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Culturally Grounded Substance Abuse Prevention

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Culturally Grounded Substance Abuse Prevention

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This is the research backing the new DARE program "Keepin' it Real"

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Abstract

This paper reports on the evaluation of a culturally grounded prevention intervention targeting substance use among urban middle-school students. The curriculum consists of 10 lessons promoting antidrug norms and teaching resistance and other social skills, reinforced by booster activities and a media campaign. Three versions were delivered: Mexican American, combined African American and European American, and Multicultural. Thirty-five middle schools were randomly assigned to 1 of the 3 versions or the control. Students completed baseline and follow-up questionnaires over a 2-year period (total 6,035 respondents). Analyses utilizing a generalized estimating equations approach assessed the overall effectiveness of cultural grounding and the cultural matching hypothesis. Support was found for the intervention's overall effectiveness, with statistically significant effects on gateway drug use as well as norms, attitudes, and resistance strategies but with little support for the cultural matching hypothesis. Specific contrasts found the Mexican American and Multicultural versions impacted the most outcomes.

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substance-related disorders / prevention & control*

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national center for biotechnology information

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Culturally Grounded Substance Use Prevention: An Evaluation of the Keepin' It R.E.A.L. Curriculum - PubMed

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This paper reports on the evaluation of a culturally grounded prevention intervention targeting substance use among urban middle-school students. The curriculum consists of 10 lessons promoting antidrug norms and teaching resistance and other social skills, reinforced by booster activities and a med ...

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Overview of the new DARE program

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If you were one of millions of children who completed the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or D.A.R.E., between 1983 and 2009, you may be surprised to learn that scientists have repeatedly shown that the program did not work. Despite being the nation's most popular substance-abuse prevention program, D.A.R.E. did not make you less likely to become a drug addict or even to refuse that first beer from your friends.

But over the past few years prevention scientists have helped D.A.R.E. America, the nonprofit organization that administers the program, replace the old curriculum with a course based on a few concepts that should make the training more effective for today's students. The new course, called keepin' it REAL, differs in both form and content from the former D.A.R.E.-replacing long, drug-fact laden lectures with interactive lessons that present stories meant to help kids make smart decisions. Beginning in 2009 D.A.R.E. administrators required middle schools across the country that teach the program to switch over to the 10-week, researcher-designed curriculum for seventh graders. By 2013, they had ordered elementary schools to start teaching a version of those lessons to fifth and sixth graders, too. "It's not an antidrug program," says Michelle Miller-Day, co-developer of the new curriculum and a communications researcher at Chapman University. "It's about things like being honest and safe and responsible." Even so, keepin' it REAL has reduced substance abuse and maintained antidrug attitudes over time among students in early trials-an achievement that largely eluded the former iteration of the program.

D.A.R.E.'s original curriculum was not shaped by prevention specialists but by police officers and teachers in Los Angeles. They started D.A.R.E. in 1983 to curb the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco among teens and to improve community-police relations. Fueled by word of mouth, the program quickly spread to 75 percent of U.S. schools.

But for over a decade research cast doubt on the program's benefits. The Department of Justice funded the first national study of D.A.R.E. and the results, made public in 1994, showed only small short-term reductions in participants' use of tobacco-but not alcohol or marijuana. A 2009 report by Justice referred to 30 subsequent evaluations that also found no significant long-term improvement in teen substance abuse. "Thirty years ago, everyone believed that if you just told students how harmful these substances and behaviors were-they'd stay away from them," says Frank Pegueros, president and CEO of D.A.R.E. America. "I've actually had officers tell me, 'You mean I was doing it wrong for 15 years?' Evidently, we were."

Behavioral scientists started to suggest a different approach as early as 1998, based on research into successful behavior-change techniques. Instead of bombarding students with information in 45-minute lectures, they called for a hands-on program that would build communication and decision-making skills and let children rehearse these tactics via role play. Eventually D.A.R.E. started to search for a new curriculum, and the program's scientific advisory board selected keepin' it REAL from over 200 listings on a national registry of evidence-based programs maintained by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Now instructors speak only for about eight minutes during each lesson, partly so students can spend more time practicing tough decisions in activities with their friends. "If we teach good decision-making skills, it should transfer from one high-risk behavior to the next," Pegueros says.

