11 ms·

DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked

heimatau 11y ago
As a kid during a lot of this, in the 1990s, I felt DARE was stupid and pointless. It did nothing to discourage my peers nor myself from drugs. I did miss out on some cool helicopter tours and some military expos but other than that DARE was seen as a 'stupid meaningless waste of time' according to myself and peers. Maybe if it wasn't a top down approach, it might've worked. Like if they had my peers dramatize drug related pressure (not watching a video of my 'peers' [they were more like tacky uncool peers, by anyones standard]). Also, not having cops 'teach' it. I didn't feel educated. I felt bad for the cop, as they struggled to convince us that drugs were bad (many of my classes were just anti-cops, so we gave each cop a difficult time, just out of spite). My peers are among the average Americans, not a rough bunch, just anti-authoritarian. :) For balance, upon writing this post, I'd like to suggest a solution (not just criticize DARE). Have specific teachers teach about drugs. Just like sex educators aren't generalists, they focus on teaching the one subject, sex. Let's have drug educators. I know sex educators get a lot of flack but that flack is falling out of fashion because sex educators are effective. Let's do that for drugs. It could educate many people on the hard drugs that are extremely difficult to quick after one dose (crack, heroin, etc). Educating kids on what's out there, is empowering. Hopefully we can see a healthy change in our system.
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  I was a teenage DARE ambassador, taught younger kids how uncool drugs were. But that wasn't nearly as effective as the time I drew a caricature of the class's newest drug user and a friend made 50 copies of it. Major fireworks, major drama, and all adults who wanted to know were now in the know. I may have almost destroyed that poor thing's life, but in doing so I believe I found a faster-acting solution than DARE, at least for kids who didn't want their parents to know.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    It seems to me that the best way is simply to severely punish any kid caught taking drugs. And do hair tests to make sure they're caught.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - InclinedPlane 11y ago
      You do realize that every President of the US in the last 2 decades has smoked pot and in some cases used harder drugs, right? Oppressive police state tactics are rarely a good idea, whether dealing with kids or otherwise.
  - oxide 11y ago
    that's...uncool. most people grow out of drug experimentation naturally and never look back. you might have actually fucked that person's life up, compared to if you had done nothing. that's no solution, that's just plain mean.
    - themodelplumber 11y ago
      Tongue in cheek solution. No one should do this. The fireworks enveloped us all.
      - heimatau 11y ago
        Your example made me smile. Unmoderated peer pressure is more effective than DARE. Should you be getting all that grant money? We can only dream.
      - oxide 11y ago
        I want to say something in my defense but I think it'll just make it worse. Hook, line and sinker.
    - heimatau 11y ago
te_platt 11y ago
Proud father comment here. Last year my son's school had a DARE essay writing contest. Knowing that I favor legalizing drugs he showed me his submission before turning it in. I should note we had a good conversation about why I think drug use is a very bad idea and the reasons why. His English teacher (8th grade) gave him 100 out of 100. The following is his submission: D.A.R.E. is a program designed to keep kids from drugs. There are problems with D.A.R.E. though. For example, it is counter productive, gives parents a false sense of security and it wastes money. In 1989-1996 studies done showed that kids involved in the D.A.R.E. program take 3-5% more drugs than kids not in the D.A.R.E. program. The program also shows specific interest on severe drugs such as cocaine, marijuana and meth. This can cause kids to take the drugs they learned about, making this system completely counter productive. The D.A.R.E. program wastes money. It is funded by taxes that you pay and those funds are completely wasted on this program. D.A.R.E. shows absolutely no long-term effects on kids. The money spent on D.A.R.E. could be used for much better things than nothing. This program gives parents a false sense of security. When parents have children in the D.A.R.E. program they think “oh, he is already learning that drugs are bad so I don’t need to teach him myself.” When this happens, kids think their parents don’t care if they are doing drugs, especially when they see other family members doing drugs without any immediate reactions they have learned about in D.A.R.E.. When this happens they think D.A.R.E. lies about what drugs do and start taking them because they believe there is no risk in it. Some people might say D.A.R.E. helps decrease drug use in kids but there are two problems with this statement. First, it is a lie, kids who are in the dare program have been shown to take 3-5% more drugs than kids who don’t. Second, who cares if kids are taking drugs? Who says it’s a bad thing to take drugs? Yes, they do kill you, but so do doughnuts! Maybe D.A.R.E. should stand for “doughnut abuse resistance education” instead of drug abuse resistance education”. Seeing how they both kill you its just doughnuts make you fat as well as dead. As you can see the D.A.R.E. program has some severe issues and needs to be taken care of. If we destroyed the D.A.R.E. program we could save enough money to start a new, more effective and important, program. Perhaps it could be “Doughnut Abuse Resistance Education” to warn kids of the dangers of doughnuts. For short we could even call it D.A.R.E., catchy, I know.
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mratzloff 11y ago
I think Randy Marsh from "South Park" had the most effective anti-marijuana speech I've ever heard: Stan: I've been told a lot of things about pot, but I've come to find out a lot of those things aren't true! So I don't know what to believe! Randy: Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but… well, son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored. And it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything.
- Vexs 11y ago
