REEFER MADNESS

Does Houston's biggest drug-prevention program keep kids clean or just make
cops feel good?

For 45 minutes every week, the teachers and students who participate in the
Houston Police Department's DARE program get what Councilwoman Martha Wong
calls "a little break." As part of Drug Abuse Resistance Education, a
uniformed Houston police officer teaches the fifth- and
seventh-gradersabout the dangers of alcohol, tobacco and illegal drugs. In
return for participation (17 weeks for fifth-graders, ten for seventh-)
students receive free DARE T-shirts, DARE pencils, DARE erasers, DARE
rulers and the opportunity to see one of the two special DARE vehicles: the
black Corvette or the blue Chevy pickup.

Administered by 70 percent of our nation's public school districts and 180
of HISD's 185 elementary schools, the 15-year-old Los Angeles-based DARE
has become the unquestioned king of drug-resistance programs. Its winning
combination: uniformed police officers, encouragement that borders on
cheerleading and a lot of free paraphernalia emblazoned with the program's
logo.

Thanks to almost universal popularity, the program has become politically
unimpeachable. "How can you be against kids and cops working together?"
Councilwoman Annise Parker asks rhetorically, "It's a great opportunity to
have pictures of police officers with smiling kids."

Few people criticize efforts to keep kids off drugs, which may explain why
Houston has never evaluated DARE since the police department began offering
the program in 1987. But for the past four years, Houston councilmember Ray
Driscoll has been quietly leading a fight to evaluate the program's
effectiveness and its $4 million budget.

This year, Driscoll finally got his wish. University of Houston professor
Dr. Bruce Gay is conducting a study of the DARE program, funded by grants
from the Houston Police Department; his study should be out this month.

But regardless of what Gay's report finds, the Houston Police Department
may continue to fund and operate DARE. "To them it's automatic: 'DARE's a
good program and it works,' " says Driscoll, "Of course, they can't prove
that."

Nor will the program's supporters do so with the UH study. According to
Gay, the study will survey DARE students on their opinions about drug use
and violence before and after they complete the 17-week course. But even
critics have never questioned DARE's short-term effects. In a 1998 study,
Dr. Dennis P. Rosenbaum of the University of Illinois at Chicago concluded
that "DARE was able to have both immediate and short-term effects" on its
graduates. But, he found, "nearly all of these effects dissipated with the
passage of time and did not survive the critical high school years."

Sergeant Fletcher, however, claims that the criticisms voiced in
Rosenbaum's study are not valid, thanks to a major program overhaul in
1994. Now DARE supplements the 17-week program presented to students in the
fifth grade with a ten-week program presented in seventh grade. According
to Fletcher, these ten additional 45-minute lessons, in the heat of
adolescence, provide DARE students with the tools to resist drugs
throughout high school.

The Rosenbaum study, however, was only the latest in a series of reports,
from Kentucky to California, that have all reached the same conclusion:
DARE has failed to produce long-term results. And that, says Wong, is what
a drug-prevention program should be all about: "My concern is long-range
effects. If it doesn't have long-term effects, why can't the teachers teach
the information?"

Loath "to see money being wasted," Driscoll proposed an amendment to Mayor
Lee Brown's 1999 budget. The measure would cut DARE's funding in half,
using the freshly cut $2 million to search for a new drug-education program.

Few councilmembers wanted to support a measure that would cut DARE so
severely. Even a self-described "knee-jerk conservative," Councilman Rob
Todd, voted against the amendment, claiming that "we don't have any
alternative." Needless to say, the amendment went down in flames, 11D04.

Todd, who read reams of studies on DARE's efficacy, believes that it is
impossible to assume that Houston's program is ineffective simply because
those in Kentucky, Illinois and California are. "No offense to
councilmembers Driscoll or Wong, but I would no more attribute that Houston
is like Chicago or Los Angeles than I would say that Clear Lake is like
their district."

Perhaps the biggest hurdle to killing the DARE program lies in the
personage of Mayor Lee Brown, who brought the DARE program to Houston 12
years ago. In the words of a Brown spokesperson, "He thinks it works; he
thinks it's a good program."

The Houston Police Department also believes in DARE. In fact, Chief
Bradford's unwillingness to commit to fixing problems that the UH study
finds caused Annise Parker to vote for the Driscoll amendment. "I was
willing to vote against the amendment if the chief was willing to act on
the study," said Parker. "Chief Bradford was unwilling to say that he would
fix the program. It's very frustrating."

Part of the department's commitment to DARE may be because of the marked
change observed in officers selected to participate. "They arrive as the
typical street cop: They have become somewhat callous and somewhat hardened
because they have been exposed to so much hurt and pain on the streets,"
says Fletcher. "As they begin to realize the difference they will [make] in
these kids' lives, you see a softening and a commitment to compassion."

Obviously, DARE is something more than simply a drug-education program to
the 71 HPD officers in the DARE unit. Parker believes that recent
criticisms have simply increased the department's protection of the
program: "There's sort of a bunker mentality developing around DARE."

And from deep within the bunker, Fletcher lashes out to discredit his
critics. According to the sergeant, most of the criticism levied against
DARE is made by researchers with a personal agenda or by those who support
the legalization of drugs. "There are misinformation efforts by researchers
who have their own drug-prevention programs to sell," claims Fletcher.
"There are also organizations, for example NORML [the National Organization
for the Reform of Marijuana Laws], that have made efforts to criticize DARE
because of its very clear message: 'Don't Use Drugs.' They don't like this
message; they want kids to use drugs recreationally."

While DARE's effect, or lack of one, may never be conclusively proven,
drug-use statistics seem convincing. With drug use among teens on the rise,
is it safe to say that the most widely employed drug-education program in
the country is working? Driscoll says no. "We are putting a lot of money
into DARE, a lot of money that is not showing up on the bottom line as far
as drug use is concerned."

Contact T.R. Coleman at his online address. (tcoleman@houstonpress.com)

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Checked-by: Mike Gogulski