Source: Contra Costa Times (5/18/97).
email: 					Does DARE work?

by REBECCA BARRON
TIMES EDITORIAL WRITER

DARE dares us to find out

	Does DARE, the most famous drug prevention program work? Most
studies just say no. Still, we pour millions into it every year.

	I wondered why. So I dared to take DARE's dare. The acronym stands for
Drugs and Alcohol Resistance Education.

	Just as so many studies have questioned DARE's effectiveness, so has the
Times. We've published a handful of editorials suggesting the program be
dropped. I've written a few of them myself.

	The most recent ran in March with the catchy headline "Dare to Dump
DARE." As usual it elicited reader response  some agreed, some didn't.
One that caught our attention was from Contra Costa County deputy sheriff
Roger Wilson, a DARE instructor for six years. He urged DARE doubters to
"walk with me on my school campuses and look into the eyes of these
kids."

	So, I took him up on it. I accepted the DARE challenge. I'm a skeptic, I
told him. Prove to me DARE works.

	Officer Wilson warmly accepted my request. I visited his classes at
Hillcrest Elementary in Rodeo and Alamo Elementary  six in all. One
thing I can say with absolute certainty: Wilson lives and breathes DARE.
He puts his heart and soul into his classes. As a former juvenile hall
officer he's seen what can happen to kids who get mixed up with drugs.
Whether he's teaching stranger danger or anger control to secondgraders
or how to become savvy about commercials to his fifthgraders, his
animated style captures students' attention.

	While heading to his first class of the day at Alamo Elementary, a woman
approaches. Her daughter is sick, she tells him. But she came to school
anyway because she didn't want to miss his class. She enjoys DARE that
much! Mom just wanted Wilson to know. I half jokingly wondered aloud if
it was a setup. Later in class, Wilson remembered to ask the girl how she
was feeling.

	In a 5thgrade class at Alamo the DARE topic today is how the media
influences our buying habits. it kinds are aware of the tactics
advertisers use to entice and manipulate, it will be easier for them to
ignore the bait, particularly those pushing alcohol and cigarettes.

	These kids are well acquainted with the Budweiser frogs, Joe Camel and
the current theme songs of most popular brandname products. "You will
never find a beer commercial or a cigarette ad where they aren't having
fun," Wilson tells the class. He plays a video of the Bud Light TV spot
featuring the old BeeGees song "Stayin' Alive." "Oh, I love this one!" a
little girl exclaims.

	At lunchtime the kids flock to him, pushing in closer and closer as
Wilson munches on a sandwich and chats. They want to know what kind of
car he drives. Which he likes better; Burger King or McDonald's. They
think having a reporter there is pretty cool, too. They lavish Wilson
with praise. "He's really nice. He kicks. He's awesome. He rules!" says
one boy.

	Geez, you'd think he was Santa Claus. These kids adore him. Wilson heads
over to shoot some hoops with a group of boys. One little girl approaches
and points "You're a bad guy," she says. "No I'm not. I'm a good guy.
"You're a bad guy," she insists and walks away. "She says that every
week," he shrugs as he heads for the court.

	Well, most of the kids adore him.

	Fifthgraders at Hillcrest are learning the DARE theme song today
They'll be singing it on DARE graduation night, Wilson tells them. He
hands out sheets with the words and turns on the boom box.

	"I wanna rock the house," he says. He struts around the room doing the
hand motions while singing along with the tape. "Other DARE graduations
do skits, not me. I like to rock out." The kids grin.

	"D! I won't do drugs!

	A! Won't have an attitude!

	R! I will respect myself!

	E! I will educate me!"

	So goes the chorus. It's a catchy pop tune all right. Think Dave Clark
Five or the Monkees. I've had that darn song in my head for two weeks
now. Just can't seem to shake it.

	By the second time around, the kids are belting it out. After
rehearsal, Wilson introduces his special guests. he's brought three
students from John Swett High to share how to succeed in high school.

	These three kids are the creme of the crop. Bright, smart,
athletic, wellmannered, active in school and community They are every
parent's dream child. And they are a big hit with the kids.

	The fifthgraders bombard them with questions. And the teens answer
them all, including ones about drugs and alcohol, although the high
schoolers admit to little or no experience with these substances. Oh, one
other thing these three students have in common. None of them are DARE
graduates.

