SCARED STRAIGHT? OR JUST SCARED?

Do Elementary School Anti-Drug Campaigns Work?

One day last summer, my seven year-old came home from day camp in
tears. After much coaxing, she revealed that she'd seen an anti-drug
presentation that day.

"They said drugs can kill you, and that wine is a drug," she wailed.
"And Daddy drinks wine." She was convinced that her father was
courting death when he downed his glass of Shiraz each night at
dinner, and it took several days' worth of debriefing to convince her
otherwise.

At the time, I tried to view the experience philosophically. The camp
she was attending served kids with a variety of special
needs--physical disabilities, learning disabilities, emotional
problems--along with a sizable contingent of "at-risk" (i.e., poor,
inner-city) kids. Overall, it was a fantastic, inclusive program, and
while my child had never heard of drugs before that day, it's likely
that some of her campmates had already confronted the issue, or would
do so soon. So who was I to say that seven-year-olds didn't need to
be preemptively scared straight?

But just a couple of months later, we were hit with a full-on
anti-drug propaganda blitz. A notice came home from the counselor at
the small private school my two daughters attend, announcing Red
Ribbon Week: five solid days of "age-appropriate" drug abuse
prevention activities that, the flyer promised, would build our
children's self-esteem and educate them about the dangers of illicit
substances. At the same time, little red ribbons began to appear on
school fences, public and private, all across the city: Red Ribbon
Week, I soon learned, is one of the most widespread anti-drug events
in the country. One day, the kids at our school all wore funny hats.
Another day, they came to school dressed as what they want to be when
they grow up (the lesson being, I suppose, that if you get high,
you'll never make it as a Disney princess). They learned anti-drug
chants. The fifth-graders put on a play, "Little Red Ribbon Hood," in
which the big bad wolf tries to get the protagonist to huff spray
paint, smoke cigarettes and drink. And they all made handprint
pictures inscribed with a solemn pledge: "These hands will never touch drugs."

Frankly, all this stuff made me squirm. But I tend to overcomplicate
issues that seem perfectly straightforward to normal people, and I
knew there was no way I could lodge a complaint with the school about
this. I could just picture the hurt, shocked look on the counselor's
face if I questioned her efforts. "But we're only trying to keep your
children off drugs," she'd say. "Are you saying you want them to take
drugs?" So I held my tongue. My kids seemed to enjoy the activities
and to find the "Drugs are bad--don't do drugs" message palatable
enough, and my kindergartner was unperturbed. But my second-grader
continued to get anxious if anyone said the word "drugs" around her.
"Don't talk about that!" she'd shriek, covering her ears. Now, nearly
a year later, she still harbors the fear that she will be one day
forced to take drugs. For her, drugs have become just another
childhood bogeyman. She doesn't quite believe me when I tell her not
to worry about it.

But she hasn't yet asked any of the really hard questions--unlike my
friend's exceptionally bright kindergartner, who came home from his
first day of Red Ribbon Week asking all manner of uncomfortably
probing (but eminently reasonable) questions, like "If drugs kill
you, Mommy, then why do people take drugs?" He's a persistent tyke,
and because she doesn't like to flat-out lie to him, she found
herself admitting that people take drugs to feel good, and that
marijuana is actually legal in some countries. "He ended up asking me
if I thought a close friend of our family, who is European, has ever
smoked pot," she said. "What could I say? I've smoked pot. Our friend
has probably smoked pot within the past month. And he's still alive.
Does my son really need to work through that at age five?"

Like most of the thoughtful parents I know, my friend is a bit
ambivalent about the whole anti-drug thing--even as she worries that
her authority-questioning kid will turn out to be a hopeless stoner
one day. Certainly drugs are bad, and I will be quite content if my
girls don't smoke pot, snort crushed-up Ritalin tablets, or binge
drink when they're teenagers, just as I'll be pleased if they don't
join Campus Crusade for Christ or get their tongues pierced. But all
too often, these anti-drug programs seem to put parents in an
impossible position: We must either agree with pronouncements and
propaganda we know to be false or exaggerated, or we must engage our
children in awkward conversations about complex subjects they are too
young to understand. And while it's a simple matter to get kids under
ten to accept black-and-white pronouncements like "Drugs kill you" or
"Don't tell lies" or "Beauty is only skin deep," I wondered what
would happen when they hit middle school, and the costumes and
handprints are forgotten or despised as relics of childhood. And what
happens the first time they meet someone who admits to having tried
pot and is, miraculously, still alive?

