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 befor

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.