DON'T YOU D.A.R.E.

On January 28, 1991, at 4 p.m., 10-year-old Darrin Davis,
of Douglasville, Georgia, returned from school to his
suburban home. Both of Darrin's parents were at work, and
he let himself in. He immediately went to his parents'
bedroom to call his mother, who wouldn't be home for
another two hours. After talking to her on the phone,
Darrin began searching the bedroom for candy; his parents
often hid sweets there. He found none. Instead, after
climbing on top of a chair, Darrin saw a white powder on a
small makeup mirror. At that point, Darrin would later say,
he thought of something he had recently been taught in
school. Darrin's fourthgrade class had been visited by a
police officer under the auspices of the Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program, or dare, as it is known. One
of the things the dare officer had told Darrin and his
classmates was that they should inform the police if they
ever saw anyone including their parentsuse drugs. The
kids were shown a video that reinforced the point.

Although Darrin had never seen either of his parents use
drugs, he decided, based on what he had learned in dare,
that the substance on the mirror was powdered cocaine. So
he did what the dare officer had told him to do: he called
911 and turned in his parents. Two hours later, when the
Davises returned home, they were handcuffed and arrested
while Darrin watched. A police officer put his hand on
Darrin's shoulder, and told the boy he had done "the right
thing." Darrin's father spent the next three months in
jail, much to Darrin's surprise and dismay. "I thought the
police would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs
are wrong," the boy told a local reporter. "They never said
they would arrest them. It didn't say that in the video."
When the sheriff's office told the boy he was too young to
visit his dad in jail, Darrin set the neighbors' house on
fire, causing $14,000 in damages. "I asked him why he did
it," Darrin's mother said. "He said he wanted to be put in
jail with his daddy." As it turned out, the substance on
the mirror was not cocaine. The Davises' lawyer says it was
a small amount of speed. Both the Davises were charged with
simple possession. Ultimately, the Georgia Supreme Court
ordered the charges dropped, primarily on the grounds that
the police had improperly searched the Davis home. The
damage, though, was done. Darrin's telephone call destroyed
his family. Heavy media coverage of the 10yearold who had
turned in his own parents ruined the Davises' reputation.
Legal fees nearly bankrupted them, and they came close to
losing their home. They filed for divorce shortly after the
criminal charges were dropped.

In January 1994, James Bovard, a freelance writer, wrote
an account of the Davis case for The Washington Post's
prestigious Sunday Outlook section. Bovard used the case to
criticize dare for "turning children into informants" in
the war on drugs. Although Bovard had called dare to get
the organization's comment, dare officials had declined to
talk more than briefly. Jefferson Morley, an assistant
editor at Outlook who handled Bovard's column, edited the
piece and faxed the edited copy to Bovard. The piece
remained extremely critical of dare. On the fax, Morley
scribbled a note: "Jim: ok?" Bovard called Morley and
approved the piece as edited.

On Sunday morning, January 30, Bovard picked up the Post
and read his story. He was astonished to read, inserted
into the piece and under his byline, six paragraphs that he
had not writtenthat, indeed, he had never seen. The
paragraphs ran counter to the thrust of the column, calling
the case against dare "murky." Far worse, the new
paragraphs said "there was evidence" Darrin's parents were
not only drug users, but "were also involved in drug
trafficking, thus putting their child at risk." Not only
had the possession charges been dropped against the
Davises, but there had never been any evidence presented to
show that the Davises were drug dealers. They had never
been charged with trafficking, only with possession.

"I was stunned. I didn't know what to say," Bovard
explains. "Nothing like this had ever happened before."
Bovard investigated, and what he found out stunned him even
more: the incorrect information in the added paragraphs had
been directly supplied by dare.

How did this happen? J.W. Bouldin, the Davises' lawyer,
says the Post's lawyers told him that dare had lobbied the
newspaper to add the paragraphs. The Post's lawyers told
Bouldin that dare supplied Morley with the information for
the six paragraphs and Morley typed it in. Bovard also says
that dare put pressure on the Post. "When they learned more
about my story, dare put on the fullcourt press," Bovard
says. "They wanted to kill this story. It makes sense why."
Morley says it happened slightly differently. He says that
after he edited the column he became concerned that dare's
point of view was not represented. He consulted with the
Post's lawyers, who agreed with him that he should call
dare and get their side of the story. He telephoned dare's
Los Angeles headquarters and talked to a spokeswoman for
the organization. Morley says that he wrote the six
paragraphs based on his conversation with the spokeswoman.
He admits that the information came directly from dare and
that he never told Bovard he had added it to the column.
But he says neither he nor anyone at the Post "kowtowed" to
dare. "This was my f*up. It was not the Post caving in to dare," Morley
says. "The whole story doesn't make me look very good. I
regret, I really regret, any role in spreading the false
information.... This was my least finest hour."