If someone could demonstrate that these scare tactics and charades
will do any good when the time comes for my daughters to actually
turn down their friend's mom's OxyContin, I would find them more
palatable. But as Red Ribbon Week crescendoed to the "Red Ribbon
Rally" (skits, poems, raps, and songs), I had a gloomy suspicion that
in the long run, its message might turn out to be worse than useless.
After all, I'm a member of the "Just Say No" generation, and all I
remember about that reprogramming effort was having a good laugh at
it while feeling rather ... merry. I wanted to know if anti-drug
programs had become any more effective--or any less ridiculed by
their youthful targets--than they had been when I was coming up. I
wanted to know if there was any good reason to start lecturing kids
about dope in kindergarten (and if there mightn't be a way of doing
so that would generate less fear and confusion). And I did, despite
my crotchety attitude, genuinely want to know if there was anything
I, the school, the government, or anyone else could do to prevent my
kids from becoming hard-core drug addicts one day.

To be sure, most parents wouldn't deny we have a problem with drug
use among teens. By twelfth grade, 48.2 percent of American kids will
have tried illicit drugs (including alcohol) at least once, according
to 2006 data gathered by the University of Michigan's Monitoring the
Future project, a government-funded study that has tracked rates of
youth substance abuse for more than thirty years. That's a decrease
from 1999, when that number was 54.7 percent, but (barring some sort
of massive social upheaval) it is a near certainty that a significant
proportion of grade-schoolers will one day break their sweet
handprint promises. Not to pursue a life of hopeless addiction,
necessarily, but perhaps to smoke pot a few (or a few dozen) times,
and, if current trends continue, to use prescription drugs cadged
from the family medicine cabinet to get high (a new pastime known as
"pharming"). Some of them will try terrifying adolescent stunts like
huffing or the "choking game," in which you asphyxiate yourself to
the point of getting a head rush (and, in a few horrible instances,
to the point of death).

But mostly, they will drink. Despite the hype over marijuana,
ecstasy, and meth, alcohol remains by far the most common
mood-altering substance used by adolescents: in 2006, about 45
percent of twelfth graders and 17 percent of eighth graders had taken
a drink in the previous thirty days, according to Monitoring the
Future data; the corresponding numbers for marijuana use are 18 and 6
percent. Twelfth-grade lifetime usage figures for hard drugs like
cocaine, ecstasy, and methamphetamine are in the 1 and 2 percent
range, and even lower for heroin. Even at the height of the crack
epidemic of the late 1980s, only 5.4 percent of seniors had tried it.
Just like my daughter's camp counselors told her, alcohol is a
drug--and it is far more likely to get her in trouble one day than
any other substance (except perhaps, in the long-term, nicotine, the
other state-sanctioned drug). Youth drug prevention as we now know it
got its start in the 1980s, with Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No"
campaign, a response to a rate of teenage drug use that reached an
all-time high in 1981, when 65.6 percent of high school seniors
reported on Monitoring the Future surveys that they had tried illicit
drugs. Hard on the heels of Just Say No was the founding in 1983 of
D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a national nonprofit
organization that now sends trained police officers into 75 percent
of the nation's school districts to teach kids, usually fifth and
sixth graders, about the dangers of drugs. Three years later, in
1986, came the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, a coalition of
advertising people interested in using their marketing skills pro
bono to discourage youth drug abuse. The Partnership made its first
big splash with the "This is Your Brain on Drugs" spots--which, of
course, gave rise to endless ironic jokes made while sucking on a
bong--and followed up with classics like the ad that depicted a girl
diving into an empty swimming pool and the one in which the actress
Rachael Leigh Cook smashes up a kitchen to demonstrate the
proposition that "this is your brain on heroin."

While incorrigible stoners may have giggled at such excesses, from
the point of view of the nascent drug prevention movement, these
efforts seemed to be working. By 1991, the number of high school
seniors who had tried illicit drugs dropped to 44.1 percent.
Marijuana use declined from 60.4 percent in 1979 to 32.6 percent in
1992. And a couple of years later, when television stations became
increasingly reluctant to donate the airtime needed to show
Partnership ads, rates began to creep back up again, with marijuana
use climbing to 49.6 percent in 1997, and general illicit substances
to 54.7 percent in 1999. Both the initial drop and the subsequent
rise seemed to indicate that the ads and the in-school programs like
D.A.R.E., Project ALERT and Red Ribbon Week, which got its start in
1985, had worked.

