BUZZKILL!

As Auditors Try To Figure Out How Jackson County Spends Its Anti-drug
Money, Perhaps An Investigator Should Ask A Kid.

Kids at this DARE event learn not to take anything from pushers --except
free pencils, crayons and anti-drug coloring books.

When you're an 18-year-old blonde in Lee's Summit, getting out of a
speeding ticket is so incredibly easy.

Buying drugs is even easier. But it takes a special talent to get out of a
ticket and buy drugs at the same time.

As Laura tells it, she was doing 55 in a 35 mph zone, just like she always
does, when the very same cop who always pulls her over stopped her again.
She waited in her convertible while the Lee's Summit officer returned to
his vehicle to run her driver's license information.

Laura was just minutes from her house, in the well-groomed neighborhood
where she grew up. In a few weeks, she would leave it for the first time to
attend college at a big state school.

While she waited on the policeman, Laura waved at her friend Dan, who was
in his yard, shouting distance away. He walked over and leaned into her window.

"Laura, what are you doing?" he asked.

"I need to buy from you," she said.

"All right, when you're done with him, pull around," he told her.

Fifteen minutes later, Laura was blazing down the road again, glancing in
her rearview mirror through Chanel sunglasses to make sure that the officer
was out of sight. The cop let her off with a warning, but her wallet was
$20 lighter thanks to the small wad of decent-grade pot that Dan had tucked
into her purse.

Marijuana barely registers as a drug for Laura and her friends. It's just
so routine, especially now that they've experimented with much more serious
shit, such as cocaine. She knows kids who blew a couple of lines before
accepting their diplomas at graduation.

Compared with some people she knows, Laura only dabbles in drugs. She cut
back on the coke after one of her friends had a major freakout in class
last semester and had to go to the hospital, then to therapy.

So there's a little pot in her purse, and a bottle of Smirnoff Ice barely
out of sight between the toilet and the counter in the bathroom, which she
has all to herself. Her bedroom is two full floors away from her parents;
she and her brother control the whole basement. A screen door in Laura's
room leads to the backyard, where a kidney-shaped pool overlooks a view of
boats on a lake adjoining the property, their masts sticking out of the
water like white straws. The privacy afforded to Laura and her friends Iris
and Quinn means they're free to smoke Marlboro Lights poolside while their
last high school summer drifts away.

Back in grade school, these girls -- Laura, Iris and Quinn aren't their
real names -- would not have been considered at "high risk" for drug use.
But in fifth grade they found themselves along the first line of defense in
the war on drugs.

The DARE program.

The Lee's Summit Police Department was the first in Missouri to adopt the
DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, in 1987. The program,
started by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1983, sends officers into
fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms to instruct students on how to make good
choices, build good self-esteem and say no to drugs.

But ask middle schoolers to explain what DARE is all about and they're
likely to respond with shrugs, if not outright laughter.

DARE draws giggles from these Lee's Summit girls who can more readily list
the drugs they've tried than the names of the boys they've kissed.

"You go first," says Iris, bumping Quinn with her shoulder.

"Ecstasy, 'shrooms. I've smoked, and I drink. That's pretty much it for
me," Quinn says.

Iris counts off on her fingers, "Cocaine, Ecstasy, mescaline, 'shrooms,
pot, opium -- "

"When did you do opium?" Quinn asks.

"Two weeks ago."

All three burst out laughing.

"With who?"

"My friend from work."

"Oh, shit!"

Laura glances at her friends with a guilty smile. "I've done cocaine ." She
corrects herself. "I do cocaine occasionally. It's, like, something fun
that I do. I don't purchase it, but a lot of my friends will have it, and
we'll do it occasionally. And, like, Xanax."

Ponytails nod all around. Everyone's tried Xanax, dipping from one friend
or another's prescription.

A slew of studies in the mid-'90s showed that DARE had little or no impact
on kids' drug use. In the corporate world, when your marketing strategy
fails this badly, you change the company's name.