Bouldin knew as soon as he read the column that he had a
dandy libel case. He called the Post's lawyers and informed
them that he was going to sue on behalf of the Davises.
"They soon saw they had one very, very big problem on their
hands," Bouldin says. Shortly before the Davises' libel
suit was to be filed, the Post settled. The settlement
included a large cash payment to the Davises. The paper
also printed a correction, which cleared the Davises of the
drug trafficking accusation and admitted that no evidence
connecting them with drug trafficking had ever existed.
Bouldin says that the terms of the settlement prohibit him
from disclosing just how much the misinformation provided
by dare cost the Post, but he makes it clear that the price
was high. "Let's just say this was a very expensive
mistake for The Washington Post," he says, the tone of
satisfaction clear in his Southern drawl.

Dare spokesman Ralph Lochridge doesn't deny his
organization gave the Post false information, and he
doesn't apologize, either. "Just because the Davises
weren't convicted in court doesn't mean they're not guilty
of it," Lochridge told me.

The anti-drug and anti-alcohol program called dare is
popular, well financed and widespread. Started in 1983 by
the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. School
District, dare has quickly become the nation's standard
antidrug curriculum. The dare logo is everywhere: on
bumper stickers, duffel bags, Frisbees, even fastfood
containers. dare is the only drug education program
specifically sanctioned for funding under the federal
DrugFree Schools and Communities Act. This year, the
program will receive $750 million, of which some $600
million, according to outside analysts, comes from federal,
state and local governments. At the core of the dare
curriculum are seventeen weekly lessons taught in the fifth
or sixth grade. The teachers are all uniformed cops trained
by dare. The officers lecture and assign homework on the
dangers of drugs, alcohol and gangs. Many schools, like
Darrin Davis's, offer a shorter curriculum in every grade
before the fifth. Some school districts also participate in
supplementary junior high school and high school programs.
The Los Angelesbased dare America, the nonprofit company
that develops and sells the dare curriculum, boasts that
cops working with dare now lecture in 70 percent of the
nation's school districts. In 1996, two of the last
holdouts, the New York City and Washington, D.C., school
districts, signed up for the program.

Most parents know about dare, and most of them approve
of it. So do most politicians, most police officers, most
teachers and most journalists. President Clinton has been a
fan ever since Chelsea graduated from the Arkansas dare.
"We ought to continue to expand the ... program so that in
every grade school in this country there's a dare officer,"
he said to cheers at an Orange County campaign rally last
October. How many people, after all, are opposed to warning
children about the dangers of drugs?

But what most people don't know is that, in the past
five years, study after study has shown that dare does not
seem to work. The studies have found that students who go
through the program are just as likely to use drugs as
those who don't. In fact, the results in one study even
show the dreaded boomerang effect: dare graduates are more
likely to use marijuana. Behavioral scientists have begun
to question, with increasing vigor, whether dare is little
more than a feelgood scheme of enormous proportions. As
one researcher put it: "dare is the world's biggest pet
rock. If it makes us feel good to spend the money on
nothing, that's okay, but everyone should know dare does
nothing." None of this is a secret among drug policy
experts and reporters who cover drug policy; some of the
studies have been available for years. Reason, Kansas City
Magazine and USA Today have published substantial stories
criticizing the program's effectiveness. But these stories
have done nothing to impede dare's progress, and most
parents and educators still believe it works. Why isn't the
case against dare better known? Why, at a time when federal
funds are scarce, is it not a public issue that a program
which costs the government more than half a billion dollars
a year may be a waste of the taxpayers' money?