The government, at least, was convinced enough of a cause-and-effect
relationship that the Office of National Drug Control Policy
(ONDCP)--the Drug Czar's office--teamed up in 1998 with the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America to create the National Youth
Anti-drug Media Campaign, which would slot Partnership ads into
airtime bought with public money--some $1.4 billion over the next
eight years. And presto: today, youth drug use is once again trending
down. Data from 2006 showed lifetime marijuana use at 42.3 percent
among twelfth graders and "any illicit drug" at 48.2 percent,
continuing a decline that began around 2000.

So, good news, right? We're on the right track: we just need more and
better ads, cop lectures, and skits and we can rest assured that our
kids won't end up burnouts.

If only it were so simple. While massive, long-term surveys like
Monitoring the Future and the Department of Health and Human
Services' National Survey on Drug Use and Health are considered a
reliable measure of trends in drug use, it's not so easy to
definitively identify the causes behind the shifting numbers. As with
the steep drop in the violent crime rate that began in the early
1990s, which has been chalked up to everything from tougher
sentencing laws to legalized abortion, changing rates of youth drug
use could be due to any number of causes: economic, cultural and
political trends; geopolitical events affecting drug pricing and
availability; the coming of age of the "echo boom" generation; or a
combination of factors.

As it turns out, numerous university and government studies have
found D.A.R.E.--by far the country's most widespread school-based
drug education program--useless in preventing youth drug use in the
long-term. A six-year University of Illinois study released in 1998
reported that suburban kids who had taken part in D.A.R.E. had
"significantly higher levels of drug use" than those who hadn't.

And in 2005, a five-year, $42.7 million, government-funded study by
the University of Pennsylvania and Westat, Inc., a Rockville,
Maryland, research corporation, concluded that the Youth Anti-Drug
Media Campaign was totally ineffectual at preventing drug use by teens.

The Westat study, which surveyed between 2,000 and 4,000 nine- to
eighteen-year-olds each year for four years, found that exposure to
the ads led to higher rates of marijuana initiation among non-users,
a result known as the "boomerang effect." While self-reporting has
obvious limitations for pinpointing the number of kids using drugs at
a given time (kids reported their attitudes and drug use on in-home
touch-screen surveys; they can easily lie) it is considered more
reliable as a measure of change in use over time, because if they are
lying, they are likely to do so with some consistency on each year's
survey, unless there's a major cultural shift.

Robert Orwin, Westat's principal investigator on the study, says that
he and his colleagues were surprised to find that the Media Campaign
produced a boomerang effect, but they "couldn't make it go away." He
offered a theory on why it might be so. "The message was that drugs
are bad for you; don't do drugs," he says. "The meta-message was that
a government agency is spending all this money and all this effort to
tell me how bad drugs are, so everybody must be using drugs."

Orwin is also critical of the "Reefer Madness"-style hysteria of some
of the ads. (For the record, he believes that it is dangerous for
kids to smoke pot.) Particularly memorable was the ad in which one
tween blows another away with his father's gun after the two are seen
smoking pot. In another TV spot, some stoned kids in an S.U.V. run
over a little girl on a tricycle. Orwin suspects that many teenagers,
who "aren't stupid," viewed much of this rhetoric as pure comedy.
"The ONDCP and the Partnership claimed that they copy-tested the ads
with kids, trying to get their near-term reactions, and that the kids
liked the ads," he says. "I found that hard to believe. If the kids
said they found the ads persuasive, those kids were goofing on you.
Because they couldn't possibly have believed that."

At the heart of this debate is the question of whether the
advertising industry's well-oiled system of marketing theory and
research methodology can convince kids not to buy something--in this
case, drugs--as successfully as it can convince them to buy toys or
breakfast cereal.

Tom Hedrick, senior communications officer and a founding member of
the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, says yes. "The people that
started the Partnership believed that while drug abuse was a very
complicated psychosocial issue, that at the very front end of the
problem a choice to use was involved, and that the choice to use was
not unlike that for products and services," he says. "And that the
science and art of marketing and communications, which had been used
for many years to sell products and services, could be inverted and
used to help un-sell the product to the American public and to kids."

Public service ads directed at kids have, in fact, convinced them to
refrain from doing things they're attracted to, such as smoking. A
study in 2002 found the "Truth" anti-smoking campaign effective. The
campaign was created by the American Legacy Foundation, a group
underwritten with tobacco settlement money. But the same study found
that Philip Morris's "Think: Don't Smoke" ads increased the
likelihood that kids would take up smoking. Clearly, not all
"un-selling" is created equal.

"In the case of [the anti-smoking ads], kids were more heavily
involved in the design," says Orwin. "And the target, in terms of who
was in a sense the bad guy, was Big Tobacco. If you quit smoking,
you're not only doing something for yourself: you're also doing a
rebellious, antiestablishment act. With drugs, there isn't anything
like Big Tobacco you can put up there as the enemy."

