT DON'T WORK - SO WHY ARE THEY STILL AROUND?

JUST SAY NO

The job of keeping kids ignorant is big business. Consider the popularity
of "just say no" programs that claim to prevent students from taking drugs.
Numerous studies have shown they don't work. That hasn't stopped the
government from wasting billions of dollars to fund them.

The federal government allocates about $2 billion annually to youth drug-
and violence-prevention programs (the total cost, including state, local
and private funding, has been estimated at $8 billion). This past July, the
government launched a taxpayer-funded, $1 billion "just say no" advertising
campaign. President Clinton announced the campaign at a United Nations
special session that pushed the theme "A Drug-Free World: We Can Do It."
Actually, we can't. The war against drugs has failed miserably, in large
part because it is punitive, racist and overly broad. The imbalance is as
obvious as it is tragic. Only a third of the $17 billion Clinton pledged
for the war on drugs in his UN speech will be used to help addicts. The
rest will be parceled out to law enforcement.

Prohibition has become a mantra among those in power, to the exclusion of
all other strategies. Yet studies have shown that abstinence programs aimed
at youth, such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education, have no long-term
effect. That hardly matters. Buoyed by the Drug-Free Schools and
Communities Act of 1986, which requires schools to launch zero-tolerance
programs if they want federal funds, DARE has achieved incredible status.
By its own accounting, the program reaches 26 million children in 75
percent of the nation's schools. It also has been exported to 44 countries.

DARE began as a police action. In 1983, Daryl Gates, then chief of the Los
Angeles Police Department, sought a way to prevent drug crimes in schools.
DARE sent its first ten officers to 50 schools. Today, the group boasts
that its instructors receive "special training in areas such as child
development, classroom management, teaching techniques and communication
skills." How much training? About two weeks' worth, after which the police
officer provides his services as a teacher, psychologist, counselor and
drug expert.

Armed with a teaching manual from DARE America (the nonprofit organization
that administers the curriculum), the uniformed officer visits a school
each week for four months to instruct fifth- or sixth-graders on personal
safety, assertiveness, self-esteem, "managing stress" (a principal reason
kids take drugs, according to DARE) and the dangers of mind-altering
substances, including alcohol and tobacco. The students take time from
their reading, writing and math lessons to organize skits, watch videos and
complete assignments in their DARE workbooks. The officer also encourages
students to submit written questions. Inquiries such as "Why do my parents
smoke marijuana after I go to bed?" are forwarded to authorities at the
cop's discretion.

The problem with "just say no" education is the same one that has plagued
drug propaganda since Congress approved the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914:
It doesn't survive a reality check. Abstinence education preaches that all
drug use constitutes abuse, all drugs are equally dangerous, lifetime
abstinence is a realistic goal and recreational drugs such as marijuana
serve as gateways to narcotics. It claims to teach kids to make decisions,
but dictates the correct decision and punishes those who make any other
choice. If a student is caught experimenting, he or she is kicked out of
school as part of a zero-tolerance sensibility. The kids who most need help
making decisions about drugs, even the straight-A students, are ostracized.

The most harmful effect of "just say no" may be the damage it does to the
credibility of teachers and parents. When students first try
"mind-altering" marijuana, they quickly discover it doesn't make them ill
or lead them into a spiral of addiction (if they watch the news, they must
wonder why some sick people smoke marijuana to feel better). Teenagers
learn through experience that adults spout hyperbole and distort by
omission on the topic of drugs. As a result, useful distinctions may not be
made. In the introduction to Buzzed: The Straight Facts About the Most Used
and Abused Drugs From Alcohol to Ecstasy, the psychologist and two
pharmacologists who compiled the book offer this example: "Not too long
ago, it was widely reported that a well-known basketball player, Len Bias,
died after he used cocaine. This story has been used repeatedly to
illustrate the dangers of cocaine. However, most people who use cocaine do
not die as a result, and cocaine users and their friends certainly know it.
If horror stories are the principal tools of drug education, it does not
take long for people to recognize that such accounts do not represent the
whole truth."

Copyright ©1998 Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

Checked-by: Richard Lake