What happened to James Bovard and to The Washington Post
is an illustration of the answer. For the past five years,
dare has used tactics ranging from bullying journalists to
manipulating the facts to mounting campaigns in order to
intimidate government officials and stop news
organizations, researchers and parents from criticizing the
program. dare supporters have been accused of slashing
tires, jamming television transmissions and spraypainting
reporters' homes to quiet critics. "What you have to
understand is that dare is almost a billiondollar
industry. If you found out that a food company's foods were
rotten, they'd be out of business," says Mount Holyoke
sociology and criminology professor Richard Moran. "What's
now been found out is that dare is running the biggest
fraud in America. That's why they've gone nuts." dare has
become so wellknown for the hardball tactics it employs to
shut down its critics that drug researchers and journalists
have a word for those hushedthey say they've been
"Dared."

Glenn Levant, the executive director of dare, did not
respond to repeated requests for an interview about dare's
effectiveness and its tactics in squelching bad publicity.
Provided, at his request, with written questions, Levant
did not reply. dare spokesman Ralph Lochridge says his
organization does not silence researchers. "We don't go
after anyone, and dare doesn't stop critical stories," he
says. "It does try to help journalists write balanced
pieces." Lochridge says his organization tries to "work"
with journalists. "We don't mind criticism, but we want
balance. Is your story going to be balanced?"

The story of dare and its critics starts in Kokomo,
Indiana. Fiftythree miles north of Indianapolis, Kokomo is
an auto factory town of 45,000 people in the heart of the
state's rural and Republican midsection. The city hall
operator boasts that Kokomo was the birthplace of stainless
steel. In 1987, it also became the first Indiana city to
sign up for the dare program. That year, school officials
invited two sociology professors at the local branch of
Indiana University to run an experiment to see how well the
program worked. Everyone expected glowing results, and
hoped the positive study would accelerate dare's
implementation elsewhere. The research team studied 1987's
fifthgrade class in Kokomo through 1994, its last year in
high school. They also studied the high school class of
1991, which had made its way through the school system
prior to dare's implementation, and had never been exposed
to the program. Sociology professors Earl Wysong and
Richard Aniskiewicz measured drug use among the students in
both the 1994 graduating class and the 1991 class. They
also measured dare's secondary objectives: boosting self
esteem and reducing susceptibility to peer pressure. Wysong
and Aniskiewicz were careful to measure the students' drug
use with a multipart questionnaire, which included dare's
own test as well as tests commonly used by psychologists.
They found that the level of drug use among kids who had
gone through dare was virtually identical to the level
among kids who had not. This means that in every category
of drug use testedlifetime usage, how recently the
students had used drugs, how often they had used drugs and
the grade in which they started using drugsthe results
were "very similar" for both the dare alumni and the
nondare students. So similar, in fact, that the
differences were within the margin of error. Moreover,
students in both groups rated the availability of drugs
nearly identically. In fact, the only statistical
difference between the groups was that more dare graduates
said they had used marijuana in the past thirty days and
the past year than non dare alumni. Wysong and Aniskiewicz
concluded that "dare exposure does not produce any
longterm prevention efforts on adolescent drug use rates."
What about the more touchyfeely results? Again, the
sociologists found no statistical differences. Using
questionnaires to examine selfesteem and " locus of
control," a common psychology test that measures
susceptibility to peer pressure, they found numbers so
similar for the two groups that any differences were again
within the margin of error. They wrote that self esteem
and peer pressure are "two more areas where we can see no
longterm effects resulting from dare exposure." "That's
all, that's it," says Wysong. " It's simple. There was no
difference."

But Wysong and Aniskiewicz also found out what other
critics of dare would discover: no onenot parents, not
educators and certainly not dare officials wanted to hear
the bad news. Kokomo's parents, teachers and school board
latched on to the study, but Wysong says they missed the
point. "I told them the study shows dare doesn't work," he
says, but no one listened. "So what they did was implement
drug testing." Since last April, the high school has
required every student who leaves the building at lunch,
participates in extracurricular activities or drives to
school to sign a waiver. The waiver allows the school to
pull them out of class at any time and force them to take a
drug test. On average, fortyfive students are tested each
week. "That wasn't what our study recommended," Wysong
says. "After our study it became very clear they kept dare
for public relations reasons." The school board has not
renewed any studies on the local dare program. Even after
Wysong and Aniskiewicz published their results, dare
continued to boast that an earlier California studyin
fact, the first study ever done on dareshowed that kids
who went through the program accepted drugs less often than
kids who had not gone through the program. The data also
showed that dare alumni reported using drugs less often.
This study, however, did not ring true to many researchers
because it had no pretest. In other words, students were
only surveyed after graduating from dare. Without measuring
drug use before dare, it's difficult to know whether or not
the students' behavior had changed. What is more, the study
last examined its subjects as seventhgraders, meaning it
never measured dare's longterm impact. "If you don't know
where your base is you really don't know anything," laughs
an Ivy League biologist who examined the methodology of the
California study. "My kid's science fair project with
plants and swinging lights was more rigid than this."