The Partnership's Hedrick points out that no industry has ever been
able to show a strict causal link between advertising and an increase
in business. He suggests that a new standard be used for evaluating
anti-drug ads' effectiveness. "Common sense and observation suggest
that during the campaign, there has been a more than twenty-five
percent decline in illicit drug use among teens," he says.

The government, at least, seems to buy that argument. President Bush
has requested a $30 million increase in funding for the Media
Campaign in his 2008 budget. (The new Democratic chairman of the
House subcommittee that oversees the Drug Czar's office, Rep. Dennis
Kucinich of Ohio, is an outspoken critic of the War on Drugs,
however, so that appropriation will no doubt be scrutinized closely.)

Though government-funded anti-drug advertising seems set to continue
full steam ahead, heavy-handed ads of the flattened trike variety
probably won't reappear anytime soon. A new crop of ads, created by
the Portland, Oregon, firm Wieden + Kennedy for a new campaign called
"Above the Influence," takes a different approach. One series depicts
wry little animated scenes, like a dog expressing disappointment at
his stoner master asking him to walk himself. Another spot, in
faux-documentary style, reveals a made-up fad called "Slomming," an
acronym for "Sticking Leaches On Myself." Adolescent actors display
leeches they've attached to their bodies and talk about the practice
as something that's "hard not to get into" because everyone does it,
and the final tagline is "What could you be convinced to do?"

My personal favorite, "The Conversation," depicts a boy receiving a
phone call from a friend with whom he'd been partying the night
before. We only witness one side of the conversation. "How did she
get home?" he asks, then offers, "Man, I was so high, I didn't. ...
Are we cool?" And after a pause, a quietly anguished, "Tim, you know
me. That's not me." We don't know what awful thing he's done--did he
hook up with his best friend's girlfriend and then abandon her in a
7-11 parking lot?--but the ad is hard-hitting and haunting in a
totally insidious way, far from the browbeating and threats of ads
past. Kids are not being told that they'll die if they get high, just
that there may be unpleasant consequences.

The new ads' relative subtlety is more likely to strike a chord with
kids than over-the-top scare tactics, says Mark DiMassimo, creative
director of the advertising agency DiMassimo Goldstein, and a former
member of the Partnership's creative review committee.

"The fact is that the light touch works," he says. "The government is
not going to fund anything that encourages anything illegal,
obviously. But on the other hand, a savvier approach, a soft touch
dealing with social fear rather than mortal fear--ultimately, what
we're selling is a kind of self-actualization."

Kids may respond well to these ads, as DiMassimo suggests. Certainly,
they are good entertainment. But according to Westat's data, kids
approved of the earlier Media Campaign ads, too. According to Orwin,
it was the later, more highly-rated spots--the "Marijuana Initiative"
ads that began in late 2002--that were found to have the greatest
boomerang effect. Perhaps the kids in the focus groups weren't
"goofing" on the Partnership, as Orwin surmised. Perhaps they really
did find the ads insightful and persuasive. But maybe kids' immediate
response to an ad has little relation to its ultimate
effectiveness--unless, perhaps, it's an inverse one. Maybe what the
ads accomplished was simply "substantial recognition" of the brand "Pot."

Because of drug ads' apparent risk of backfire, it may be
school-based drug education that offers the best hope of steering
kids away from addiction, even though sitting in a gym listening to a
police officer or teacher talk about drugs can't rival the glamour of
slick ad campaigns produced by the country's top agencies. A
face-to-face program can offer more nuanced information than a
thirty-second TV spot, along with the chance for kids to ask
questions and discuss the issues, and an opportunity for teachers to
gauge their students' knowledge, attitudes and risk level. However,
much like other anti-drug efforts, school-based prevention programs
have had something of a checkered past.

One has managed to build a near-monopoly. Founded in 1983 by the Los
Angeles Police Department, under the leadership of former Police
Chief Daryl Gates, the D.A.R.E. program consists of seventeen weekly
lessons aimed mostly at fifth- and sixth-graders. The participating
officers focus on "resistance education": telling kids about the
dangers of drugs, building their self-esteem, giving them positive
alternatives to drug use, and arming them with ways to say "No" to
peer pressure.

After a 1986 study by National Institute of Justice (NIJ) found that
D.A.R.E. produced positive outcomes, the program started receiving
federal funds, supplemented by private contributions, merchandising
royalties, and the willingness of local communities to donate police
officers' time. By 2000, according to a Government Accountability
Office report published that year, D.A.R.E. was operating in 80
percent of school districts in the United States and receiving a
share of the Department of Education's $439 million in drug
prevention grants. Although no one (including the GAO) seemed to know
how large a share of the federal prevention budget went to D.A.R.E.,
a 1993 USA Today story reported that the nonprofit was taking in $700
million a year in public and private funds.