	Wilson is convinced DARE works. "We now have kids waving at
police officers," he said. Students' perceptions of police are important
to him.

"Are you going to save every kid? No. It's not a silver bullet. We're one
spoke in the wheel. If we can save one kid, is the program worth it?

	I'll say it is! If you save 50 percent? Definitely!"

a Wilson dreams of the day when former student tells him he stayed drug
free because of DARE. "Will it happen someday? I know it will."

	He did it. I left those six classrooms and an extensive interview with
Wilson feeling upbeat and assured that this generation of kinds wouldn't
turn to beer kegs and pot parties as their main pastimes.

	Wilson is truly dedicated. If every teacher, a parent and
police officer treated kids thw way he does, there might not be a drug
problem in this country today. And police certainly wouldn't be shadowed
by any image problem.

	DARE is OK, I thought as I hummed the theme song. it teaches kids good
lessons in life. how to be assertive. How to say no to peer pressure. How
to reject drugs and alcohol. How to avoid violence. What's the matter
with that????

	Then it struck me. DARE's feeling good approach is why it remains
popular despite all the negative studies. The greatest scientist in the
world could point out its fatal flaws, but we would ignore them because
we want to feel good. We don't want to think about whether it works
because if it doesn't then what?

	I still had no idea whether DARE worked. Yeah, kids dug the contact with
the police. But what that keep them away from drugs three, four, five
years from now? I had no idea.

	DARE criticisms are many but two of the major ones are these: It takes
away from academic class time and it just plain doesn't work.

	School time is an issue among a group of parents in San Ramon
Valley schools. MiMi Tapper of Alamo got a firsthand glimpse of DARE
last year as a homeroom mother for her son's fifth grade class. She was
unimpressed. The officer spent too much time talking about himself,
trying to make the police look good, she said.

	The nuts and bolts of DARE could be presented in far less
time, like a couple of sessions. 	"There are only so many minutes in a
school day ... and you're cutting into academic time."

	Tapper also questions whether DARE and other drug program offered, PEP,
could have a boomerang effect. When kinds reach the age of rebellion 
they'll reach first for the taboos that adults have bugged them about for 
years drugs, alcohol and tobacco. Tapper recalls well the DARE graduation 
where, in addition to the DARE theme, students sang the Lee Greenwood hit 
from the '80s "God Bless the U.S.A."

	"It seemed a little ... Orange County to me. It gave me the chllls. It
seemed to me that they had just completed a brainwashing."

	Another parent Kathy Ramies had a similar reaction. "It really disturbs
me. They're very militant in their approach. It's almost as if they are
teaching kids how to do drugs." For example, she wonders whether kids
would even think to sniff WhiteOut or marking pens if DARE didn't
mention it.

	She took her son out of the program this year: Unfortunately, there are
no good alternatives for kids who opt out. They are either sent to the
library or to another teacher's already full class.

	Her son James is a little kinder toward DARE. Yet after three years of
PEP and DARE, he thinks it would have been overklll to sign up for DARE
in sixthgrade too. He's glad he opted out.

	Alice Schultz, another parent in the San Ramon Valley, is pushing to
have the program moved out of the classroom and into a more common area,
like a multipurpose room. That way kids who opt out can remain in their
class with their regular teacher and receive meaningful instruction.

	"The problem is parents can opt out, but they don't make that an
attractive option." These parents make some valid points. Unfortunately
it's difficult to change the status quo.

	Then there's the big issue of whether it works.

	Studies say that students who go through DARE are just as likely to do
drugs as those. who don't. Some even indicate a boomerang effect. A study
in Kokomo, md., took it one better and measured the program's secondary
goal of raising selfesteem. Again no longterm difference between DARE
and nonDARE students.

	Yet another study was conducted to study the studies. Not only did it
conclude that DARE did not work, but it also concluded it takes money
away from "boutique" programs that do work.

 	Perhaps the most damaging was by Berkeley researcher Joel H.
Brown and his associates for the Pacific Institute for Research and
Evaluation released in 1995. "In Their Own Voices" studied drug programs,
including DARE, in 50 California school districts and included input
from 5,000 students.

	They not only determined that DARE and similar programs don't work, they
told it in students' own words.