Instead, DARE just gets more funding.

Jackson County's DARE program is paid for by COMBAT (the Community Based
Anti-Drug Tax), a quarter-cent sales tax that voters agreed to renew in
August 2003. DARE consumes a relatively small portion of the overall COMBAT
fund: DARE administrators expect to receive $1.29 million of 2004's
estimated COMBAT intake of $19,650,000.

Imagine that Laura's newly purchased pot represents the money generated
from the COMBAT sales tax. Of the green stuff in the baggie, 33 percent
goes to law enforcement and corrections. Prosecutors get 22 percent.
Treatment providers take 21 percent. Prevention programs, including but not
limited to DARE, get 24 percent.

The people who decide how to spend the treatment and prevention money are
the COMBAT commissioners -- Nancy Seelen of St. Luke's Health System;
Dorothy Kennedy, a retired teacher; Aasim Baheyadeen, a longtime activist;
Darrell Curls, chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Committee; Manuel
Perez Jr., an administrator from the Kansas City, Missouri, Health
Department; Gregory Grounds, a lawyer and former mayor of Blue Springs; and
John Readey III, a partner with the Bryan Cave law firm. Four other members
attend meetings but cannot vote because their programs receive COMBAT
funds: Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders; Independence Police Chief
Fred Mills; Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department Major Gregory Mills;
and Jackson County Sheriff Tom Phillips.

Each fall, COMBAT commissioners look at a conservative estimate of the next
year's sales tax and sift through applications submitted by treatment and
prevention program providers such as the Niles Home for Children, Move UP,
the Mattie Rhodes Center and the Guadalupe Center. The commissioners then
make funding recommendations to the Jackson County Legislature, which
ultimately decides how much money to give the programs.

But DARE doesn't undergo the COMBAT Commission's scrutiny, because it
qualifies for tax money automatically. Back in 1991, COMBAT administrators,
using their federal grant-matching capabilities, began earmarking funds for
DARE programs throughout Jackson County. In 1995, voters agreed to give
DARE "entitlement" status, meaning the program need not reapply for funds
every year through the COMBAT Commission the way other treatment and
prevention programs must. Instead, the police departments that provide DARE
officers send abbreviated applications to the COMBAT Commission's
headquarters at the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office, which also gives
DARE a pass.

Last August, when it came time for Jackson County officials to convince
voters to renew the COMBAT tax for another 7 years, the public-relations
component of their campaign strategy was easy to find.

"DARE was the puppy in the window" to sell COMBAT to voters, says Sgt.
Steve Seward, DARE supervisor for the Kansas City, Missouri, Police
Department. After all, DARE works toward COMBAT's first goal, to "prevent
youth experimentation with drugs." And who would vote against that?

Jackson County voters approved the tax 2-to-1, as they had in 1989 and
1995. But political scuffles over COMBAT in February of this year dragged
the entire tax under the scrutiny of federal investigators.

Jackson County Prosecutor Sanders kicked off the process when he called for
a state audit of COMBAT at a news conference on February 12, after a
meeting in which COMBAT commissioners approved a motion to review the tax
structure. County Executive Katheryn Shields, whose office appoints the
commissioners, agreed that a financial audit should be done but noted that
her office already does one every year. The next day, Sanders announced
that he was appointing an "audit committee," but he backed down after
Shields and County Legislature Chairman Scott Burnett sent a letter
advising Sanders that appointing such a committee was outside the
prosecutor's authority.

In March, Jackson County officials agreed to hire an outside firm to
complete a financial audit; its results are pending. The Legislature also
discussed ordering a performance audit that could take a year to complete,
but it hasn't selected a firm.

In the meantime, federal investigators have begun a wide-ranging inquiry
into Jackson County's operations and have asked to see documents relating
to COMBAT, according to County Executive Katheryn Shields' spokesman, Ken
Evans.

