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DARE? Who Cares??
The Failures of the DARE Program

By Ryan Abeling

In 1979, drug users over the age of twelve who had done drugs in the past month reached 25.4 million users. So when former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates decided to start the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or DARE, in 1983 to help combat this trend, many people were ecstatic. Twenty years later, DARE is still very popular, gaining over $750 million dollars per year of taxpayers’ money and greatly surpassing any other drug education program financially.

However, many schools, parents and graduates are saying no to the future of this failing program. It has already been canceled in many cities, including Oakland, Calif. and Fayetteville, Ark. Several studies have been done to show that DARE has no effect on teens. The fact is, it’s not working.

In the DARE program, uniformed police officers come into fifth grade classrooms, one hour a week for 17 weeks, “educating” students on “resisting drug abuse.” Right at the beginning of the program, all the students are required to sign a pledge promising to stay clean. At the end of the 17 weeks a ceremony is held, DARE-related songs are sung and students are presented with T-shirts, a certificate, a pin, and a wallet-sized plastic card that identifies them as DARE graduates. The program is tax-exempt and is paid for through taxes, donations and royalties from their merchandise sales.

Parents are worried that their children are subject to a foolish curriculum and confusing morals. The U.S. justice department says DARE has a “non-existent effect on drug use.” And Gates seriously suggested that all casual drug users should be “taken out and shot” for being traitors in the war on drugs, showing the level of reason involved.

DARE is very different from any other class because it does not undergo any review by teachers or administrators, so whatever these cops tell your kids doesn’t deal with local conditions or problems. It is a generic lesson for an “average” child. Parents and teachers know there is no “average “ child.

With a topic as sensitive as drug use, local conditions are usually very important to consider. A kid in the city won’t benefit from a curriculum designed for a suburban child. A suburban kid doesn’t have to walk down shady alleys where drug dealers await fresh meat, but a city kid would need such lessons to avoid being pushed into buying crack.

But there is no difference between the two classrooms in the program’s mind. It’s easier for them to think all kids are the same because the DARE training program for the officers doesn’t discern location in their lessons. That way they can train hundreds of officers at the same time. In fact, the only time the curriculum was changed was to grab more federal money.

Another problem is that DARE doesn’t tell a child not to do drugs outright. Instead, it tells kids that they “have the right,” not to do drugs. Conversely, they also “have the right” to do drugs then, don’t they? Such a muddled message only confuse a kids.

The lessons focus on “values clarification.” Described by two teachers, Leland and Mary How, it is an approach that helps students “prize and act upon their own freely chosen values.” Values clarification does not tell students “right” and “wrong” but is more concerned with the process students use to arrive at their values rather than the actual content. In fact, a DARE officer from Massachusetts said, “I tell kids they can smoke dope if they want, as long as they know the consequences.”

Another aspect that worries parents is the treatment of their position and other adults throughout the lessons. The introductory video, for example, called Land of Choices and Decisions, depicts all adults as “senile, drug pushers or drug abusers…with the exception of the officer.”

While DARE preaches anti-stress management, the actual lessons are absurd. In fact, DARE considers even normal routines to be stress-inducing activities, like doing chores or meeting someone new. It’s more productive to teach them how to work through these situations by using their brain, not “counting to 10” or “giving the cold shoulder.”

DARE’s curriculum is also soft on the drugs that children are in the greatest risk of encountering, tobacco and alcohol. DARE focuses on the more illicit drugs such as cocaine and crack. Tobacco and alcohol are used openly in front of children’s eyes, yet they are not covered to the same extent in the lessons compared to illegal drugs. Kids are more likely to find a pack of cigarettes than a coke spoon, and know what to do with it as well. Telling a kid the dangers of cocaine will only confuse him and educate him on a subject he shouldn’t even know of until high school. Education can be dangerous in DARE’s case.

Any teen will tell you that when an adult tells them not to do something, they’re going to do it anyway, if not for spite then for curiosity. There is no benefit in educating fifth graders on the dangers of heroin, unless you’ve been catching Little Susie or Johnny shooting up before class in the bathroom stall.

So the real question is, does DARE work at all? One study, conducted by the U.S. Justice Department called The Past and Future Directions of the DARE Program, in Sept. 1994, concluded:

“The DARE program’s limited effect on adolescent drug use contrasts with the program’s popularity and prevalence. An important implication is that DARE could be taking the place of other, more beneficial drug education programs that kids could be receiving.”

Another study done in Charleston County, S.C. found:

“Significant differences … in the predicted direction for alcohol use in the last year, belief in prosocial norms, association with drug-using peers, positive peer association, attitudes against substance use and assertiveness. No differences were found on cigarette, tobacco, or marijuana use in the last year, frequency of any drug use in the past month, attitudes about police, coping strategies, attachment and commitment to school, rebellious behavior and self esteem.”

You don’t need a scientific study to see the failure of attaining any positive change from attending DARE. The program isn’t even recognized by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. In an article about DARE, a collaboration of writers attacked the program. They called DARE’s goals “counterproductive” because they were unattainable for any child. You simply can’t prevent a child from experimenting by telling them to say no. They went on to say that kids who did experiment with illicit drugs, especially marijuana, were better adjusted than constant users or abstainers. Experimenters were even more socially skilled and had higher levels of self-esteem.

The most astounding evidence they found was that hallucinogen use was significantly higher among DARE students, again raising the idea that telling a child of drugs at so young an age only raises their curiosity about drugs and leads to earlier and at times greater experimentation.

I personally don’t find this surprising by looking at my own experiences. I sat through DARE as a child, yet I feel my experimenting bettered me instead of hurting me. There is a happy medium in drug use and I believe I graced through it. My use was under control and did more for my social skills than any teacher or parent could have hoped for.

The most important mentor one can hope to have is experience. When it comes to learning about life, a person must live and learn to work through problems. Lying to your parents about being drunk as you control your wobbles is more useful in the real world than being told to say no without a rational thought. It’s called being calm under fire.

Experimentation will probably never be stopped, and why should it? But there is a need to keep kids from severely abusing drugs to the point of hurting themselves. Is DARE the strongest commitment America can create to curb severe drug use among teens even when it’s not working? We are impeding serious efforts to find logical ways to keep kids from abusing drugs. A letter to the editor in a Massachusetts newspaper said:

“The tragic truth that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that may not work has not yet sunk in on the local or national levels… The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs.”

DARE’s only response to these accusations of uselessness is, “even if we’re only reaching one kid, it’s worth all the effort.” Well, but if a math lesson only successfully teaches one kid out of thirty isn’t it worthless?

But still people continue to pursue this program in our schools, proving the sad fact that parents don’t care about their kids enough to help them in a productive way. The worst part is that most parents don’t have the good sense to question what is being taught to their kids and to see if it’s actually working, so they assume DARE is productive. They continue to raise them in the same mind numbing, emotionless way, by dumping them in class with a cop and assuming they’ll learn what’s right. It’s the same way they threw their kids in front of the television instead of raising them on their own.

Instead of letting an undereducated cop mock professional teachers by pretending to know how to teach mental health and psychology, we should be teaching our kids ourselves. A parent can effectively teach a kid about drugs better than a stranger. Besides, a parent shouldn’t trust anyone beside him or herself to teach their kid about drugs. You wouldn’t want your kid learning about sex from a stranger, so why are drugs different?

Ryan is an audio production major. Email him at Abekool19@hotmail.com.