ANTI-DRUG PROGRAMS FAIL TO MAKE THE GRADE

The nation's schools pour $1 billion a year into ineffective
drug-prevention programs.

High school students are no smarter about saying no to illicit drugs
than their parents were -- despite the billions of dollars that the
nation's schools have pumped into drug-prevention programs.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse has tracked illicit drug use
since 1976. Then, 58 percent of high school seniors used an illicit
drug. Today, 30 years later, 52 percent have.

The numbers have bounced around, dropping to a low of 40 percent in
1992. "The trend rises and falls, and we have no clue why," Richard
Clayton, at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health, told
the Los Angeles Times.

But researchers do know this: DARE, or Drug Abuse Resistance
Education, doesn't work. Yet schools remain hooked.

The federal government some years ago dropped DARE from the approved
list of anti-drug programs in which schools can use federal funds.
But, as the Times reported, DARE is still used in 70 percent of U.S. schools.

Programs that rely on a simplistic, anecdotal curriculum and imply
wide use of illicit drugs are equally ineffective and may actually
nudge kids toward drug use. University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill researchers reported in 2002 that only 35 percent of public
schools and 13 percent of private schools had effective programs.

Drug-prevention programs should reflect local circumstances. The
needs of an urban system where kids sling dope in the hallways differ
from a suburban district where kids raid the medicine cabinet.

Further, researchers find effective programs incorporate role-playing
and relevant information about drugs rather than push scare tactics
and a blanket disapproval of all drugs and alcohol. Kids are confused
by anti-drug programs that oversimplify that all drugs are bad,
teaching that all drinking is bad for instance, even though they see
their parents sip an occasional glass of wine.

Parents, unsurprisingly, have more influence than school programs on
whether their children use illicit drugs. Still society expects, and
the government demands, that schools teach drug prevention. With the
cost exceeding $1 billion a year, kids should be learning what they
need to know.