COMBAT's motto brags that it has been "making substance abuse history since
1989." And it flaunts DARE's figures: In the past decade, nearly half a
million fifth-graders have received drug-prevention training from nine
Jackson County programs.

Yet what stands out most to Laura, Iris and Quinn about DARE is how little
of it stands out at all.

"I don't remember anything about DARE except the DARE bear we passed
around," Laura says. "It was a big deal because when you asked a question,
you got to hold the bear. That's the only thing I think I got out of it."

"Wasn't it a lion?" Iris asks. After a moment she adds, "Mel Blunt."

"What?"

"That was our DARE officer's name. That's awesome."

Quinn stares at her. "His last name was Blunt? Shut up."

"It's weird," Iris continues. "I know it [DARE] sounds good, and I don't
personally know what would happen if I didn't go through it, if I was never
introduced to it, because I don't remember it," she says. "At that point in
time, you're young enough to know the word drugs, and drugs are bad, you
know, so they teach you the word weed and marijuana. And they ask you if
you know any slang words [for various drugs]. I remember that."

These girls know where their families stand in the socioeconomic universe.
They know, for instance, that Lee's Summit North High School is considered
a snob factory full of rich kids. No one has to beg for the keys to Dad's
car, but they might ask for the keys to the boat.

Iris defines her family as Republican, conservative and likely to be
shocked if they knew about the rainbow of drugs she has sampled. She says
the kids most likely to do drugs aren't necessarily the ones found in the
urban core. They are, as most adolescent health specialists understand,
kids with lots of money and even more free time. The typical drug user DARE
taught them about -- a smelly, dropout loser -- has been a myth so far.

"Like, the stereotypical 'You've got a whole bunch of fucked-up teenagers,'
that just isn't true anymore," Iris says. "I don't have a terrible home
life. I still do it. It has nothing to do with being unhappy. I mean, I'm
sure that's the reason I've done it sometimes, to escape reality, but most
of the time I want to go out and have fun with my girlfriends. It has
nothing to do with being upset or depressed."

There's more evidence of DARE's ineffectiveness out on a small ranch near
Longview Community College, where a two-kegger is chugging deep into one
recent Saturday night.

In the kitchen of the little white house, which is surrounded by stars and
mosquitoes and cattle, a new drinking game has just been invented, and it's
Laura's turn. One sunburned boy in a plaid shirt instructs Laura to throw a
spoon at a counter crowded with enough bottles to make Jim Beam puke.

"Whichever bottle you hit, that's what you gotta take a shot of," he says.

She tosses the spoon, which knocks over a shot glass full of something
amber-colored before ricocheting off a bottle of gin.

"Looks like it's gin!" the boy announces. Behind him, two guys in T-shirts
and cowboy hats discuss the night's plans to go muddin'.

"We drive trucks into the mud and try to get 'em stuck," one cowboy
explains. His shirt reads: "I didn't ask you to dance, I said you look fat
in those pants!"

His friend continues, "Yeah, and if one gets stuck, we drag it out with
another truck."

A quick poll of the kitchen reveals that this cornfed faction of Lee's
Summit North grads likes the DARE program about as much as they like
wearing tiaras.

"DARE is so gay," says one of the boys. "It made marijuana look like a
drug. It ain't a drug like other things are drugs."

His friend agrees. "It doesn't work worth a shit. It made me want to smoke
pot more."

Outside on the deck, the party doesn't require trucks or mud, only red Solo
cups, two kegs and a few 24-packs of Bud Light. It's so packed with kids
that opening the screen door causes a tidal wave of movement.

"Everyone you see here is a DARE graduate," says one 19-year-old, sweeping
one hand over the general direction of the patio table, which is covered
with empty cups and beer cans and manned by five or six of his friends. "In
junior year, things changed," he says. "We went from beer and pot to having
cocaine come around. A lot. I never saw anything like meth or heroin or
crack, but a lot of 'shrooms and X."

