YOUNG PEOPLE DESERVE TRUTH ABOUT DRUGS

Patty Jo Sawvel's March 19 column contained some excellent advice on
preventing drug use.

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. They keep kids busy during the hours they're
most prone to getting into trouble.

In order for anti-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 in drug education. 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 No. 1 drug problem.

For decades, anti-drug education has been dominated by scare tactic-based
programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE). Good intentions are
no substitute for effective 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 are being 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 need to be
reality-based or they may backfire when kids are inevitably exposed to drug
use among their peers.

ROBERT SHARPE

Washington, D.C.

The writer is a program officer with the Drug Policy Alliance, which calls
itself "the leading organization working to broaden the public debate on
drug policy and to promote realistic alternatives to the war on drugs."