FAILURE OF DARE

Few would dispute today's children need to be warned about the dangers of
addictive drugs -- and the criminal culture which often accompanies their
use -- at a fairly tender age.

So what could be more natural, Los Angeles police wondered back in 1983,
than to send officers into the city's classrooms, creating a program that
became known by the mildly tortured acronym DARE -- Drug Abuse (or
sometimes, "Awareness") Resistance Education?

The initiative spread like wildfire. More than 50,000 police officers
nationwide have now been trained in the DARE "curriculum."

Problem is, the program consumed ever larger chunks of taxpayer funding,
and it never actually worked. Louisville, Ky., dumped DARE in 1996 after
finding it to be ineffective. Boulder, Colo., followed suit in 1998, as did
Minneapolis in 1999, as study after study showed little or no decrease in
the long-term likelihood to use drugs among DARE graduates, when compared
to control groups.

Last week, Cincinnati and Dayton, Ohio, followed suit, citing in part a
study published Aug. 3 in the magazine Health Education Research, which
found the top three programs used by schools to keep kids away from drugs
have never proved they're effective.

Programs such as DARE "haven't shown the kind of results that schools
expected, despite years of use," reported the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The reason for this should have been obvious long ago. What children need
in order to make wise decisions about drug use is factual information.
Unfortunately, the officer typically relates a few harrowing anecdotes
about users of illegal drugs whose lives did not turn out well. Otherwise
he is left with a somewhat slicker version of the warning of South Park's
Mr. Mackey, mumbling to the children that, "Drugs are bad, OK, so don't do
drugs."

It was an interesting experiment. It failed.