A girl in an aqua halter laughs at the mention of DARE. "It totally doesn't
work," she says. "It was stupid. We were little kids. And isn't coffee a drug?"

"I'm wasted!" the boy next to her announces. "I've been drinking since 11
today."

His buddy high-fives him. "That's how we do it!"

As if heralded by the mention of drugs, the stubby end of a blunt floats
its way from hand to hand on the patio as people hit it, cough and pass it
along.

Around midnight, a fight breaks out and the host kicks out the remaining
guests. But partyable hours remain, and so as kids hop in their cars and
pickup trucks, they campaign for the best after-hours plans. One guy calls
out that they're going to his house to smoke more pot. "There's a pool at
mine!" says a girl.

If this class of DARE grads seems a little disappointing, the
administrators at DARE America's headquarters in Los Angeles might point
out that these kids went through the old DARE. The "new" DARE has made
important changes, based on studies by researchers from the University of
Akron.

The new curriculum is DARE's way of addressing the chorus of critics who
began pointing out the program's inherent flaws in the mid-'90s. The Center
for Prevention Research at the University of Kentucky found that DARE
actually caused increases of drug use among teens. A common complaint is
that DARE's core fifth-grade audience is too young and that officers are
unwittingly stoking kids' curiosity when they get into the pharmacological
aspects and effects of drugs. ("Ralphie sees sounds and hears colors!")

The changes in DARE are "dramatic," says Lt. Ed Moses of the Missouri
Highway Patrol. Moses is chief administrator of the DARE Academy in
Jefferson City, which trains Missouri's DARE officers.

"The new version is much more interactive, and the officer does much more
facilitating instead of presenting," he tells the Pitch. Now kids are
encouraged to work in groups to come up with ways of dealing with the
hypothetical situations presented in their colorful DARE workbooks rather
than sitting mutely as a police officer lectures on the shame of drug use.

The new DARE doesn't negate the old program's value, Moses says. "The old
curriculum is still good and still has its benefits ... but it has been
found that there's stronger retention of material when a student is
involved with working with the material."

Some things look different, sure. The amorphous, blobby characters that
populated the DARE workbooks of the '90s have been replaced with colorful
illustrations of diverse groups of kids skateboarding and writing rap
music. But samples from the new curriculum displayed on DARE's Web site --
such as peer-pressure exercises in which kids take turns being the drug
pusher and the drug refuser -- would still sound familiar to anyone who
graduated from the old program.

There are other changes, though. Instead of spending 17 weeks going through
DARE in fifth grade, kids now sit through it for 10 weeks in fifth grade
and 10 more in seventh grade. This allows police to revisit kids they saw
in fifth grade to reinforce what officers told them the first time around.

But DARE's claim to be new and improved is an old strategy, too: DARE also
purported to have reinvented itself back in 1994.

Besides, DARE can be all things to all people. Moses stresses that DARE was
never entirely focused on drugs. Post-Columbine, for example, DARE
introduced a component that teaches kids that it's wrong to be a bully.
There's even a way to tie DARE to the Department of Homeland Security.
"It's a possibility the program could be more security-conscious because of
the fear that terrorists might target schools, as they have in other
countries," he says.

Any good educational curriculum re-evaluates itself every 3 or 4 years,
says Moses. But an ever-changing program also presents an ever-confounding
problem for DARE's critics: If DARE's success was questionable 5 years ago,
well, that was the old DARE -- it's different now.

Moreover, the changes don't stop the program from being a massive joke
among kids old enough to know better, according to Laura and her friends.
In fact, the way they explain their own drug use shows that they've
employed DARE-like decision-making techniques to rationalize it.

They say that experimenting with a palette of mind-altering substances in
high school's protective bubble is better than making big drug mistakes in
college, which costs, like, money.