  Seriously, the only things that have ever made me think a second time about drugs are the honest descriptions of it, not the "I did drugs and now I have no teeth" kinda descriptions, but the ones that go, "When you're on meth, meth feels great! Everything is amazing, you feel like you can do so much, but when you're off it everything seems boring! So you go back for more, and eventually you're addicted." kinda descriptions. If you talk about LSD, and say, "I've had some amazing times on it, and other times I've had spiders in my eyes", I think most people would be less likely to try it. Sure, not everyone, but still more than people saying just spiders in your eyes. I mean, it's a classical argument tactic, give something up to make your point more valid. But damned if it doesn't work.
  - astazangasta 11y ago
    Or, just do drugs. I mean, LSD is great, and people should try it. Smoking pot is also nice, I've done some great writing while stoned. Heck, Paul Erdos did amphetamines his whole life. Why are we trying to convince everyone not to do drugs again?
    - philwelch 11y ago
      We're not; it's just one drug cartel trying to push out the competition. Whenever you hear drug use described as "self-medicating", you're hearing the notion that drugs like Zoloft and Ritalin are ok but drugs like marijuana and MDMA aren't.
tenpoundhammer 11y ago
The only thing I can remember is the dare officer teaching us how to use a bong and how to cook heroin in a spoon. I'm not sure how that's supposed to stop us from using drugs though.
- themodelplumber 11y ago
  Did you see the video of the DEA agent who shot himself in the foot during a K-12 presentation?
  - tenpoundhammer 11y ago
    I did actually, I know police officers are human and capable of error, but this is ridiculous. Why even have your gun loaded when walking into a presentation like this?
boot13 11y ago
As opposed to all the ones that worked?
- notgood 11y ago
  A trillion dollars wasted but let's keep at it! I'm sure its gonna work out with just one trillion more. Besides, think of the consequences of suddenly stopping! Private jails would go bankrupt and that would be anti-capitalism and therefore anti-american.
- mistercow 11y ago
  Apparently the "Above the Influence" campaign has been fairly effective.
ISL 11y ago
As a counterpoint, I found DARE to be a useful and worldly course. I probably wasn't the target audience, as an introverted sciency-type, but the class gave me a survey of the various drugs on the market and an introduction to a vocabulary with which I'd had no contact. When interactions with drugs touched closer friends in subsequent years, I feel that I was better prepared than I would've been without DARE. Anecdotally, DARE led to my confounding our family doctor when I categorically refused to take any cough medicine, even prescribed, that contained codeine. So, Mr. DARE officer, your course worked for me.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  Satire is something so rarely seen on HN. Good job.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- GhotiFish 11y ago
  Did you actually refuse treatment from a doctor because the cough medicine contained codeine? Your parents let you get away with that?
kenesom1 11y ago
D.A.R.E. was funded by Big Pharma trade groups, branches of law enforcement, and even things like asset forfeiture [1]. It was never about public health, but simply propaganda to justify the abuses carried out in the name of the War on Drugs and to prop up the prison and pharma industries. Substance abuse education can't be entrusted to the government given how easy it is for public programs to be corrupted by interests who are opposed to public health and safety. [1] https://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0468.htm https://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0468.htm
carbide 11y ago
I remember DARE. A message delivered to us by people we didn't respect. A police officer that no one trusted and videos of teens we perceived to be losers telling us that drugs were bad. The program seemed to focus on social pressure not to do drugs, but social pressure is meaningless and ineffective when it's coming from somewhere beneath you. It had the effect of making my peers want to get high to distinguish themselves from the lower social class who were shown to us coming out against drugs. From personal experience, I feel that they would have been better off focusing on the consequences to your health rather than a fumbling attempt at peer pressure. The one class when they showed pictures of a smoker's lungs was the only one that had any lasting positive impact on me.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  It is very stupid to scare youth with health consequences. For young people, the world "health" means nothing. It's very blank. It means a lot for senior demographics, and so they happily push measures involving scaring young people with health problems. Which then won't work.
  - djhn 11y ago
    That's a very good point. You can also substitute various other demographics for young people, like lower socioeconomic classes, people heavily discounting their future, impulsive people, etc. Health disguised as vanity works quite well though. Case in point, current fitness boom.
  - njbooher 11y ago
    The video of the kid who had been drinking and driving, got in a wreck, and had to have a hole drilled in his skull to relieve the buildup of blood was pretty effective for me.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  From your description, it does sound similar to abstinence-only sex ed. The only thing schools should do with regards to drugs, sex, alcohol, and all those vices that can be enjoyed responsibly, is to educate - this is what these drugs will do, positive and negative effects, it's illegal to possess it in most cases, etc. We didn't have much or any of that, but we did have a police officer in class once showing us a block of hash. IDK what all that was about though, we just thought it was cool to have a guy with a gun in class, :p. (note that this is in a country famous for its tolerance towards weed)
FrankenPC 11y ago
Developing software has all kinds of metrics that show the team if the progress is in the right direction, effective, and future proof. How is it a program like DARE could have gone on for so long without peering into their own performance metrics to see if the program had any value? It's a rhetorical question. It's obviously political. A group of powerful people banked their political cred on the concept and was unwilling to admit defeat. Just like the entire drug war.
ParanoidAct 11y ago
I never understood the purpose of programs like this as a child. All that effort, money, time, etc. pumped into it and somehow the only ones that ever seemed to have any effect at all were like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtLHKtNOcS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtLHKtNOcS8 that is essentially a very good advert for meth.
pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
it worked great... taught me what drugs looked like and how to use them. oh, you assumed they weren't lying and extorting the public contradictory to their claims? that's cute. even your precious combinatorings are mostly corrupt.