Sgt. Christine Rapp, who has been a full-time D.A.R.E. officer at the Hancock County Sheriff's Department in Indiana for 16 years, says these exercises are as popular in the classroom as they are with prevention researchers. "The interaction and group work is awesome because we learn by doing-much more than just by hearing," Rapp says. "When [students] learn the ways to say no to friends, they absolutely love getting up in front of the class and acting those out." Officers teach four ways to say no: Refuse, Explain, Avoid and Leave (hence the acronym).

The elementary curriculum focuses on developing these four basic skills, says Michael Hecht, a communications researcher at The Pennsylvania State University who developed keepin' it REAL with Miller-Day. And the middle-school curriculum, intended for seventh graders, has the students apply the guidance much more to drugs. The four strategies that make up the acronym were teased from 300 interviews that the two researchers conducted with kids across the country.

Hecht and Miller-Day have authored several of the handful of studies that demonstrated the program's effectiveness and convinced the D.A.R.E. scientific advisory board to adopt it. The largest one, published by Hecht, Miller-Day and their colleagues in 2003, asked 6,000 students to fill out questionnaires about their use of alcohol, tobacco and marijuana at several points over a two-year period. The reports from students who completed keepin' it REAL indicated that they sampled these substances less than those in a control group, and used a wider variety of strategies to stay sober. Their antidrug attitudes were also more likely to stick over time. A subset of that study with 1,300 students who were already using drugs, showed that the program reduced substance use at a rate that was 72 percent higher than the control group. Steven West, a rehabilitation counselor at Virginia Commonwealth University who once published a meta-analysis showing D.A.R.E. to have negligible effects, is encouraged by these results. "They are going the right route now-it's based in science," West says.

Richard Clayton, a retired prevention researcher formerly of the University of Kentucky, was also once an outspoken critic of D.A.R.E. but has since been responsible for many science-based improvements to the program after it invited him to join its board of directors and chair its scientific advisory council, which is now stacked with prevention researchers. "They listened to the notion that comes from the literature that you need to be interactive-not didactic lecturing," he says. "I think what they've done is pretty amazing."

West and Clayton also argue that the D.A.R.E. program is worth saving, because it has built a remarkable network of schools and police stations that have proved willing to work together to encourage kids to lead smart, healthy lives. With that network firmly in place, D.A.R.E.'s biggest responsibility is finding the best way to put it to work. "We want to be on the cutting edge of research and science," says John Lindsay, a regional director for D.A.R.E. America. "If you believe in that, you can't just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk-and I think that's what we've done over the last few years."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

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If you were one of millions of children who completed the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or D.A.R.E., between 1983 and 2009, you may be surprised to learn that scientists have repeatedly shown that the program did not work. Despite being the nation's most popular substance-abuse prevention program, D.A.R.E.

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1995 CA Dept. of Education study finds DARE not effective.

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School-based anti-drug programs such as DARE and Red Ribbon Week are largely ineffective in preventing students from using alcohol, drugs and tobacco, according to a comprehensive study commissioned by the California Department of Education.

The study, conducted by a coalition of researchers and professors, found that programs that rely on lectures and assemblies to promote the evils of drugs and alcohol lack credibility with the state's teen-agers and fail to reach the students most at risk of using drugs.

But the Department of Education has no plans to publish the study's report and disputes its findings.

"Our problems with this study had to do with what we thought was faulty methodology," said Greg Wolf, consultant for the department. Wolf, who was not directly involved in the funding or implementation of the study, said he could not specify which aspects of the study the department questions. Other officials could not be reached for comment.

The researchers defended the study and said they don't understand why the state has not published it.

In the study, more than 40% of students polled in a random sample told researchers their decision whether or not to use intoxicants was influenced "not at all" by programs teaching drugs' harmful effects and strategies for preventing use.

DARE--Drug Abuse Resistance Education--is the nationwide school-based program that was started by the Los Angeles Police Department. It exposes children beginning in the fifth grade to a 17-week curriculum that focuses on the problems created by drug use and tries to teach them that drug use is not universal.

"There is no way to truly gauge the effectiveness of DARE," said Sgt. George Villalobos, an administrative supervisor for the acclaimed anti-drug program. "But we know it's successful because of the people we talk to all the time. I'd like to know what [those who conducted the study] recommend in place of this."

The researchers, Joel Brown of Berkeley-based Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, Marianne D'Emidio-Caston of UC Santa Barbara and Jordan Horowitz of Southwest Regional Laboratory in Los Alamitos, spent more than three years conducting research for the study and reported their findings at a drug abuse convention in Santa Monica on Friday.