	They found that as kids grew up drug programs lost credibility And the
kids didn't mince words about why. As elementary pupils, they didn't
understand the drug message being spoon4ed to them. It lacked relevance
to their lives.

Now older and more worldly, they look back on those lessons as being less
than truthful. The terms "use" and "abuse" were interchangeable. It was
a short trip from that first puff on a joint to O.D.ing in an crack
house. Yet life experiences now tell them that isn't how it works at all.
There are plenty of degrees between taking a sip of beer and joining 
AA.

	Since they weren't told the whole truth, they tended to discount the
information and its source. These kids told researchers they would prefer
comprehensive drug education with more outside experts and more hard
knowledge of drugs' effects. And they didn't want it from a cop. The
wanted it from experts who could offer confidential counseling. They
wanted to hear from former addicts, too.

	Ryan Ng, a 13yearold from Lafayette, had a similar assessment.

"Their ideas are like in the '60s. Everyone thought it was a big joke,"

he said of his DARE class at Stanley Intermediate. The A student would
much prefer a more realistic approach that included high school kids
sharing their experiences with drugs and alcohol.

	Of course, DARE disputes all these studies claiming they are flawed
because they used outdated DARE curriculum. The new curriculum for
elementary ages, adopted in 1993, is more interactive, they say.

	They point to a study by Ohio State University that says DARE does work.
By surveying more than 3,000 11th graders, researchers determined that 72
percent of DARE graduates compared to 58 percent of nonDARE students
consumed little or no drugs and alcohol.

 	However, the gap in the highrisk category  those who were heavy or
regular users between DARE and nonDARE students was less pronounced. Ten
percent of DARE grads were heavy users compared to 15 percent for
nonDARE.

Researcher Brown says there's a few things we should keep in mind when
complaining research results.

	Is it published in respectable scientific journals, a key to
credibleity? Does it use the sound scientific practice of random survey?
His research fits both those bills, he says.

	And, just because one study reaches a different conclusion, that doesn't
change his study's findings. Scientists don't depend on just one study to
draw conclusions. Then consider the whole body of evidence.

 	DARE and most of the other drug programs used today are virtually the
same program, Brown says. And they're all based on a 100yearold model,
the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Those women preached a no use
message, too, and look where that got us.

	Unfortunately, all the programs are the same because that's what the
government will fund.

	"It's like putting old wine in a new bottle. Programs might look
different but they are really saying the same thing," Brown said.

"It's a waste of taxpayers' money and it has a potential for harm," Brown
says. But he is quick to emphasis that it's not just DARE. The criticism
fits all similar programs.

	"It's much bigger than just DARE," he said. "We need to stop sacrificing
kids for politics." Brown says he working on followup research now that
will delve into better solutions. Stay tuned.

	'Mommy!", my 4yearold son said racing up to me as I walked in from a
day at the office. "A policeman visited my school today! I got a badge!"
he pointed proudly to the shiny sticker on his shirt. "And the policeman
said that we should never get in cars with strangers and that guns are
bad." He proceeded to go into great detail about what the officer had
told his preschool class about stranger danger and guns.

	It was a far cry from the usual response I get upon asking about his
day. Those usually alternate between "Nothing" and "I forget."

	The officer had clearly made an impression. And there lies the paradox.
We may like what we see. I'm glad that officer visited my son's class and
helped reinforce these important safety messages. He had heard them from
me before, but an officer in a uniform carried real weight.

But do we need a special national program to invite officers into the
schools? Perhaps it would be more economical and better for kids and
police alike if all officers  not just DARE  got to interact with kids
from time to time.

 

	So where does this leave us? With a big mess. DARE is great for police
public relations. And that's fine. But that's not what we're paying 
for.

	Thirteen years of DARE and drug, alcohol and tobacco use are way too
high. In fact, drug use has doubled since 1992. Yet, today's young people
are rhe most drug educated in history

Does DARE actual harm kids? I'm not convinced it does. But clearly it
siphons money that could be used to help kids with real drug problems.

	A drug program should do what it aspires to do. We only harm ourselves
and our children if we ignore the research critical of DARE. Admittedly
it will be tough to drop DARE until another model  one approved by
researchers, educators and parent  gains acceptance and national
prominence.

	It's time the country step back and take a look.