A few dare to question DARE

Although scientific evidence shows the anti-drug program doesn’t work, it provides police with cash and schools with cover

By Lance Tapley

Although scientific evidence shows the anti-drug program doesn’t work, it provides police with cash and schools with cover what if you were told scientific research had shown repeatedly that a taxpayer-funded program in roughly 75 percent of Maine’s (and the nation’s) school systems — a program sucking up hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of Maine kids’ time — was a failure? And that the program’s national leaders had, for all intents and purposes, admitted it was a failure?

Wouldn’t you — as a taxpayer, parent, teacher, or student — want to get rid of that program? To judge by the loud silence in Maine about the 18-year-old anti-drug program DARE, the answer is no.

The most recent attack in the relentless academic criticism of DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) appeared on Sept. 5 when the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, which is associated with Columbia University, released a study that concluded that DARE, which is also anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco, showed “little evidence . . . of any extended impact.” The study was based on 10,000 random telephone interviews nationwide with students, teachers, and parents, as well as a review of drug-abuse-education research.

In Maine, though, except for a few quiet critics, DARE appears to be untouchable. There are no angry letters to the editor, no probing newspaper editorials, no protests at public meetings. Once again, DARE this month is sending policemen back into classrooms to preach the

abstinence-based message popularized by Nancy Reagan in the 1980s: Just Say No. Meanwhile, on high school campuses this month, students once again are reconnecting with their pot dealers (30 percent), arranging for beer parties (51 percent), and lighting up cigarettes on nearby street corners (29 percent).1

This is the simple reality behind all the academic studies: Drug use among young people has not gone down. And it has not gone down despite decades of DARE in most of the school systems. Therefore, belief in DARE is like belief in magic. It can’t be justified by reason.

But there are reasons for DARE. It provides police with cash and schools with cover. Both schools and police can tell parents they are trying to do something about those bad adolescent habits — ironically, habits for which the parents are perhaps most responsible.

“What they actually do is teach kids how to use drugs and get away with it,” says a sarcastic Kimberly Cook, criminology professor at the University of Southern Maine in Portland.

“DARE is an opportunity for the police to obtain funding,” comments a candid Cumberland County sheriff Mark Dion. And, referring to the studies showing DARE has no effect, he adds: “The police are a fact-finding agency that doesn’t believe in facts. It’s the one profession that doesn’t believe in empirical science.”

A few educators in Maine, however, have tried to develop alternatives to DARE. One alternative is based on this idea: If you really want critical, non-peer-group thinking from the kids, the kind of thinking that can lead an individual to choose to steer clear of drugs, then infuse the whole school experience with critical thinking. This is an approach that’s being tried in SAD 6, a school district on Portland’s western outskirts.

Nevertheless, DARE in Maine doesn’t seem threatened by critics or alternatives. DARE just IS. It is part of our culture.

Under siege but strong as ever

PROJECT PEACE: Rita Clifford with second graders Caroline Hillock and riley Mattor.

It began with the Los Angeles Police Department in 1983, and DARE America is still headquartered in LA, but DARE now can be found in over 40 countries, making it the biggest anti-drug program in the world. Each year, around 35 million students in this country alone are exposed to it, most of them in the fifth or sixth grades, but DARE also has programs for younger elementary, older middle school, and high school students as well as parents. It is sponsored by police departments, which use specially trained, uniformed officers. Classroom teachers, guidance counselors, and student leaders often play a part in its activities. A typical program might include four months of weekly sessions ending with a “graduation” ceremony.

In Maine, where it has been in existence since 1988, it enrolls 37,000 students yearly, according to Alan Hammond, DARE’s Maine coordinator. An employee of the state’s Department of Public Safety, he operates out of the Criminal Justice Academy in Vassalboro, where he trains DARE officers for town and city police forces. It’s “a strong program in the State of Maine,” he claims.