There were other prevention programs out there, but D.A.R.E. was the
most widespread, the richest, and, with its iconic red and black
bumper stickers, by far the most visible. Parents, politicians, and
school officials loved D.A.R.E.: it made them feel that something was
being done about the drug problem (and it didn't hurt that a
substantial proportion of its budget came from private donations).
The kids enjoyed the logo-emblazoned booty and the contact with
personable police officers. Over the years, the core curriculum was
periodically updated to include new drugs (tobacco, inhalants) and
new issues (conflict resolution, gangs).

But amid the accolades, there was just one little problem: after the
NIJ's initial positive findings (later criticized for poor design),
study after study by university researchers and government agencies
began to show that D.A.R.E. simply didn't work. In 2000, the
Department of Education announced that it would no longer let schools
spend their federal drug prevention funds on D.A.R.E. Finally, after
a decade of dismissing negative scientific studies (D.A.R.E.
Executive Director Glenn Levant once quipped, "Scientists will tell
you bumblebees can't fly, but we know they can."), D.A.R.E. unveiled
a brand-new curriculum in 2001, aimed at seventh- and ninth-graders
instead of fifth- and sixth-graders, and announced a five-year
longitudinal study of its effectiveness to be carried out by
researchers at the University of Akron.

The new curriculum, called "Take Charge of Your Life," designed to be
less preachy and more interactive than the old D.A.R.E. model, is
patterned after less widely used but more effective programs that
employ peer group discussions, games, and role playing. Preliminary
findings, released last year, seemed cautiously optimistic,
announcing that the program "may be effective in reaching those
adolescents who are at elevated risk for substance abuse." No
conclusions have yet been offered as to whether the program decreases
those kids' drug use, though; final results will be released later this year.

The study's principal investigator, Zili Sloboda, spent years as a
National Institute on Drug Abuse researcher, evaluating the efficacy
of prevention programs and coauthoring a government pamphlet on
effective programs for schools and parents (D.A.R.E. is conspicuously
absent from the list of "science-based" programs). She says the
original D.A.R.E. was too didactic, with a police officer at the
front of the room delivering content to a passive audience. "The
programs that have been demonstrated to be effective are based on
getting kids to use critical thinking skills," she says. "That's how
kids learn." Take Charge of Your Life presents the instructor (still
a cop) as a guide or coach, not as a lecture-giving heavy. It also
helps students develop problem-solving skills by presenting them with
drug or drinking scenarios and asking them to discuss how they would react.

Reading through the NIDA booklet Sloboda helped to research, I was
struck by how much emphasis the approved programs place on issues
other than drugs. In fact, none of the four elementary-level programs
the booklet endorses seem to mention drugs at all. They focus instead
on encouraging positive relationships between kids and their
environments--schools, teachers, families, and peers--and helping
them achieve a sense of academic and social competence. The goal of
recognized programs, such as the Caring School Community Program,
SOAR, and PATHS, is to enhance the "protective factors" believed to
reduce a student's future likelihood of drug abuse, not to provide
young children with information about drug risks and peer pressure.
(Nor, I couldn't help noting, to require "pledges" about their future
behavior).

"When kids fail in school, especially early on, this puts them on a
trajectory that puts them at risk for substance abuse later on,"
Sloboda says. "In elementary school, one important component is that
you want academic programs introduced so that kids can succeed.
Another is to help them develop prosocial attitudes, and to get them
involved in prosocial activities"--drama, sports, music, art.

But she cautions that the research on why kids do drugs is far from
definitive, and that different kids try drugs for different reasons.
"More kids initiate than get dependent and continue use," she says.
"A very high percentage--between 80 and 90 percent--tend to initiate
and stop." This group, she says, tries drugs as a social thing, and
because it's fun. The 10 to 20 percent that develop a problem usually
have more deep-seated emotional or psychological problems.

I asked Sloboda if a successful prevention program for older kids
should at least own up to the existence of the "fun" side--in
addition to the self-destructive or self-medicating aspects--of drug
use. "I think a lot of these programs are very realistic in that
regard," she says. "I did observe the delivery of [the new D.A.R.E.]
in the classroom, and one thing that was very striking to me was the
fact that kids are actively engaged in conversations about these very issues."