Houshalter 11y ago
Interesting article. But it didn't go into any details of why DARE is ineffective compared to other programs. It didn't specify what the other programs did differently. It barely mentioned the other programs, or their effectiveness, until the very end. I'm afraid a lot of readers might walk away with the impression that all anti-drug programs are ineffective. Lastly it says that this reform started in the 2000's. That was 15 years ago. So people who went through the program in the 2000's like me might not have gotten the ineffective version. Assuming they actually made decent reforms, which the article suggests.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  That's just it - DARE forked the MVP. The completed product is out there, hardly known.
badmadrad 11y ago
I actually have fond memories of DARE. But we had a really cool cop come in the class and tell us stories that were interesting to me. Usually the stories were very honest and real stories which I found riveting compared to the daily repetitive humdrum of school. I don't think it was the reason I didn't do drugs but it definitely supported and provided foundation around what my parents would tell me.
kristianrjs 11y ago
I went through DARE in Canada 11 years ago when I was 9. They had an RCMP officer come in everyday for a week for a about 30 mins and I had to write an essay specifically on the negative effects of marijuana at the end of the week. I really didn't even understand the concept of taking drugs to get high and the only alcohol in my life was the beer my parents drank. It seemed like wasted time to me.
athrowaway27 11y ago
I swear on my life, the following is 100% true. When i was in 5th grade, a dare officer came to my class and told me about a piece of paper i could put under my tongue and see things that werent real(lsd)... that started a decade long journey of copious drug use.
joslin01 11y ago
Haha DARE. Oh yes, I remember it well -- I got all the stickers you could by giving some bogus talks about God knows what. It made me pretty excited for middle school where I was being trained to Just Say No to all the random kids that would be coming up to me offering me drugs. Of course by the time I got to middle school, my DARE officer had been fired for smoking weed in his pimped out DARE cop car. A few years after that, I would be getting high nearly every day in high school. Great stickers though.
sandworm101 11y ago
The children were never the target audience. Programs like DARE always reflect the wants of those who fund them, not those they try to help. Nancy Reagan and countless othersi power believed abstinence was the best tool for most any vice. So DARE reflected that simple mindset. My experience of DARE was that it had little to do with drugs. It seemed focused on getting cops into classrooms. The ones who came to our class were always horrible. They openly lied to us about drugs, cars and even the law. We played with them. The goal was to get the cop red-faced mad by asking simple questions. One handed out something he called cocaine, but we instantly discovered was just baking powder. If any chief is reading this: Do not sent a bicycle cop in spandex shorts to talk to boys wearing blazers and ties.
Symmetry 11y ago
Social norms are powerful things. Some people did a study at the Petrified Forrest National Park on how to prevent people from stealing pieces of fossilized wood. When they put "Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest’" on signs the amount of theft was much larger than anything else they tried[1]. So if you're running a public awareness campaign emphasizing how many people break the rules is just about the worst thing you can do. The message DARE seemed to be giving me when I was a kid was that drug use was normal. [1]http://www.niu.edu/user/tj0bjs1/papers/cdsbrw06.pdf http://www.niu.edu/user/tj0bjs1/papers/cdsbrw06.pdf
pinoceros 11y ago
The colloquial use of the word "anyways" nearly ruined this article for me.
jessaustin 11y ago
DARE rolled out at just the right time so that I wasn't subjected to it but my sister two years younger was. By the time I was a senior in high school, it was clear to everyone that the DARE-exposed classes were using at much higher rates than previous classes. (Not my sister though!) This was 1994. There is no such thing as a "temporary" government program. Programs that do harm will do so for decades.
cardamomo 11y ago
As a side effect of DARE's eventual disappearance from schools, one of my favorite (bad) jokes no longer works with younger listeners. (Wait for the third punchline.) Q: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? A: It was dead. Q: Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree? A: It was stapled to the first one. Q: Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree? A: Peer pressure. Alas, I'll have to save my bad jokes for other adults and come up with some new ones for the kiddos. EDIT: Formatting.
swayvil 11y ago
But it did work. Millions have an irrational antipathy towards drugs. Indoctrination works, especially when you get em while they're young. The effects of DARE will echo through our society for generations. Just like the effects of a war or a natural disaster.
danschumann 11y ago
It's a SELF IMAGE THING! If your mom came into your room every day and had a talk about how SCARED SHE WAS that you were GOING TO MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS.. Likely you'd go out there and make a billion dollars. People often rebel just for the sake of defining their own boundaries!!!!
chestervonwinch 11y ago
Ha! I still have my DARE t-shirt hanging up in my closet somewhere. It's a wonder that it's survived this long (and still fits!). Although it doesn't exactly get a lot of wear, so maybe its survival isn't such a miracle :P
dragonwriter 11y ago
DARE is not, and never was, an anti-drug program; it was a pro-police program, and one which was repeatedly proven effective in that role in many of the same studies which showed it didn't do anything anti-drug, that used the "anti-drug" label to gain support from parents, etc., because "were teaching your kids to stay of drugs" sounds better than "we're teaching your kids to have warm fuzzy feeling about cops".
NPMaxwell 11y ago
A point of the article is that major investments of money and work may be completely ineffective. Almost everyone involved in such projects perceives first hand that the project works. The illusion is very compelling. Efforts to stop the waste are not met with cooperative collaboration. As technology advances, we will not have more leisure time. Instead will will spend more and more effort working at jobs like DARE instructor.