One of the state’s best programs, Hammond adds, is in South Portland. There, kids first encounter DARE in the fourth grade, but the core curriculum is taught in the sixth grade — emphasizing “saying no to drugs,” according to the South Portland Police Department’s published description of the program — and then is reinforced in the eighth grade. But “we don’t just teach a sterile curriculum,” emphasizes policewoman Linda Barker, who does the DARE work at Memorial Middle School. For example, she personally invented an anti-tobacco course including recognizing the annual, national Great American Smokeout day and giving out t-shirts as anti-smoking-project prizes. DARE provides kids with lots of freebies: bumper stickers, pens, dolls, etc.

Barker’s work includes many activities besides DARE. She is stationed at the school full-time as a “resource officer,” financed by a grant from the Clinton Administration’s community policing initiative. A law-enforcement counselor to students, teachers, and parents, she is instituting a system whereby all teachers, staff, and visitors will wear identification cards on lanyards around their necks. There are two other DARE-resource officers in South Portland, each stationed at a school. Previous to the grant coming through, Barker was the city’s only full-time DARE officer.

Barker, like others who work within or with the program, is fully aware of the national criticism of DARE.

LITTLE BLACK CORVETTE: Portland’s DARE car is an apt metaphor the program: it’s got a blown transmission.

This began in earnest in the 1990s with the publication of the results of rigorous studies at the University of Kentucky and the University of Illinois that followed thousands of DARE graduates for years. It turned out they were no less likely to use drugs than control groups. The 1998 Illinois study found that DARE graduates from suburban school were more likely to use drugs than others.

As a result of these and other negative studies, including reviews by the National Academy of Sciences and the US Surgeon General, DARE was dropped by Seattle, Oakland, Houston, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, and other communities. And the federal government said in 1998 it would withhold some of its annual $500 million in drug-use-prevention grants unless a program could scientifically demonstrate a promise of success.

Anyone with access to the Internet, however, can obtain lots of data showing use of illegal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco has not declined among young people. A chart available at www.drugwarfacts.org shows that from 1991 to 1995 “lifetime” illicit drug use among twelfth graders rose from about 45 to 49 percent. Among eighth graders, the jump was from nearly 20 to nearly 30 percent.2

A phone call to the state’s Office of Substance Abuse can bring home the statistics. The office’s annual questionnaire given to Maine students in 2000 showed them saying they used marijuana, alcohol, and cigarettes somewhat less than in the recent past, but, according to Bill Lowenstein, associate director, between 1991 and 2000 drug-related arrests in the state among juveniles jumped from 106 to 606 per 100,000 people. Juvenile alcohol-related arrests in the same period went from 433 to 670 per 100,000 population. These are harder facts than self-reported use, although increased law enforcement may be a factor in these numbers.

Lowenstein says his office no longer recommends DARE programs be funded with federally derived Safe and Drug-Free Schools money. “They oversold themselves. There’s no long-term cause and effect” between DARE and substance abuse, he says, agreeing with the national critics. However, the agency that actually doles out the money, the state Department of Education, says that it is “not aware any programs have been denied,” according to Safe and Drug-Free Schools funding administrator David Stockford. He says schools applying for grants have rewritten their applications to include references to “goals and objectives that can be evaluated.” This apparently has been sufficient to meet the concerns about DARE.

As for tobacco, although the trend in the United States is for less use, in 1995 Maine was first in the nation in cigarette smoking among young adults. The Maine Bureau of Health’s report on health trends in the 1990s shows that, in 1998, 37 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds smoked cigarettes. This was a result seen after many years of DARE anti-smoking indoctrination in the schools.

Kimberly Cook, the USM criminology professor, whose specialty is “crime and social control,” thinks DARE cannot possibly work because uniformed police in the classrooms signal to students a “very punitive mentality” toward drugs, a “law-enforcement ideology” that often is counterproductive because of the natural tendency of youngsters to rebel against authority.

Cook is highly critical of the entire “War on Drugs,” which she characterizes as “a pseudo-military approach to a social problem.” Outside of Maine, she says, it’s “a war on the urban poor and ethnic minorities that has contributed to 2 million people being incarcerated in the United States.”

