EIGHT SIMPLE STEPS TO PUT CHILDREN ON A STRAIGHT PATH

Years ago, I lived in Nova Scotia. I was in Grade 4 when a RCMP officer
came to our school to teach us all about bicycle and pedestrian safety. The
rules at our school were basic and fundamental.

Take the bicycle safety course and you could ride your bike to school.
Don't take the course and you don't ride your bike to school.

In giving this course, the diligent officer also taught us about what to do
if we came across bullets, a gun and so on and what to do.

He also told us what to do if we came across a needle and things that
looked liked pills, and drugs. It was this basic education that paid off
later on when summer arrived. One of the kids on my block came across a
needle one day. He wanted to pick it up, but I told him not to. We told his
parents, who phoned the police. It turned out to be a drug needle, half
full of speed.

I believe that this basic safety education could have been called the early
years of the DARE program. DARE stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education.
I would like to share with you some invaluable information.

DARE'S mission is to help kids resist drugs and violence, with an immediate
objective to deliver the program to every Grade 5 and 6 student in Canada.
The long-term objective is to provide the follow-up DARE program to every
student in junior and senior high school in Canada, providing students a
refresher course on the skills and attitude they developed in the previous
curriculum.

The following are eight reasons to consider DARE:

* In Ontario alone, $11 billion each year is spent on the treatment of
drug- and alcohol-related programs.

* The majority of all crime is related to drugs and alcohol.

* Schools and other community organizations must use their own resources to
deal with drug and alcohol issues.

* One-quarter of all hospital beds in Ontario are used for drug- and
alcohol-related patients.

* Significant sums of money are lost each year in reduced productivity due
to employee drug and alcohol problems.

* Drug and alcohol abuse has become so prevalent that parents are having
difficulties coping with the problems that many of their children face as a
result of peer pressure.

* The DARE program, fully implemented, will save countless lives and
personal tragedies (not to mention billions of dollars) as a result of
drug- and alcohol-related problems in Canada.

* Helping kids you know to resist drugs and violence.

Tyler J. Moffitt Safety advocate