QUESTIONING DARE

The recent news of corruption within the Drug Abuse Resistance Education
Officers Association, a youth drug prevention program, is yet more evidence
of our state's failure to concentrate on prevention and treatment of drug
abuse.

As the most prominent drug prevention program in America, DARE consumes
well over $700 million dollars a year to provide a service that seems to
have had no effect on drug usage among those who participated in the
program as opposed to students who haven't. This latest news that a
convicted felon, the program's former crime prevention manager Roy A.
Willoughby, who seems to have embezzled thousands of dollars from DARE, is
just another symptom of a social policy program that has become a
self-feeding monster that has grown too big and too corrupt to actually
function.

Locally, drug enforcement does much less to prevent any actual crime or
violence than to hinder or destroy the Penn State years of a student. By no
means (do) I endorse the use or legalization of drugs, but perhaps we'd be
better off trying to do what many voices have been saying for a lot of
years -- concentrating on prevention, education and treatment instead of
enforcement and punishment. If you think that that objective is being
achieved, you are wrong.

Perhaps our government thinks that the public needs the delusion that
something is being done about our nation's drug problem by having programs
such as DARE, but I think a program like DARE is simply taking the
resources and time away from a program that can actually be effective in
educating our youth about the reality of drugs.

I hope this latest incident forces the public to look below the surface of
our nation's largest drug prevention program and express its commitment to
further explore prevention as oppose to enforcement. Drug addiction is a
medical condition and police aren't doctors.

Oleg Lektchinov

State College