This Is Your Country on Drugs:

HOW THE DARE GENERATION GOT HIGH

The following is an excerpt from Ryan Grim's new book, "This Is Your
Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America (Wiley,
2009).

In the summer of 1999, the sixties generation celebrated itself by
throwing a concert to mark Woodstock's thirtieth anniversary. The
do-over event was organized by the same ponytailed businessman who'd
put the first one together, and typical of something organized by an
aging boomer, it was a corporate shit show. Pizza sold for six
dollars a slice, and in the middle of a heat wave, water cost four
dollars for a tiny bottle. For those who couldn't make it to the
concert in upstate New York -- at a Superfund-listed former U.S. Air
Force base -- the entire festival was available on pay-per-view.

More than 200,000 young people did show up, though. And unlike their
gate-crashing parents, they paid $150 each to get in.

The sixties crowd might have lost their idealism somewhere along the
way, but their children showed some antiestablishment -- or at least
antisocial -- spirit on the last day of the festival, breaking into a
riot, setting fires, looting vendor booths and ATMs, and allegedly
raping four female concertgoers.

It's a notorious instance of the way that boomers' children
simultaneously embraced and rejected the mythology of the sixties. A
less-well-known manifestation of that attitude involves those kids'
drug use: during the mid- to late nineties, American teens got as
high as any group of young folks since the seventies, right under the
noses of the people who had kicked off the last national indulgence.

For most of American history, drug-use trends among younger and older
people have moved roughly in harmony -- if not to the same degree,
then at least in the same direction. The late sixties were an
exception: use rose first among college students and then increased
among high schoolers and the rest of the country. Since then, young
people have been the leading indicator of drug trends.

The next deviation was in the nineties. In 1991, eighth-graders,
according to their answers to the University of Michigan Monitoring
the Future survey category concerning "any illicit drug," started
getting high more often. But no other segment of the population did.
The next year, eighth-, tenth-, and twelfth-graders all showed
increases in use, while college-student and adult use remained
largely flat. The trend continued over the next few years, as middle-
and high-school students continued to show more drug use while older
groups' use remained steady.

By 1996, tenth-graders were doing more drugs than their adult
counterparts. In 1997, their use equaled that of college students; by
1998, it had eclipsed college-age use. The wave broke that year, as
eighth-graders finally reported a decline in drug use. As those
younger kids grew up, they took their temperate ways with them, and
at the very end of the decade, use among tenth- and twelfth-graders
took a downturn. By 2004, tenth-graders were once again using drugs
less often than college students and adults. The party didn't
completely die down, however: Twelfth-grade use, even while eighth-
and tenth-grade use fell, stayed roughly constant.

The Michigan researchers who first noticed the trend call it a
"cohort effect." The pattern is clearly visible moving through the
charts over time. Take cocaine use: among eighth-graders, it rose
from 1991 to 1998; among tenth- and twelfth-graders, from 1992 until
1999; among college students, beginning in 1994; and among young
adults, starting in 1996. Clearly, these are the same people doing coke.

Understanding why begins with recognizing that the survey numbers are
only a partial reflection of the reality of drug distribution and consumption.

If the availability and price of a drug are constant yet its use goes
up or down, it means that a couple of different things could be
happening. Perhaps a new drug has hit the streets and has begun to
corner the market on a particular kind of high. Or maybe the change
isn't economic but cultural, with changes in use reflecting new
levels of approval or disapproval for a certain substance.

The forces that drive these phenomena can be captured only roughly by
the Michigan survey, which asked kids about their personal
disapproval of using a drug even once, and about the amount of
perceived risk associated with taking a drug. If an antidrug campaign
actually works, surveys should first show attitudes hardening against
the drug, then a decline in its use. In a pro-drug environment,
attitudes will soften -- users will see less risk in trying a drug
once and will disapprove of it less -- and then, a few years later,
use will predictably rise.

