Author: Gary Jackson

DARE’s ‘just say no’ drug education didn’t work Here’s what could : NPR

Within one day of launch, CBS4 in Denver reported that people vandalized signs on the cages. The campaign will use traditional mediums like TV, newspapers, and YouTube, but it’s also deploying human-sized cages in Colorado to grab teens’ attention and promote the “lab rat” theme. Slater says part of the issue with these approaches might be that they “normalize” drug use. By doing that, some anti-drug campaigns inadvertently remove some of the stigma attached to illicit substances. Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at /us).

A large U.S. survey conducted in 2012 by psychologist Lloyd D. Johnston and his colleagues at the University of Michigan revealed that fully 24 percent of 12th graders had engaged in binge drinking (defined as five or more drinks on one occasion) in the past two weeks. Moreover, 42 percent had consumed at least some alcohol in the past month, as had 11 percent of eighth graders and 28 percent of high school sophomores. In addition, 1 percent of 12th graders had tried methamphetamine, and almost 3 percent had used cocaine in the past year. And yet those survival techniques were never talked about in Myers’ middle and high school drug education classes.

I’ve heard from people of color in LA who grew up in the 1980s. They said the cops just came in and yelled at them and said they were gang members, or their mothers were “crack moms.” So the messaging was different at the individual level in these different spaces, urban versus suburban. Black and Latino kids are far more likely to be arrested at school for these kinds of offenses.

Meet young people where they are, not where you want them to be

D.A.R.E. was first implemented in Los Angeles schools in 1983 and by the mid-90s, it had become a national organization. After a study from the National Institute of Justice in 1986 claimed to find that D.A.R.E. had “short-term results,” per Priceonomics, D.A.R.E. started receiving an outpouring of funding. Mike Sukle, whose advertising firm created the campaign, says his company settled on the tactic after looking at the research for previous anti-drug campaigns and focus-group testing the “lab rat” approach with Colorado teens.

As one student wrote in their end-of-course DARE essay contest submission in 1994, “DARE means a lot to me. In this program we learn to give excuses and report if someone offers us drugs. Recognize, Resist, and Report.” Students took the message and ran with it, not only reporting on those who offered them drugs, but also on family and friends who used drugs. Teens, for example, might know that the high school quarterback is a weekend pot smoker. If they see that his marijuana use doesn’t seem to pose an immediate threat to his physical or mental health, they’ll immediately grow skeptical of any message that claims marijuana makes people stupid or crazy.

As more teens overdose on fentanyl, schools face a drug crisis unlike any other

And instead of engaging the students with interactive activities, often police officers would merely lecture students for minutes, trying to drill in the idea that drugs are bad. Ideally, if students have high self-esteem, then they can resist any temptation to use drugs. Other evidence has come out about former DARE officers being sentenced for child pornography, prescription drug thefts, and sexually assaulting teenage boys. Along with the history of turning kids into the eyes and ears of the police, these stories suggest the dangers of police programs framed as a reform or a form of community policing. DARE was sold as a preventive program that would be divorced from the enforcement side of the drug war. But as the stories of DARE kids informing on their friends and family reveal, that separation was never as distinct as proponents hoped.

Choose Recovery Over Addiction

He wrote a report about the “School Buy Program.” This program put undercover officers into Los Angeles area high schools to try to arrest drug dealers. By the early 1980s, Daryl Gates, who’s now the LAPD chief, is ramping up the War on Drugs—drug raids, drug task forces. That gets reinforced by the Reagan administration when the president calls for a War on Drugs, too.

  1. Altogether, DARE reached an estimated 50 million children worldwide.
  2. Volkow says the failures of past drug education programs haunt current efforts to inform young people of the risks of fentanyl.
  3. Despite this fanfare, data indicate that the program does little or nothing to combat substance use in youth.
  4. I’ve heard from people of color in LA who grew up in the 1980s.

It gives them more confidence than they should have.” By this, Colson implies that the program educates students about drugs they were otherwise not aware of. In 1983, the federal government introduced a nationwide education program called D.A.R.E. which aimed to reduce drug-taking, gangs, and violence among young people. Let’s examine what D.A.R.E. was, what the impact it had was, and what we can learn from the failures of past rhetoric. They focused on resisting peer pressure and didn’t address the experiences of most students across the country, which more often involved being invited to sell drugs to help make money or being surrounded by older influences.

Teaching safety measures for when students do choose to use

These zones were meant to keep drug dealers from selling to children by enhancing penalties for dealing near schools or other places children go. But the no-go areas have become so expansive that they have criminalized entire cities — and generally failed to keep dealers away. The fears behind “Just Say No” are close to obsolete today, as marijuana legalization becomes a reality in more and more states.

There were clear, inherent problems with setting up cops as drug experts and educators, preaching abstinence-only and expanding the War on Drugs into the classroom. And much to the consternation of the police, independent researchers eventually showed DARE was not only ineffective by its own standards, but potentially counterproductive. Young people continued saying yes to drugs, despite the weekly DARE class that taught them to say no.

Merely telling participants to “just say no” to drugs is unlikely to produce lasting effects because many may lack the needed interpersonal skills. Programs led exclusively by adults, with little or no involvement of students as peer leaders—another common feature of D.A.R.E.—seem relatively unsuccessful, again probably because students get little practice saying no to other kids. While it is useful to educate students about the dangers of street drugs when they’re young, it doesn’t really address the root of the problem. The majority of people with substance use disorder have experienced an adverse childhood experience (ACE) during their formative years. The repercussions of these unresolved experiences are often the underlying cause for someone becoming addicted to drugs or alcohol. CBT is an evidence-based practice proven to reduce rates of substance use disorder.