As a kid during a lot of this, in the 1990s, I felt DARE was stupid and pointless. It did nothing to discourage my peers nor myself from drugs. I did miss out on some cool helicopter tours and some military expos but other than that DARE was seen as a 'stupid meaningless waste of time' according to myself and peers. Maybe if it wasn't a top down approach, it might've worked. Like if they had my peers dramatize drug related pressure (not watching a video of my 'peers' [they were more like tacky uncool peers, by anyones standard]). Also, not having cops 'teach' it. I didn't feel educated. I felt bad for the cop, as they struggled to convince us that drugs were bad (many of my classes were just anti-cops, so we gave each cop a difficult time, just out of spite). My peers are among the average Americans, not a rough bunch, just anti-authoritarian. :) For balance, upon writing this post, I'd like to suggest a solution (not just criticize DARE). Have specific teachers teach about drugs. Just like sex educators aren't generalists, they focus on teaching the one subject, sex. Let's have drug educators. I know sex educators get a lot of flack but that flack is falling out of fashion because sex educators are effective. Let's do that for drugs. It could educate many people on the hard drugs that are extremely difficult to quick after one dose (crack, heroin, etc). Educating kids on what's out there, is empowering. Hopefully we can see a healthy change in our system.

themodelplumber 11y ago
I was a teenage DARE ambassador, taught younger kids how uncool drugs were. But that wasn't nearly as effective as the time I drew a caricature of the class's newest drug user and a friend made 50 copies of it. Major fireworks, major drama, and all adults who wanted to know were now in the know. I may have almost destroyed that poor thing's life, but in doing so I believe I found a faster-acting solution than DARE, at least for kids who didn't want their parents to know.
- hugh4 11y ago
  It seems to me that the best way is simply to severely punish any kid caught taking drugs. And do hair tests to make sure they're caught.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - InclinedPlane 11y ago
    You do realize that every President of the US in the last 2 decades has smoked pot and in some cases used harder drugs, right? Oppressive police state tactics are rarely a good idea, whether dealing with kids or otherwise.
- oxide 11y ago
  that's...uncool. most people grow out of drug experimentation naturally and never look back. you might have actually fucked that person's life up, compared to if you had done nothing. that's no solution, that's just plain mean.
  - themodelplumber 11y ago
    Tongue in cheek solution. No one should do this. The fireworks enveloped us all.
    - heimatau 11y ago
      Your example made me smile. Unmoderated peer pressure is more effective than DARE. Should you be getting all that grant money? We can only dream.
    - oxide 11y ago
      I want to say something in my defense but I think it'll just make it worse. Hook, line and sinker.
  - heimatau 11y ago