Faced with all the criticism, all those studies, and all the numbers, DARE officials in Maine brush them off. “It’s just talk,” says Alan Hammond, the state director. “If it wasn’t effective it wouldn’t be in so many schools,” he says. He couldn’t think of a school system in Maine that had dropped DARE. If there is any validity to the criticism, he feels, it may just indicate the need for more of DARE, not less.

Linda Barker, the South Portland police officer, deflects the criticism in a different way. She feels DARE should not be evaluated on its ability to get kids to stop using illicit drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, but on its educational component, and “I see tremendous education” on “how to make good decisions.”

But, she observes, the children “go home to families that have different values” and to “kids on the street that have different values” than the values that she teaches, plus there is the pervasive influence of unhealthy electronic-media messages and a contemporary lack of parental direction. These influences drown out DARE’s message, she suggests.

However, if DARE claims to be helping to stop substance abuse, shouldn’t it be evaluated on that grounds? Even the national DARE office recognizes this as the criterion for success. This year it announced that it would revamp the program with the aid of a $13.7-million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. As the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News reported:

“ ‘Our feeling was, after looking at the prevention movement, we were not having enough of an impact,’ said Hebert D. Kleber, the head of DARE’s scientific advisory panel . . . ‘There was a marked rise in drug use. Our job was to answer the question, how can we make it better?’ ” There will be a shift in focus to older middle-school kids, more role-playing added, and DARE will be made — the intention is, anyway — more “hip and cool.”

But these proposed changes couldn’t be said to be a fundamental shift. DARE soldiers on. “It’s a program,” says Idella Harter, president of the 25,000-member Maine Educational Association, the union that represents teachers and other school staff. She is trying to explain DARE’s longevity despite the critical studies, which she terms “quite conclusive.” “Generally, resources for Maine schools are not as available as they should be,” she says, and DARE is simply what’s available to address a big social problem.

Her counterpart at the Maine Principals’ Association, director Dick Durost, has much the same attitude: “There’s a feeling that we need to do something,” and DARE is doing something until a more proven program comes along. “We don’t want to throw our hands up.”

In addition to giving schools an ability to say they are addressing the drug-abuse problem, even if to no effect, both Harter and Durost suggest there are ancillary benefits to DARE. The students “see police officers as human beings,” Durost says.

Mark Dion, the iconoclastic Cumberland County sheriff (he supported last year’s successful medical-marijuana state initiative), agrees this is true, but he sounds more skeptical about the reasons for DARE’s persistence. For the police “it’s an access to a funding stream,” he says flatly. The funding largely comes from various federal anti-drug and community-policing grants, but money for DARE also sometimes comes from community service organizations such as Rotary Clubs, he notes. (DARE America also lists as sponsors various corporations such as Kmart, Mattel, and Polaroid.)

Dion squarely dismisses DARE’s basic approach: “Teaching kids to say ‘no’ doesn’t work. It’s too simplistic for such a complex problem. I look at the jails and I can see the studies are correct. DARE doesn’t work. DARE is more about providing parent comfort.”

Dion remembers that when he tried to pull DARE out of one school (his department provides DARE to schools that request it), “the parents vigorously lobbied their municipal leaders to bring it back. It highlighted how much parents relied on the program to innoculate their children from the threat.”

He feels an alternative, more comprehensive approach to drug abuse education is needed: “We need more about teaching kids to be critical thinkers, about how to evaluate information. There’s a lack of this in the schools.”

A local alternative is tried

HARSH CRITIC: USM’s professor of criminology Kimberly Cook questions DARE’s effectiveness.

If one surfs the drug-reform Web sites, there are many alternatives proposed to DARE and, indeed, to the entire War on Drugs. Common Sense for Drug Policy (www.csdp.org) plugs treatment for people with drug problems instead of a law-enforcement approach. An Australian site, Families and Friends for Drug Law Reform (www.ffdlr.org.au), has a paper by an American academic who claims our anti-drug education doesn’t work because the premise is false that adolescents use drugs due to low self-esteem: “Many high school student leaders and athletes use alcohol and marijuana,” he points out.3 Parents’ letters to the editor on news Web sites express dismay at valuable school time taken up with DARE that could be spent on academics.

