>From Wash (DC) Times
}}>Begin
The Washington Times
www.washtimes.com
DARE's dying gasps?
James Bovard
Published 8/27/00
The nation's most popular drug education program may be on the ropes. The
Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program is increasingly being tossed out
of school systems as the evidence becomes overwhelmingly of its failure to
deter drug use.
DARE was the brainchild of Los Angeles Police Department chief Daryl
Gates, who launched the program in the early 1980s. More than 20 million
students receive DARE training each school day; DARE is taught in every state
and in three-quarters of the nation's school districts. The DARE curriculum is
taught by police primarily to fifth and sixth graders, though children in
kindergarten and in high school also receive DARE instruction. The police are
supposed to serve as role models and trusted confidants.
America is deluged with DARE paraphernalia � including bears, bumper
stickers, buttons, hats, and jeeps. DARE has everything � except good results.
Many independent experts have found that DARE miserably fails students.
� The federal Bureau of Justice Assistance paid $300,000 to the Research
Triangle Institute (RTI), a North Carolina research firm, to analyze DARE's
effectiveness. The RTI study found that DARE failed to significantly reduce
drug use. Researchers warned that "DARE could be taking the place of other,
more beneficial drug-use curricula."
� Dennis Rosenbaum, professor of criminal justice studies at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, surveyed and tracked 1,800 kids who had DARE
training and concluded in 1998 that "suburban students who participated in DARE
reported significantly higher rates of drug use . . . than suburban students
who did not participate in the program."
� A 1999 study by the California legislative analyst's office "concluded
that DARE didn't keep children from using drugs. In fact, it found that
suburban kids who took DARE were more likely than others to drink, smoke and
take drugs," the Los Angeles Times reported.
� A 1999 University of Kentucky study, funded by the National Institutes
of Health, examined the effect of DARE on students' behavior over the
subsequent 10 years. The report concluded: "Our results are consistent in
documenting the absence of beneficial effects associated with the DARE program.
This was true whether the outcome consisted of actual drug use or merely
attitudes toward drug use." One Kentucky researcher observed: "The only
difference was that those who received DARE reported slightly lower levels of
self-esteem at age 20."
Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson recently denounced DARE as "a fraud on
the people of America." Mr. Anderson, who yanked DARE from Salt Lake City
schools, complained: "For far too long, drug-prevention policies have been
driven by mindless adherence to a wasteful, ineffective, feel-good program.
DARE has been a huge public-relations success but a failure at accomplishing
the goal of long-term drug-abuse prevention."
Dare America President Glenn Levant defends DARE by pointing to the
reported 13 percent decline in teen-age drug use in the most recent annual
survey. However, the percentage of eighth-graders who used marijuana, cocaine
and LSD tripled between 1991 and 1997. DARE cannot claim credit for the most
recent decline without accepting blame for the huge increase in the preceding
years � at a time when DARE already saturated the nation's public schools.
DARE also suffered a stunning defeat in April that could cripple its
ability to muzzle criticism. Federal Judge Virginia Phillips, in a case
involving DARE America's libel suit against Rolling Stone magazine, ruled there
was "substantial truth" to the charges that DARE had sought to "suppress
scientific research" critical of DARE and "attempted to silence researchers at
the Research Triangle Institute, editors at the American Journal of Public
Health, and producers at 'Dateline: NBC.' "
DARE's feel-good photo opportunities are no substitute for effective drug
education. American children deserve something more than a drug program that
fails to persuasively inform and warn them of the danger of narcotics.
Politicians, school officials and police need the courage to admit DARE is a
dud.
James Bovard is the author of the just-published "Feeling Your Pain: The
Explosion & Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years" (St. Martin's
Press).
Copyright � 2000 News World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
End<{{
A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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