te_platt 11y ago

Proud father comment here. Last year my son's school had a DARE essay writing contest. Knowing that I favor legalizing drugs he showed me his submission before turning it in. I should note we had a good conversation about why I think drug use is a very bad idea and the reasons why. His English teacher (8th grade) gave him 100 out of 100. The following is his submission: D.A.R.E. is a program designed to keep kids from drugs. There are problems with D.A.R.E. though. For example, it is counter productive, gives parents a false sense of security and it wastes money. In 1989-1996 studies done showed that kids involved in the D.A.R.E. program take 3-5% more drugs than kids not in the D.A.R.E. program. The program also shows specific interest on severe drugs such as cocaine, marijuana and meth. This can cause kids to take the drugs they learned about, making this system completely counter productive. The D.A.R.E. program wastes money. It is funded by taxes that you pay and those funds are completely wasted on this program. D.A.R.E. shows absolutely no long-term effects on kids. The money spent on D.A.R.E. could be used for much better things than nothing. This program gives parents a false sense of security. When parents have children in the D.A.R.E. program they think “oh, he is already learning that drugs are bad so I don’t need to teach him myself.” When this happens, kids think their parents don’t care if they are doing drugs, especially when they see other family members doing drugs without any immediate reactions they have learned about in D.A.R.E.. When this happens they think D.A.R.E. lies about what drugs do and start taking them because they believe there is no risk in it. Some people might say D.A.R.E. helps decrease drug use in kids but there are two problems with this statement. First, it is a lie, kids who are in the dare program have been shown to take 3-5% more drugs than kids who don’t. Second, who cares if kids are taking drugs? Who says it’s a bad thing to take drugs? Yes, they do kill you, but so do doughnuts! Maybe D.A.R.E. should stand for “doughnut abuse resistance education” instead of drug abuse resistance education”. Seeing how they both kill you its just doughnuts make you fat as well as dead. As you can see the D.A.R.E. program has some severe issues and needs to be taken care of. If we destroyed the D.A.R.E. program we could save enough money to start a new, more effective and important, program. Perhaps it could be “Doughnut Abuse Resistance Education” to warn kids of the dangers of doughnuts. For short we could even call it D.A.R.E., catchy, I know.