Another drug policy expert who has questioned dare is
Dick Clayton, a widely respected drug abuse researcher at
the University of Kentucky. In 1996, Clayton published, in
the journal Preventive Medicine, the most rigorous
longterm study ever performed on dare. Starting in
September 1987, Clayton surveyed schoolchildren in all of
the thirtyone elementary schools in Lexington, Kentucky.
The schools were randomly assigned to receive the dare
curriculum or to receive "no treatment." Students were
tested before going through the dare program, immediately
afterward and again each year through the spring of 1992.
Clayton's team found that any results from dare were
extremely shortlived. "Here it is in layman's terms: dare
is supposed to reduce drug use. In the long term, it does
not," Clayton says. Just before and after Clayton's release
of the twoyear data, more studies quietly began popping up
with similar results. In total, Clayton wrote in the 1996
book Intervening with DrugInvolved Youth, at least fifteen
studies were conducted. "Although the results from various
studies differ somewhat, all studies are consistent in
finding that dare does not have longterm effects on drug
use," he wrote. Among those studies was a 1990 Canadian
government report showing dare was less effective than
anyone imagined. The program, the Canadians reported, had
no effect on cutting abuse of any drug from aspirin to
heroin. (The Canadians were studying dare because the
program was becoming more popular abroad. Today, Lochridge
says, dare is used in fortynine foreign countries.)

As the number of debunking studies grew, something else
also grew: the number of researchers getting Dared. Take
the case of Daniel, a young professor at an Illinois
college. He asked that his last name not be used, since he
is up for tenure within the next two years and nervous
about adverse publicity. Daniel says he wants to study
behavioral programs that have political impact. While he
suspects that to improve his chances for tenure he should
study the behavior of lab animals, he's fascinated by "real
world" problems. "That's why Clayton's study appealed to
me," he says. "I thought here was a chance where people
like me can make a difference." Daniel designed and
performed a study of college freshmen. All of the freshmen
were instate students, but only some had attended dare.
Once again, Daniel's study found no meaningful difference
in drug use between students who had gone through dare and
students who hadn't. He did find, however, that dare
graduates were slightly more likely to drink alcohol
regularly for the purpose of getting drunk. Over lunch one
day, Daniel, proud of what he thought was an "important
finding for the Illinois school system," showed the data to
a colleague in a different department. "That was the
biggest mistake of my career," Daniel says. "That's
righteven bigger than sleeping through an oral exam in
graduate school." Daniel says that, within a week, a local
dare official called him at home and asked to see the data.
Daniel says he freely showed the information to him. That,
he says, resulted in a "big argument with lots of yelling."
Two weeks later Daniel says he received a call from his
department chairman. The chairman told him that the local
dare official had complained that Daniel was offering kids
marijuana as part of his study. Daniel says the allegations
are false, but that he immediately stopped work on the dare
study, and returned to lab animals. "That could have been,
and still might be, a career killer," Daniel says. "dare
has made it so I will never venture out of the lab again."

While it's not possible to say exactly how many
researchers have been Dared, it is clear from talking to
academics in the relevant fields that there are a number of
them. It's common knowledge among researchers that doing
dare studies can ruin a promising career. Wysong and David
W. Wright, a Wichita State University professor, wrote in
Sociological Focus that the dare researchers they had
interviewed "asked to remain anonymous out of fear of
political reprisals and to protect their careers."
Interviews with drug researchers support this statement. An
author of one prominent paper says he no longer studies
dare. "I needed my life back. I'm in research. My wife and
I couldn't take endless personal attacks," he told me. "You
want to know why I stopped researching dare? Write your
article and you'll see." Another researcher who was
critical of dare says he became so unpopular among fellow
professors he went into the private sector. "If you fight
dare, they make you out to look like you want kids to smoke
pot. I thought it was my duty to say the emperor is not
wearing any clothes," he says. "It was stupid of me to
think I could fight them. Everyone told me I couldn't, but
I tried. Here in the private sector I can start over." The
researcher says after he published his study, someone
etched the words "kid killer" and "drug pusher" into the
paint of his car.