But a nuanced, engaging approach to drug education--not to mention
all those music, art, and drama programs--can be costly and complex.
Many of the more successful programs are intensive: you have to train
teachers, use classroom time, invest in materials. Even then, they
often require booster programs to maintain their effectiveness in the
long-term. The website of LifeSkills Training, a widely praised
program developed at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University,
cites research demonstrating that graduates of its middle-school
program remained less likely to use drugs six years later, in twelfth
grade--but that's after fifteen sessions in seventh grade, ten
booster sessions in eighth grade, and five in ninth grade.

If there is any long-term benefit to be gained from exposing
elementary school children to explicit talk of drugs, though, I have
yet to find it. Some of the research on the original D.A.R.E. program
for fifth- and sixth-graders pronounced it useless even in the
short-term, hence the recent shift to seventh and ninth grades. And
Red Ribbon Week, the program my children have been through, has never
been subjected to an evaluative study of any kind, according to Peggy
Sapp, executive director of the National Family Partnership, its
parent organization. Indeed, experts like Sloboda say that the basic
research on how younger kids respond to drug prevention hasn't yet
been done. "My opinion is that we don't really know how to deal with
this issue with younger kids," Sloboda says.

For teens and tweens, scientifically validated programs like those in
the NIDA pamphlet (and, maybe, the new D.A.R.E.) may offer a good
deal more in the way of useful skills and positive attitudes than
"Just Say No" or even "Slomming." But they nonetheless adhere to the
bedrock ideology that has defined anti-drug programs since the
federal government began to fund them in the 1980s: abstinence only.
No reputable prevention researcher would suggest telling kids that
it's okay to break the law "just a little bit," but some experts do
believe drug education has been in a decades-long state of denial
about the fact that many kids are going to try drugs no matter what
you tell them, and that while total abstinence is an admirable goal,
an important corollary should be the reduction of risk and harm for
those kids who don't achieve it--and helping those who dabble to be
part of the 80 to 90 percent that don't go on to dependency.

"Abstinence is the best choice regarding drugs. To me that's a
no-brainer," says Marsha Rosenbaum, director of Safety First, which
bills itself as "a reality-based approach to teens, drugs, and drug
education." (It is an arm of the Drug Policy Alliance, a group
devoted to ending the "War on Drugs.") "However, what is also true in
America today, is that if you define drugs broadly as any substance
that changes the way you think, feel, and perceive the world, drugs
are everywhere. Legal and illegal drugs, alcohol, pharmaceuticals,
over-the-counter substances that are mind-altering. Drugs are part of
American culture, whether we like it or not."

Rosenbaum is a medical sociologist who spent eighteen years
researching drugs like crack, heroin, and methamphetamine as a NIDA
grantee. She says she had an awakening of sorts when her daughter,
then in fifth grade, came home from a D.A.R.E. presentation
announcing that she "knew everything" about drugs. "She drew a
picture on the chalkboard, a big circle with a lot of little circles
inside," Rosenbaum says. "She said, 'The big circle, that's your
brain. The little circles are your brain cells.'" Then Rosenbaum's
daughter picked up an eraser and proceeded to wipe away half of the
little circles. "'When a person smokes marijuana,' she said, 'half of
their brain cells get erased forever.'"

Rosenbaum was dismayed. "I worried that kids would learn that they
had been lied to," she says. "And that the kids would throw the baby
out with the bath water, and not listen any more to anything adults
told them about drugs. It's the problem of cynicism, which I had
encountered in my research with heroin addicts"--many of whom, she
says, had tried marijuana, found that it did not cause the dire harm
they'd been warned against, and as a result had dismissed the entire
anti-drug message.

Rosenbaum strongly advocates abstinence, but also recommends a
"fall-back strategy" for teenagers (and parents) who choose not to
abstain, an approach she says is nowhere to be found in conventional
drug education. She believes drug prevention programs should provide
scientifically accurate facts about drugs, refrain from scare
tactics, and outline strategies for risk reduction to those who need
them, particularly with regard to alcohol (don't drink and drive, for
example, and be aware of the signs of alcohol poisoning) and
marijuana (don't smoke pot every day or before school).

Some prevention groups dismiss views like Rosenbaum's as part of a
hidden "legalization agenda." Other drug researchers and educators
may very well share some of her beliefs in private, but if they need
federal funding to do their work, they can't voice such radical
notions, and their curricula can't include risk-reduction provisions
for kids who use drugs. "In order to get federal funding, the [sole]
message has to be that drugs are harmful and wrong," she says. "That
language is in the federal statute."