deleted 11y ago
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mratzloff 11y ago

I think Randy Marsh from "South Park" had the most effective anti-marijuana speech I've ever heard: Stan: I've been told a lot of things about pot, but I've come to find out a lot of those things aren't true! So I don't know what to believe! Randy: Well, Stan, the truth is marijuana probably isn't gonna make you kill people, and it most likely isn't gonna fund terrorism, but… well, son, pot makes you feel fine with being bored. And it's when you're bored that you should be learning some new skill or discovering some new science or being creative. If you smoke pot you may grow up to find out that you aren't good at anything.

Vexs 11y ago
Seriously, the only things that have ever made me think a second time about drugs are the honest descriptions of it, not the "I did drugs and now I have no teeth" kinda descriptions, but the ones that go, "When you're on meth, meth feels great! Everything is amazing, you feel like you can do so much, but when you're off it everything seems boring! So you go back for more, and eventually you're addicted." kinda descriptions. If you talk about LSD, and say, "I've had some amazing times on it, and other times I've had spiders in my eyes", I think most people would be less likely to try it. Sure, not everyone, but still more than people saying just spiders in your eyes. I mean, it's a classical argument tactic, give something up to make your point more valid. But damned if it doesn't work.
- astazangasta 11y ago
  Or, just do drugs. I mean, LSD is great, and people should try it. Smoking pot is also nice, I've done some great writing while stoned. Heck, Paul Erdos did amphetamines his whole life. Why are we trying to convince everyone not to do drugs again?
  - philwelch 11y ago
    We're not; it's just one drug cartel trying to push out the competition. Whenever you hear drug use described as "self-medicating", you're hearing the notion that drugs like Zoloft and Ritalin are ok but drugs like marijuana and MDMA aren't.

tenpoundhammer 11y ago

The only thing I can remember is the dare officer teaching us how to use a bong and how to cook heroin in a spoon. I'm not sure how that's supposed to stop us from using drugs though.

themodelplumber 11y ago
Did you see the video of the DEA agent who shot himself in the foot during a K-12 presentation?
- tenpoundhammer 11y ago
  I did actually, I know police officers are human and capable of error, but this is ridiculous. Why even have your gun loaded when walking into a presentation like this?

boot13 11y ago

As opposed to all the ones that worked?

notgood 11y ago
A trillion dollars wasted but let's keep at it! I'm sure its gonna work out with just one trillion more. Besides, think of the consequences of suddenly stopping! Private jails would go bankrupt and that would be anti-capitalism and therefore anti-american.
mistercow 11y ago
Apparently the "Above the Influence" campaign has been fairly effective.

ISL 11y ago

As a counterpoint, I found DARE to be a useful and worldly course. I probably wasn't the target audience, as an introverted sciency-type, but the class gave me a survey of the various drugs on the market and an introduction to a vocabulary with which I'd had no contact. When interactions with drugs touched closer friends in subsequent years, I feel that I was better prepared than I would've been without DARE. Anecdotally, DARE led to my confounding our family doctor when I categorically refused to take any cough medicine, even prescribed, that contained codeine. So, Mr. DARE officer, your course worked for me.

stephengillie 11y ago
Satire is something so rarely seen on HN. Good job.
- deleted 11y ago
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GhotiFish 11y ago
Did you actually refuse treatment from a doctor because the cough medicine contained codeine? Your parents let you get away with that?

