EDUCATION TO KEEP KIDS FROM USING DRUGS

To the Editor:

In "DARE Reinvents Itself -- With Help From Its Social-Scientist Critics"
(October 19), the reporter aptly chronicles the effort by DARE (which
stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education) to overhaul its much-criticized
middle-school curriculum and notes that DARE might have saved itself years
of uncertainty, and criticism, if it had merely adopted a proven
alternative program, such as Life Skills Training or Project ALERT.

While it's true that Life Skills Training has had tremendous success in
reducing smoking, drinking, and marijuana use among teens, the reporter
mistakenly characterizes it as a social-influence program. While the
program contains some social-influence elements, it is a comprehensive,
school-based prevention program. It addresses a wider range of risk and
protective factors through a developmental approach that emphasizes the
teaching of personal and social skills. It is precisely the
comprehensiveness of the program that has made it so effective.

The social-influence approach, on the other hand, ... assumes that most
kids don't want to use drugs and simply need to be taught refusal skills.
Unfortunately, prevention programs based on the social-influence approach
do little to address either the underlying motivations to use drugs or
individual vulnerability to pro-drug pressures. ...

Unless the new DARE goes beyond the narrow confines of the social-influence
approach, it is unlikely that it will be any more effective than DARE's
current program.

Gilbert J. Botvin Director Institute for Prevention Research Professor of
Public Health and Psychiatry Weill Medical College Cornell University New York