"Laura and I were talking about this the other day," Iris says. "We haven't
done one thing we've regretted. I mean, everything I've done or tried, I
can say I did it, and I know how I felt on it, and I can say, 'I don't want
to do that.' Smoking opium was the scariest thing I've ever done. Didn't
know who I was, didn't remember anything, and I'll never do it again,
because I hated the feeling. And now I know that throughout my life, if
someone asks me to do it, I won't feel the pressure again, because I've
done it, I tried it, and I know how I felt. So I actually feel kind of
sorry for people who haven't experienced or tried things, because they'll
go into the real world, and stuff's going to hit 'em, and they won't know
what to do."

COMBAT Program Director Jim Nunnelly says that DARE works in Jackson County
because it has COMBAT's network of treatment and enforcement efforts
backing it up.

He's quick to cite a 2003 survey of DARE students' parents, which he
commissioned from Wayne Lucas, a sociology professor at the University of
Missouri-Kansas City.

"No one had ever asked the parents," Nunnelly says. "I particularly went to
a research group and asked, 'Why don't we just ask the parents what kind of
changes they see in their kid, and then we will judge whether or not this
program is working.' That's what we did. I didn't want a national study. I
wanted to ask here."

The survey reports that parents saw improvement in their child's desire to
go to school on the days the child's DARE officer was there. More than 80
percent said that their children thought more highly of police officers.
And though some parents wrote comments registering their skepticism or
noting that they already had taught their children about the dangers of
drugs, most generally rated DARE as having been "helpful" to their families.

According to the Kauffman Teen Survey, there's been an overall decline in
drug abuse by Kansas City teenagers since the late 1990s, which follows the
national trend. The survey has polled eighth-, tenth- and twelfth-graders
every year since 1984. The survey's 2002-2003 results were released on May 10.

Disturbingly, though, the most recent survey found that "Eighth-graders --
the youngest teenagers surveyed -- have increased their use of alcohol,
marijuana, PCP, inhalants, uppers and Ecstasy since the 2001-2002 survey."

David Kingsley just completed an audit of the Kauffman survey. Kingsley is
the head of Lawrence research firm Geodemographic Resources and
Information. His background is in treatment and prevention programs, and he
has been analyzing the Kauffman results for the Partnership for Children.
He says that even though Kansas City's teenagers might be at or below
national levels for drug abuse, drug-education programs for schoolchildren
still miss the mark. Self-esteem is not a curriculum you can teach, he
says, and blanket programs like DARE really reach only the kids who were
least likely to get caught up in drugs in the firs place. He wonders how
DARE administrators could possibly measure its real impact.

"I think if you're a suburban parent, you want someone making sure your
child doesn't do drugs," Kingsley says. "It gives them a sense of comfort
to say someone's in there doing something." But the kids who get sucked
into drug culture are showing symptoms of underlying problems that plague
inner-city kids and suburban kids alike, Kingsley says. "When an officer
comes in, I don't think that officer is going to reach those kids who are
at high risk for dropping out of school, being truant, for having friends
who are also doing the same things."

Nunnelly, of COMBAT, doesn't disagree that aspects of his program are
lacking. "If there's a part that isn't being done like it should be done,
it's youth development," he says. "It's been shown that when kids are
actively involved in developmental activities, they don't even think about
drugs.... If you've got a strong constitution and you're involved in the
community and you're developing yourself, even if you're just taking piano
lessons on Saturday morning, that's youth development and that's the part
we're not emphasizing quite enough. That's real drug prevention. That's
where it's at."

Nunnelly doesn't ask the kids themselves what they think of DARE.

Other experts do, though.

Preston Washington is the director of clinical services for the National
Council of Alcohol and Drug Dependence, a referral resource for the Kansas
City metropolitan area. Young adults who get in trouble with drugs are sent
to Washington's office, sometimes referred by schools and sometimes by the
courts. When he interviews them, Washington asks what they remember from DARE.

Some tell him, "I was a little kid" or "They mean well" or "You mean that
cop program?"