kenesom1 11y ago

D.A.R.E. was funded by Big Pharma trade groups, branches of law enforcement, and even things like asset forfeiture [1]. It was never about public health, but simply propaganda to justify the abuses carried out in the name of the War on Drugs and to prop up the prison and pharma industries. Substance abuse education can't be entrusted to the government given how easy it is for public programs to be corrupted by interests who are opposed to public health and safety. [1] https://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0468.htm https://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0468.htm

carbide 11y ago

I remember DARE. A message delivered to us by people we didn't respect. A police officer that no one trusted and videos of teens we perceived to be losers telling us that drugs were bad. The program seemed to focus on social pressure not to do drugs, but social pressure is meaningless and ineffective when it's coming from somewhere beneath you. It had the effect of making my peers want to get high to distinguish themselves from the lower social class who were shown to us coming out against drugs. From personal experience, I feel that they would have been better off focusing on the consequences to your health rather than a fumbling attempt at peer pressure. The one class when they showed pictures of a smoker's lungs was the only one that had any lasting positive impact on me.

guard-of-terra 11y ago
It is very stupid to scare youth with health consequences. For young people, the world "health" means nothing. It's very blank. It means a lot for senior demographics, and so they happily push measures involving scaring young people with health problems. Which then won't work.
- djhn 11y ago
  That's a very good point. You can also substitute various other demographics for young people, like lower socioeconomic classes, people heavily discounting their future, impulsive people, etc. Health disguised as vanity works quite well though. Case in point, current fitness boom.
- njbooher 11y ago
  The video of the kid who had been drinking and driving, got in a wreck, and had to have a hole drilled in his skull to relieve the buildup of blood was pretty effective for me.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
From your description, it does sound similar to abstinence-only sex ed. The only thing schools should do with regards to drugs, sex, alcohol, and all those vices that can be enjoyed responsibly, is to educate - this is what these drugs will do, positive and negative effects, it's illegal to possess it in most cases, etc. We didn't have much or any of that, but we did have a police officer in class once showing us a block of hash. IDK what all that was about though, we just thought it was cool to have a guy with a gun in class, :p. (note that this is in a country famous for its tolerance towards weed)

FrankenPC 11y ago

Developing software has all kinds of metrics that show the team if the progress is in the right direction, effective, and future proof. How is it a program like DARE could have gone on for so long without peering into their own performance metrics to see if the program had any value? It's a rhetorical question. It's obviously political. A group of powerful people banked their political cred on the concept and was unwilling to admit defeat. Just like the entire drug war.

ParanoidAct 11y ago

I never understood the purpose of programs like this as a child. All that effort, money, time, etc. pumped into it and somehow the only ones that ever seemed to have any effect at all were like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtLHKtNOcS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtLHKtNOcS8 that is essentially a very good advert for meth.

pg_is_a_butt 11y ago

it worked great... taught me what drugs looked like and how to use them. oh, you assumed they weren't lying and extorting the public contradictory to their claims? that's cute. even your precious combinatorings are mostly corrupt.

Houshalter 11y ago

Interesting article. But it didn't go into any details of why DARE is ineffective compared to other programs. It didn't specify what the other programs did differently. It barely mentioned the other programs, or their effectiveness, until the very end. I'm afraid a lot of readers might walk away with the impression that all anti-drug programs are ineffective. Lastly it says that this reform started in the 2000's. That was 15 years ago. So people who went through the program in the 2000's like me might not have gotten the ineffective version. Assuming they actually made decent reforms, which the article suggests.

stephengillie 11y ago
That's just it - DARE forked the MVP. The completed product is out there, hardly known.

badmadrad 11y ago

I actually have fond memories of DARE. But we had a really cool cop come in the class and tell us stories that were interesting to me. Usually the stories were very honest and real stories which I found riveting compared to the daily repetitive humdrum of school. I don't think it was the reason I didn't do drugs but it definitely supported and provided foundation around what my parents would tell me.

kristianrjs 11y ago

I went through DARE in Canada 11 years ago when I was 9. They had an RCMP officer come in everyday for a week for a about 30 mins and I had to write an essay specifically on the negative effects of marijuana at the end of the week. I really didn't even understand the concept of taking drugs to get high and the only alcohol in my life was the beer my parents drank. It seemed like wasted time to me.

athrowaway27 11y ago

I swear on my life, the following is 100% true. When i was in 5th grade, a dare officer came to my class and told me about a piece of paper i could put under my tongue and see things that werent real(lsd)... that started a decade long journey of copious drug use.