And some parents suspect DARE is a police plot to get kids to snitch on their relatives. In Searsport a few years back, a family’s home was raided and the parents arrested after a seven-year-old girl told her DARE officer that her parents were growing pot at home.

Prof. Cook of USM believes the most basic premise of fighting drug abuse is wrong. She points out that in some countries where a laissez-faire attitude toward drugs exists, such as Holland, drug use is less. (The US scores highest among Western nations in teenage marijuana use. Approximately half of twelfth graders admit to having tried it, and the actual use is probably more.4)

“Most drug users are recreational and responsible,” Cook says. “Eighty percent fall into this category.” What should be taught to young people about drugs? “I’d leave them alone. I may not personally advocate young people doing drugs, but young people are going to do this.”

Even the US Center for Substance Abuse Prevention notes that “adolescence is a period in which youth reject conventionality and traditional authority figures in an effort to establish their own independence. For a significant number of adolescents, this rejection consists of engaging in a number of ‘risky’ behaviors, including drug and alcohol use. Within the past few years, researchers and practitioners have begun to focus on this tendency, suggesting that drug use may be a ‘default’ activity engaged in when youth have few or no opportunities to assert their independence in a constructive manner.”5

But even if one agrees that most drug use (such as the widespread consumption of alcohol and marijuana) does not necessarily lead to self-destruction, even if one acknowledges that kids will inevitably experiment and rebel, and that parents and peers are the role models they will follow before policemen — and these are all premises that many people would agree with — then does it follow that as a society we must give up on schools for drug-abuse prevention?

A school system where they haven’t given up, see no need to embrace DARE, and are trying to fashion their own alternative is SAD 6 in the Hollis-Standish-Sebago Lake area. There the teachers are charged with leading students in every elementary grade toward, in Sheriff Dion’s phrase, “critical thinking,” and doing it in the “comprehensive” manner he feels is necessary to effect a change in kids’ thinking. (Dion recommended to this reporter the SAD 6 program as a possible DARE alternative.)

The program is called Project Peace. Created in 1994 at Hollis Elementary School by guidance counselor Rita Clifford (now the program’s coordinator) and five teachers, it was instituted in all district elementary schools two years ago. Individual teachers or teams conduct 10 Project Peace lessons a year in every classroom. Fifty-seven teachers taught it last year. Its launch was funded by a Safe and Drug-Free Schools grant.

“But it’s more than a curriculum, it’s a school-wide theme,” says Clifford. “The idea is to create a school culture.” She describes the Peace Day in June when her school’s pupils engage in “cooperative activities.” During the year, the peace-oriented classroom sessions involve art, music, and stories. For second-graders around Halloween a Project Peace session might see the teacher reading a story, “A Bad Case of Stripes,” about how people are different. Then the teacher gets the children to talk about people’s differences. Then each child makes his or her own “different” jack-o’-lantern that is put on a bulletin board.

The program was not invented to address drug issues, but rather violence and threats of violence — such as “I’m gonna kill you!” heard on the playground — and teasing and bullying, and generally its aim is to create “a safe school,” according to Clifford. But the Peace Project’s emphasis on encouraging individuality, enhancing the appreciation of differences, and creating self-respect among children should carry over, she feels, into middle and high school when the students will encounter substance-abuse temptations.

She points to “dramatic changes over the years” among the children who have gone through Project Peace. In 1998-99, before the program went system-wide, there were 127 “life-threatening behaviors” reported among all district elementary students. Last year there were 18.

Of course, no verdict will be in for years on whether Project Peace inoculates kids against substance abuse.

But the district superintendent, Grace Ward, is sufficiently impressed with it to see no need for DARE in her system. “Versus the ‘don’t use drugs’ message,” she says, “we’re building skills.”

At least in SAD 6 they’re daring to make an effort to deal with some kids’ behaviors in an original way. And that’s more than can be said about most of the state’s school systems, which seem thoroughly addicted to DARE.

Lance Tapely can be reached at ltapley@ctel.net.