The survey also measures "perceived availability," which can affect
drug trends as well. Many younger users, studies have shown, get
their drugs from other casual users, rather than from a specific
dealer. So when there are more casual users of a drug, there are more
sources for other casual users. As use declines, those sources
disappear and the trend feeds on itself, further bringing use down.
When use of a drug goes down among a group of casual users, perceived
availability follows it. However, if perceived availability declines
at the same time as, or before, a registered drop in use, then the
reduction is probably supply- rather than demand-driven.

In the early nineties, kids reported that the supply of their
favorite drugs was steady. It was demand that was up.

In a span of five years in the early nineties, "personal disapproval"
of marijuana fell by a fifth. Disapproval dropped first for
eighth-graders, a year before their use increased, and the same
pattern held for the older kids. The number of young people who
thought that the drug is dangerous also dropped significantly. Both
beliefs are leading indicators in the survey: when kids don't
disapprove and aren't afraid of a given drug, a rise in use is on the way.

The high-school class of 1996 was the first one to increase its use
of drugs since the across-the-boards decline of the eighties. That
group of students had entered kindergarten around 1983, the same year
that the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, now D.A.R.E.
America, was founded by Los Angeles Police Department chief Daryl Gates.

The idea behind D.A.R.E. is simple. If drug use spreads like a virus,
the thinking goes, then inoculating children before they're exposed
could slow the spread. Early on, however, D.A.R.E.'s creators made a
decision that has been critical to both its success and its failure:
they chose cops as the ones to deliver the vaccine. The current
course includes some essay writing and test taking, but it's mostly
about watching and listening as a uniformed officer conducts an
intentionally frightening version of show-and-tell.

Using cops as the public face of the organization -- though not
surprising, given Gates's background -- won it a vocal and
politically popular champion. Police forces appreciated the rare
opportunity to forge relationships with children outside the
cops-and-robbers matrix. The police officer as public servant is a
role cops understandably enjoy playing. "D.A.R.E. 'humanizes' the
police: that is, young people can begin to relate to officers as
people," offers the organization's promotional material. "D.A.R.E.
permits students to see officers in a helping role, not just an
enforcement role."

Officers chosen to be part of the program first go through eighty
hours of training in child development, classroom management, and
teaching. Those who take on high-school classes get an additional
forty hours' worth. Though versions of the program are available for
all grades, D.A.R.E. concentrates on fifth- and sixth-graders. The
curriculum is highly standardized, with seventeen sessions focusing
on the dangers of drugs and drug addiction, as well as the "Three
R's": "Recognize, Resist and Report." The officer shows the kids what
drugs look like and tells stories of lives ruined or ended. He or she
teaches students how to avoid peer pressure and how to build their
own "self-esteem" -- which, it's assumed, will give kids the strength
to say no.

D.A.R.E. cops often stick around for lunch and recess to talk further
with their kids about drugs -- and much else. As a 1988 federal
Bureau of Justice Assistance study explains, "Students have an
opportunity to become acquainted with the officer as a trusted friend
who is interested in their happiness and welfare. Students
occasionally tell the officer about problems such as abuse, neglect,
alcoholic parents, or relatives who use drugs."

The campaign has succeeded on many fronts, as any parent who's been
scolded for drinking by a young child knows all too well. And it has
inspired more than mere scolding. In 1992, a Maryland girl told her
D.A.R.E. officer that her parents were growing pot, and they each
spent thirty days in jail, according to the Washington Post. Two kids
in Boston reported their parents the same year; the year before, a
Colorado child called 911 and said, "I'm a D.A.R.E. kid," then told
the operator about a baggie of pot that he'd found. A nine-year-old
Georgian called the cops after stumbling on some speed in his
parents' bedroom. "At school, they told us that if we ever see drugs,
call 911 because people who use drugs need help," said Darrin Davis
to a reporter for the Dallas Morning News. "I thought the police
would come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong. They
never said they would arrest them."