joslin01 11y ago

Haha DARE. Oh yes, I remember it well -- I got all the stickers you could by giving some bogus talks about God knows what. It made me pretty excited for middle school where I was being trained to Just Say No to all the random kids that would be coming up to me offering me drugs. Of course by the time I got to middle school, my DARE officer had been fired for smoking weed in his pimped out DARE cop car. A few years after that, I would be getting high nearly every day in high school. Great stickers though.

sandworm101 11y ago

The children were never the target audience. Programs like DARE always reflect the wants of those who fund them, not those they try to help. Nancy Reagan and countless othersi power believed abstinence was the best tool for most any vice. So DARE reflected that simple mindset. My experience of DARE was that it had little to do with drugs. It seemed focused on getting cops into classrooms. The ones who came to our class were always horrible. They openly lied to us about drugs, cars and even the law. We played with them. The goal was to get the cop red-faced mad by asking simple questions. One handed out something he called cocaine, but we instantly discovered was just baking powder. If any chief is reading this: Do not sent a bicycle cop in spandex shorts to talk to boys wearing blazers and ties.

Symmetry 11y ago

Social norms are powerful things. Some people did a study at the Petrified Forrest National Park on how to prevent people from stealing pieces of fossilized wood. When they put "Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest’" on signs the amount of theft was much larger than anything else they tried[1]. So if you're running a public awareness campaign emphasizing how many people break the rules is just about the worst thing you can do. The message DARE seemed to be giving me when I was a kid was that drug use was normal. [1]http://www.niu.edu/user/tj0bjs1/papers/cdsbrw06.pdf http://www.niu.edu/user/tj0bjs1/papers/cdsbrw06.pdf

pinoceros 11y ago

The colloquial use of the word "anyways" nearly ruined this article for me.

jessaustin 11y ago

DARE rolled out at just the right time so that I wasn't subjected to it but my sister two years younger was. By the time I was a senior in high school, it was clear to everyone that the DARE-exposed classes were using at much higher rates than previous classes. (Not my sister though!) This was 1994. There is no such thing as a "temporary" government program. Programs that do harm will do so for decades.

cardamomo 11y ago

As a side effect of DARE's eventual disappearance from schools, one of my favorite (bad) jokes no longer works with younger listeners. (Wait for the third punchline.) Q: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree? A: It was dead. Q: Why did the second monkey fall out of the tree? A: It was stapled to the first one. Q: Why did the third monkey fall out of the tree? A: Peer pressure. Alas, I'll have to save my bad jokes for other adults and come up with some new ones for the kiddos. EDIT: Formatting.

swayvil 11y ago

But it did work. Millions have an irrational antipathy towards drugs. Indoctrination works, especially when you get em while they're young. The effects of DARE will echo through our society for generations. Just like the effects of a war or a natural disaster.

danschumann 11y ago

It's a SELF IMAGE THING! If your mom came into your room every day and had a talk about how SCARED SHE WAS that you were GOING TO MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS.. Likely you'd go out there and make a billion dollars. People often rebel just for the sake of defining their own boundaries!!!!

chestervonwinch 11y ago

Ha! I still have my DARE t-shirt hanging up in my closet somewhere. It's a wonder that it's survived this long (and still fits!). Although it doesn't exactly get a lot of wear, so maybe its survival isn't such a miracle :P

dragonwriter 11y ago

DARE is not, and never was, an anti-drug program; it was a pro-police program, and one which was repeatedly proven effective in that role in many of the same studies which showed it didn't do anything anti-drug, that used the "anti-drug" label to gain support from parents, etc., because "were teaching your kids to stay of drugs" sounds better than "we're teaching your kids to have warm fuzzy feeling about cops".

NPMaxwell 11y ago

A point of the article is that major investments of money and work may be completely ineffective. Almost everyone involved in such projects perceives first hand that the project works. The illusion is very compelling. Efforts to stop the waste are not met with cooperative collaboration. As technology advances, we will not have more leisure time. Instead will will spend more and more effort working at jobs like DARE instructor.