"That lets me know, as a clinician, that the peer group takes over and
becomes pretty powerful, and things get kicked out the window and out the
door, and DARE might be one of those things," Washington says. "Curiosity
is so strong, and it overcomes a lot, especially with adolescents.
Curiosity along with peer pressure."

Some kids could write textbooks about drugs. In fact, they're most eager to
share their knowledge about the things they're supposed to understand least.

For instance, Laura's 18-year-old friend Adam is happy to demonstrate how
easy it is for a kid his age to buy cocaine. On the Plaza. At Starbucks. On
a weekday afternoon in August, Adam is sitting on the deck at Starbucks
with an older man who is wearing sunglasses. The man sucks on a cinnamon
latte and dispenses some cautionary words, something about how people
usually use drugs to tamp down unpleasant emotions or to escape other
struggles in their lives. Then he shakes Adam's hand, palms the roll of $20
bills from the kid's hand and coolly rises from the table. He returns in
minutes with a pack of Parliaments.

Adam takes the cigarette pack and peeks inside. "Oh. Matches," he says. The
assortment of Starbucks patrons -- the student reading Salman Rushdie and
the couple chatting by the railing -- are oblivious to the drug deal one
table away.

When Adam makes it safely back to his car, behind tinted windows, he pulls
a book of matches out of the Parliament pack and fishes from it a tiny
Ziploc bag. Adam tilts the bag and watches the fine, white powder shift
around inside. "It's easier to buy coke than it is to buy alcohol," he
says. "How absolutely ludicrous."

He dips the end of a house key into the bag and lifts it to his nose.
Sniff. Then he starts his car and twists the volume on his stereo. Britney
Spears' "Toxic" comes blasting on -- Too high, can't come down, losing my
head, spinning 'round and 'round.

"This is my coke song," Adam says cheerfully, pulling into traffic. A few
blocks later, he becomes thoughtful. "You know, maybe he [the drug dealer]
is right that the reason people do drugs a lot is to cover stuff up. But
other people can do it recreationally and just have a good time.

"One of the things I remember about DARE was this case the police officer
had," Adam continues. "And it had all kinds of drugs in it and
paraphernalia, and they'd be like, 'Have you seen things like this at
home?' because a kid will just say anything, like, 'Oh, yeah, my mom has
that.' It's just a way to bust parents and tear families apart. There are
some people who are just going to do drugs. There's no stopping it."

Adam's pretty sure that Laura's first time doing cocaine was with him. They
like flipping through the Lee's Summit North 2004 yearbook, which has the
cryptic title Slightly Torn, and pointing out the cokeheads.

Laura and her friends report that they have a friend or two whose drug use
concerns them. Laura worries about Adam. He was supposed to stay with her
on her first night at college to keep her company, but he didn't. She is
afraid that when he's in Lee's Summit without her, he'll continue to employ
his Starbucks hookup.

As far as their own drug use goes, the girls figure they'll be able to stop
when they're ready. It's no thanks to the DARE program, but hey, if Jackson
County taxpayers want to keep spending more than a million dollars a year
on it ...

"Go for it," Iris says.

"So they can say that it makes our community look good," Quinn says.

"So they can say they tried," Laura says.

Back at the ranch, one of the guys goin' muddin' offers a much less
expensive approach.

"Show middle school kids Requiem for a Dream," he says, referring to the
nightmarish 2000 heroin flick starring Jared Leto. In the movie, addiction
tortures four characters. One finds herself performing sex acts for drugs.
Another's perfect deal goes south, and he winds up in prison. Ellen
Burstyn, as Leto's mother, becomes addicted to amphetamines disguised as
diet pills and receives shock therapy. Leto's character has an arm
amputated after needle tracks leave it infected beyond repair. After
watching all that, the mudder says, middle school kids "won't touch the
rest of that shit."

Something so easy, however, wouldn't help Jackson County administrators and
law enforcement offers sell the COMBAT tax.