Pubdate: Sun, 30 Jul 2000
Source: Salt Lake Tribune (UT)
Copyright: 2000 The Salt Lake Tribune
Contact:  143 S Main, Salt Lake City UT 84111
Fax: (801)257-8950
Website: http://www.sltrib.com/
Forum: http://www.sltrib.com/tribtalk/
Author: Rocky Anderson
Note: Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson is the mayor of Salt Lake City.

DARE FUNDING SHOULD BE PULLED BECAUSE THE PROGRAM DOESN'T WORK

Drug use by our youth is a problem that cries out for commitment, diligence,
and honesty by school administrators and elected officials. Instead, for far
too long, our drug-prevention policies have been driven by mindless
adherence to a wasteful, ineffective, feel-good program, Drug Abuse
Resistance Education (DARE). DARE has been a huge public-relations success,
but a failure at accomplishing the goal of long-term drug-abuse prevention.

Before taxpayers' money is spent for drug prevention, any program receiving
the funds should prove its worth.

Our school administrators and elected leaders should insist on no less.
However, with DARE, the moneyas well as the crucial opportunities to
implement programs that actually workhas been blown.

In a recent guest column appearing in this newspaper, Glenn Levant, the
president of DARE America, stated that "DARE has become the most successful
drug abuse and violence reduction program in the nation..." He is accurate,
but only if "success" is based on the amount of tax and foundation money
spent on a program or the number of schools that have used the program.

However, if "success" is based on the effectiveness of a program in reaching
the goal of reduced drug abuse over the long-term, DARE has been a dismal
failure, according to numerous published studies.

In a Kokomo, Ind., study, researchers found that the level of drug use among
DARE graduates was almost identical to the usage among non-DARE students.
The only statistically meaningful difference was that more DARE students
reported recent use of marijuana than those who had not been through the
DARE program.

The Department of Justice commissioned the Research Triangle Institute (RTI)
to evaluate DARE. Its published findings reflect that DARE students use more
marijuana than non-DARE students.

The RTI concluded that DARE's core-curriculum effect on the use of other
drugs, except tobacco, is not statistically significant. According to the
RTI, DARE might very well be taking the place of other, more beneficial,
drug-prevention programs that adolescents otherwise could be receiving.

When the City of Oakland decided to dump DARE after spending more than
$600,000 per year, the director of Oakland's Family Council on Drug
Awareness noted, "The bottom line is that DARE is an expensive program that
seems to be making the situation worse."

In the longest follow-up study conducted regarding the effectiveness of
DARE, the results of which were published in the Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology, the researchers noted that "[t]he widespread popularity
of DARE is especially noteworthy, given the lack of evidence for its
efficacy." They repeated the findings of many other researchers: "[T]he
preponderance of evidence suggests that DARE has no long-term effect on drug
use."

After it became apparent I was going to terminate Salt Lake City's
involvement in the DARE program, several people came to complain at the City
Council meeting on July 11. Among them were the director of DARE for the
state of Utah, officers of the Utah Council for Crime Prevention, several
DARE officers, and a member of the Salt Lake City School Board. Although
they all spoke passionately for the continuation of DARE, not one of them
made reference to any research published in a peer-reviewed journal
demonstrating the effectiveness of DARE. In fact, the Salt Lake City school
board member said she was "appalled" because I provided my research to the
school board, yet she failed to mention any research to support her
apparently intuitive notion that DARE accomplishes its objective.

Drug prevention is too important to be left to those who refuse to become
familiar with the research -- or with the availability of other programs
that have been proved to work. The DARE program, and those who have
advocated it to the exclusion of effective programs, should be held
accountable to the public.

Most important, our community should demand that our schools replace DARE
with research-based programs that will help us attain our goal of
significantly reduced drug abuse among our youth.

Among those programs are Life Skills Training (LST), Students Taught
Awareness and Resistance (STAR), and Athletes Training and Learning to Avoid
Steroids (ATLAS). I have provided information concerning these programs and
their effectiveness to the Salt Lake City school board.

Our common goal is to cut drug abuse among our youth.

A means of helping to accomplish that goal is to implement in our schools
drug-prevention programs that actually work. Those who fail to insist on
effective drug-prevention programs in our schools are betraying our youth
and our community.

And those who are unfamiliar with the research and insist on retaining DARE
in our schools simply because it is a "popular" program are not part of the
drug-abuse solution; they are part of the problem.
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MAP posted-by: Don Beck