Ironically, it may be the nation's poorest, most drug-ridden schools
that can serve as laboratories in which innovative approaches to drug
education can be developed, flying under the radar of federal law.
UpFront is a San Francisco Bay Area initiative that got its start in
one such urban school, Oakland High, nine years ago. Charles Ries,
UpFront's director, says that he doesn't run an anti-drug
program--or, at least, not one whose prime directive is to convince
kids not to do drugs. "We're more about supporting the students," he
says. "What we believe is that having a genuine conversation with
young people about what they believe and know about drugs, and why
they believe it, is the only way to reduce the risk and harm
connected to adolescent drug use."

UpFront developed its approach by asking Oakland High students, who
live in an area that serves as a regional drug market, what type of
drug education they would find most helpful. The kids asked for
small, confidential discussion groups. That's what they got:
workshops focusing on open communication, risk reduction, and
complete and honest information about what Ries, in a locution that
would probably send a conventional prevention expert screaming for
the hills, calls the "pros and cons" of drugs. Topics for discussion
include alcohol overdose prevention and intervention, distinguishing
between casual and harmful use, and the fact that while people may
initiate drug use out of curiosity, they continue to use because the
drug delivers some sort of benefit to them. "We discuss what this
benefit might be, the cost of achieving it, and whether it is worth
it," Ries says. His students' questions, he adds, are often driven by
their desire to understand a personal drug experience.

For this struggling student population, Ries says, this was the only
approach that had a prayer of working. "As soon as we opened our
doors, folks started showing up, and they continued to come, I think
because we didn't really push any anti-drug agenda down their
throats," he says. Although abstinence is not the program's main
goal, Ries says that it has produced decreases in drug use at the
school. "It's self-reported, but the students absolutely say that the
program makes them less likely to use drugs," he says.

Despite the fact that its message is anathema to the feds, UpFront's
funding initially came from the U.S. Department of Education's Office
of Safe and Drug-free Schools. (Now, with the school district in
bankruptcy, funding comes from other sources.) In a less chaotic
district, Ries says, the program probably never could have gotten off
the ground.

"There was not a lot of close oversight," he says. "But the money
continued to come, because the outcomes we were able to capture were
really good. We never really talked about anything we did that was
out of the ordinary, until the district decided that our school would
be one of the schools they'd use for a federal evaluation. We told
them exactly what we did, they talked to the faculty and students,
and they rated our program exemplary. Then we felt like we could
really come out and talk openly about our approach and why it was successful."

UpFront now offers training and workshops for other
schools--including elementary schools--and may soon be implemented in
the San Francisco school system. In workshops for younger kids, Ries
says, the approach is similar, emphasizing information and
discussion. "We ask students to talk about whether they've already
had a drink, who gave it to them and why, and how confusing those
messages can be when the person who gave us our first drink is the
person telling us we shouldn't do it," he says. "We help them tease
out the mixed messages they will have gotten about drugs, alcohol,
and smoking. It's more of an exploration of what they believe, their
experiences, with a little health education thrown in, than an
attempt to convince them that something in and of itself is harmful or wrong."

As for "I will never do drugs" pledges, he says, "I think it's crap.
You don't want to ask people to be perfect. It's just a set-up,
especially for young folks."

Meanwhile, the Bush administration is pushing a new approach to the
youth drug problem that circumvents education altogether: random drug
testing for public middle and high school students, a program that is
already up and running in more than a thousand schools. If kids at
those schools want to participate in extracurricular activities, they
must submit to the tests. The program is set to expand, with the
Department of Education offering grants to schools interested in
starting or expanding drug testing. The Drug Policy Alliance--the
group that wants to end the War on Drugs--calls testing "an easy
anti-drug sound bite for the White House," and says it won't work.
This claim was confirmed by a 2003 University of Michigan study of
76,000 students that found drug use to be just as common in schools
with testing as in schools without it. In any case, if "prosocial"
activities like sports and music are among the most important
protective factors against drug abuse, it seems counterproductive to
drive already troubled kids away from them.

Mainstream prevention experts also have reservations about testing.
Zili Sloboda, the D.A.R.E. researcher, told me that she recently
attended a parent meeting at her local middle school, at which school
staff and police officers presented information about heroin and
other drugs. "The law enforcement officers and prevention staff spoke
to the parents about the availability of home [drug testing] kits
that can be purchased at Wal-Mart and local drug stores," she says.
"The parents wanted the schools to do the testing. My concern, shared
by the prevention specialists, is what do parents do when they find
that their children test positive? I don't think most people think
about the post-testing phase, the most challenging of all."

