Good news about D.A.R.E. — the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program that puts police officers in thousands of 5th grade classrooms. The good news is not that the government pulled the plug on D.A.R.E.’s funding. The good news is that at last the government pulled the plug.
Unlike General MacArthur’s old soldiers, who never die but simply fade away, government programs – even the failures — rarely fade away. Poor programs can thrive, bolstered by popular enthusiasm. Even if academicians churn out incomprehensible statistical analyses of “effectiveness,” nobody but other academics pays attention.
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D.A.R.E. began in 1983, when Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates sent a personable uniformed police officer into city classrooms, to put fifth-graders through a 17-week “just say no” curriculum that began with “no drug” pledges and finished in a “culmination ceremony,” one later enhanced with D.A.R.E. songs, T-shirts, pins, and bumper stickers.
The federal government so liked D.A.R.E. that it let communities spend federal money on the program. Communities did. Today more than half of all school districts in the United States (in all 50 states) include D.A.R.E. Thirteen countries adopted the model. A board dotted with Hollywood celebrities oversees D.A.R.E. America, the multi-million dollar California corporation in charge of the curriculum and the paraphernalia. A combination of funders, including private donations and sales of merchandise, pays for D.A.R.E.
Parental, and political, enthusiasm for D.A.R.E. is understandable. D.A.R.E. builds on the politically acceptable “Just Say No” mantra. It stresses low self-esteem and high stress as vectors to cocaine. It decries gangs. It promotes “positive” attitudes, “positive” role models. It doesn’t emphasize the legal drugs, like alcohol, that the children’s parents may use. What is there not to like?
Ultimately, though, the key test of D.A.R.E. is not popularity, but effectiveness. And as early as 1994 when analysts from the Research Triangle Institute published their findings, the word was out: On the measure of stemming teenage drug use, D.A.R.E. didn’t work. Children who went through D.A.R.E. were no more likely to “say no” as adolescents than their uninstructed counterparts. (Ironically, exposure to D.A.R.E. may have increased children’s curiosity about some of the drugs.) Individual communities, like Detroit, that did their own rigorous assessments came to the same conclusion. School districts intent on stemming drug use were getting nothing from D.A.R.E., beyond the delusion that they were “doing something” about drugs.
Understandably, D.A.R.E.’s initial reaction to the academicians’ criticism was to criticize the academicians — and publicize their own positive reports, although those reports generally made academicians shudder. For example, one study demonstrated that 5th-graders exposed to D.A.R.E. knew more about the consequences of drug use than non-exposed 5th graders. Of course they did: D.A.R.E. made that part of the curriculum. Another retort held that “if D.A.R.E. detoured just one child….” communities should support it. Yet if a drug worked 1 percent of the time, the Food and Drug Administration would pull it off the market. Still other retorts touted the popularity of the program, or its self-esteem message, or children’s contact with police officers.
At last, the nonbiased wisdom of researchers trumped the self-interested enthusiasm of supporters: the federal Department of Education has withdrawn funding for D.A.R.E. Communities may continue to support D.A.R.E., but without federal dollars; and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is subsidizing the development of a new, revamped curriculum, geared to 7th graders.
Our approach to drug use and abuse is a heady mixture of evangelical exhorting, jail, treatment, self-help, drug-sniffing dogs, and sub rosa acceptance. Depending on the drug of choice, and the user’s social status and income, the user may get treatment, jail, or a Presidential pardon. As to why people keep reaching for that joint or hit (or drink), we are as clueless as the newly anointed national drug czar in the movie “Traffic.” Simplistic answers — like poor self-esteem — work no better than simplistic mantras — like “just say no.”
Even if we don’t know “the” solution, or the constellation of solutions, though, we can’t afford to spend $225 million on a program that doesn’t work. It is hard to end a government program, particularly a popular one. The bureaucrats who “said no” to D.A.R.E. deserve our thanks.
(Joan Retsinas is former executive director of the Rhode Island Health Care Policy and Planning Consortium. She writes frequently for this newspaper.)
