DARE PROGRAM PANNED BY U.S. DRUG POLICY EXPERTS

Editor's Note:

Although we never comment on letters to the editor we do occasionally
preface them if their nature warrants it. The following is such a letter.

This letter was received via e-mail from an official of the Drug Policy
Alliance in Washington, D.C., who had read Gregg Chamberlain's article, ,
that was published in last week's edition of the Revelstoke Times Review.

David F. Rooney Editor

While Canadian schools are just beginning to implement the Drug Abuse
Resistance Education program, schools in the U.S. are dropping it. Good
intentions are no substitute for effective drug education. Every
independent, methodologically sound evaluation of DARE has found the
program to be either ineffective or counterproductive. The scare tactics
used do more harm than good. Students who realize they've been lied to
about marijuana often make the mistake of assuming that harder drugs like
heroin are relatively harmless as well. This is a recipe for disaster. Drug
education programs must be reality-based or they may backfire when kids are
inevitably exposed to drug use among their peers.

The importance of parental involvement in reducing adolescent drug use
cannot be overstated. School-based extracurricular activities have also
been shown to reduce drug use by keeping kids busy during the hours they're
most prone to getting into trouble. In order for drug education to be
effective it has to be credible. The most popular recreational drug and the
one most often associated with violent behavior is often overlooked. That
drug is alcohol, and it takes far more lives every year than all illegal
drugs combined. Alcohol may be legal, but it's still the number one drug
problem.

References for various DARE studies can be found following my contact
information.

Robert Sharpe, M.P.A. Program Officer Drug Policy Alliance Washington, DC
USA http://www.drugpolicy.org

"Our results are consistent in documenting the absence of beneficial
effects associated with the DARE program. This was true whether the outcome
consisted of actual drug use or merely attitudes toward drug use. In
addition, we examined processes that are the focus of intervention and
purportedly mediate the impact of DARE (e.g., self-esteem and peer
resistance), and these also failed to differentiate DARE participants from
nonparticipants. Thus, consistent with the earlier Clayton et al. (1996)
study, there appear to be no reliable short-term, long-term, early
adolescent, or young adult positive outcomes associated with receiving the
DARE intervention." Source: Lynam, Donald R., Milich, Richard, et al.,
"Project DARE: No Effects at 10-Year Follow-Up", Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association,
August 1999), Vol. 67, No. 4, 590-593.

A federally funded Research Triangle Institute study of Drug Abuse
Resistance Education (DARE) found that "DARE's core curriculum effect on
drug use relative to whatever drug education (if any) was offered in the
control schools is slight and, except for tobacco use, is not statistically
significant." Source: Ennett, S.T., et al., "How Effective Is Drug Abuse
Resistance Education? A Meta-Analysis of Project DARE Outcome Evaluations,"
American Journal of Public Health, 84: 1394-1401 (1994).

Dr. Dennis Rosenbaum, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
recently completed a six-year study of 1,798 students and found that "DARE
had no long-term effects on a wide range of drug use measures"; DARE does
not "prevent drug use at the stage in adolescent development when drugs
become available and are widely used, namely during the high school years";
and that DARE may actually be counter productive. According to the study,
"there is some evidence of a boomerang effect among suburban kids. That is,
suburban students who were DARE graduates scored higher than suburban
students in the Control group on all four major drug use measures." Source:
Rosenbaum, Dennis, Assessing the Effects of School-based Drug Education: A
Six Year Multilevel Analysis of Project DARE, Abstract (April 6, 1998).