Whether widespread drug testing will reduce drug use remains to be
seen, but I am pretty sure I don't want to see my girls have to pee
in a cup to be in the school play. Regardless of what kind of drug
education or interdiction they are subjected to, though, I will still
wonder when, if ever, it will be okay for me to be honest with
them--about their experiences, and about my own--and whether honesty,
as Ries suggests, might be more helpful, in the long run, than an
abstinence-only stance.

But even faced with numbers that are, on some level, encouraging--a
lot of kids may try drugs, but 80 or 90 percent of those kids don't
become addicts--drug authorities usually advise us to take a firm,
unequivocal stand against all drugs, all the time. Theantidrug.com,
the National Youth Anti-drug Media Campaign site for parents,
recommends that parents "state clearly to their pre-teens and teens
that they would be very disappointed if they started using marijuana"
(emphasis theirs). If your child asks you about your own checkered
past, the website recommends that you be honest--but emphasize the
negative consequences of your drug use. One suggested response: "When
I was a kid I took drugs because some of my friends did. I wanted to
in order to fit in. If I'd known then about the consequences and how
they would affect my life, I never would have tried drugs. I'll do
everything I can to help keep you away from them."

Far superior to "Just Say No," as far as it goes. But does it go far
enough? What if you took drugs a few--or a bunch of--times and there
were no major consequences? What do you say when they press you:
"What kind of consequences, Mom?" Just how big of a web of lies are
we expected to spin?

When I was seventeen and about to go off to college, my parents found
out that I had dabbled in drugs, and all hell broke loose. They
screamed at me for several hours, banned me from seeing my friends or
leaving the house except to go to work for the rest of the summer,
and sent me to a drug counselor (who, quite reasonably, concluded
that I was an experimenter, not a budding addict). I think they were
pretty shocked: I was an excellent student, held down a job, and was
fairly obedient, overall. In any case, none of this drama did a thing
to prevent my going off to college and trying nearly every drug known
to humanity (and then getting into an Ivy League Ph.D. program, lest
you think I spent years in the gutter as a result). This is not
something I'd recommend to any teenager, and my actions most
definitely contained significant risks, but were I to use the
"negative consequences" gambit, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with any.

Years after my adolescent drug drama, after I had become a mother
myself, my mom told me that she used to smoke pot occasionally when
she was in her forties and I was still living at home. "I had to hide
my stash from you," she said, laughing. "Everyone my age has at least
tried pot. I'm not sure I'd want to be friends with someone who hasn't."

I must confess that even all those years later, I was not amused by
this revelation. The memory of that struggle session was still
painful. But I had to ask myself: in ten years, will I be screaming
my head off after one of my kids comes home with bloodshot eyes? If I
do, it will be for the same reason she did it: the clawing,
clutching, debilitating fear that my child will come to some horrible
end. It seems to me that for parents, all of this--the lectures, the
role-plays, the pledges, and the pee cups--comes down to one
all-important, all-consuming question: how can you tell if your kid
will be a harmless dabbler or a hopeless junkie?

I decided to call up a friend who has two small children and a
history of serious drug addiction--who did suffer negative
consequences, big ones, as a result of drugs--for more insight. She's
been sober for a long time, and though her toddlers won't face
handprint pledges for another few years, she has already started
thinking about how she'll talk to them about drugs when the time
comes--and about how she herself was taught about drugs during her
own formative years. Surprisingly, she seemed calmer, when confronted
by these questions, than many of the non-former addicts I know.

"I remember having a drug education course, in sixth grade," she
says. "It was before the days of 'Just Say No.' It was more
informational. By the end, I knew everything there was to know. And I
felt both unrealistically confident that I'd never try drugs, and
also unrealistically terrified, because it seemed like in junior high
you'd have people coming up to you in the halls, poking you with
needles full of drugs." Eerily, she chose to do her class report on
heroin, the very drug she would become addicted to fifteen years
later. In other words, she was a boomeranger, of sorts. "I do think I
got a little interested in it," she says. "I found out how it made
you feel, and that sounded appealing. Unlike something like LSD,
which sounded horrible."

It's not drug experimentation, per se, that my friend blames for her
addiction. She says that for her, heroin addiction was the
culmination of a series of grim struggles: depression, anorexia. She
worries that her own children may have inherited her addictive and
depressive tendencies, and would like to keep them far from drugs for
that reason. But she says she believes that kids will, inevitably,
experiment, and that "abstinence only" is beside the point.

"You can't just say don't do it," she says. "Like with sex, you need
to teach them to how to be responsible. But I don't know if you can
teach a kid not to be a drug addict. I was self-medicating for
depression, and I think [my addiction] could have been avoided. But
probably not with a drug education program."