The 5,000-student, 240-school study concluded that as students age they become progressively more convinced that drug-prevention programs are ineffective.

While just 10% of elementary school students had a negative or neutral attitude toward drug-prevention programs, that number jumped to 90% among high school students, the study found.

Seven in 10 students felt a negative or neutral attitude toward their drug-prevention educators and three in 10 disliked their drug-prevention counselors "a little" or "a lot."

One elementary school student quoted in the study's draft report said: "Oh, they lie to you so that you won't do drugs."

A high school student said, "They are not in this for helping you, they are in for getting rid of the bad kids and just having all the good kids in school."

A growing body of research is finding that the most effective drug education programs help children deal with peer pressure to use drugs by engaging them in group discussions and role-playing, rather than by having an adult standing in front of the class exhorting children to abstain.

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Study Assails School-Based Drug Programs : Education: Attempts to discourage use are largely ineffective, researchers say. But state has no plans to publish findings.

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School-based anti-drug programs such as DARE and Red Ribbon Week are largely ineffective in preventing students from using alcohol, drugs and tobacco, according to a comprehensive study commissioned by the California Department of Education.

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D.A.R.E. Was a Bigger Failure Than Most People Realize

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D.A.R.E. Was a Bigger Failure Than Most People Realize

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10 min video giving an overview of the failure of the DARE program.

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D.A.R.E. Was a Bigger Failure Than Most People Realized

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No. This article bluntly lays out the case for DARE's ineffectiveness.

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(Image: © Image via Shutterstock)

Most Americans who are currently in their 20s and 30s spent a significant amount of time in 5th or 6th grade homeroom hanging out with a police officer, conjuring up scenarios in which someone might offer us drugs or alcohol, and brainstorming ways to turn them down.

"Hey, kid, want to smoke some crack behind this tree?" the officer would ask.

"Nah, I've got basketball practice," we students would reply in unison.

Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E., was introduced into elementary school classrooms in 1983; though no longer as widespread as it once was, it is still part of the curriculum in many school districts. But does it work? Did we, the alumni of the D.A.R.E. program, end up just saying "no" to drugs?

No.

D.A.R.E. was (and is) completely ineffective in preventing drug use. The numbers demonstrating this started rolling in way back in 1992, when a study conducted at Indiana University showed that graduates of the D.A.R.E. program subsequently had significantly higher rates of hallucinogenic drug use than those not exposed to the program. (Maybe they shouldn't have told 5th graders that hallucinogens exist.)

Every subsequent study on the effectiveness of D.A.R.E., including a major 10-year investigation by the American Psychological Association, found much the same result. The program doesn't work, and in fact is counterproductive, leading to higher drug use among high school students who went through it compared to students who did not. Because of those studies, D.A.R.E. lost federal funding in 1998.

The reasons for D.A.R.E.'s failure are summed up by the words of the psychologist William Colson, who in '98 argued that D.A.R.E. increased drug awareness so that "as they get a little older, [students] become very curious about these drugs they've learned about from police officers."

Despite the fact that all that just saying "no" apparently makes many kids secretly think "yes," D.A.R.E. was never totally phased out. Throughout the '90s, national leaders of the program resisted the scientific findings, and in some cases even tried to bribe academic journals not to publish them. Program leaders told the press that strong public support for D.A.R.E. was a better indicator of its success than any hard numbers. They also claim the program improves the relationship between youths and law enforcement.

There's one thing the D.A.R.E. program definitely did do right: We all got a lot of wear out of those T-shirts. But then again, who knows what psychological impact that graffiti-style red-on-black had.
Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.

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(Image: © Image via Shutterstock) Most Americans who are currently in their 20s and 30s spent a significant amount of time in 5th or 6th grade homeroom hanging out with a police officer, conjuring up scenarios in which someone might offer us drugs or alcohol, and brainstorming ways to turn them down.

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A Brief History of DARE, the anti-drug program Jeff Sessions wants to revive

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A Brief History of DARE, the anti-drug program Jeff Sessions wants to revive

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Another overview / history of the DARE program. This article talks about the recent effort made by DARE to implement research based practices as required to receive federal funding by the something something act.

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Speaking at a DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) conference this week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the past work of the famous anti-drug program, saying it saved lives:

I believe that DARE was instrumental to our success by educating children on the dangers of drug use. I firmly believe that you have saved lives. And I want to say thank you for that. Whenever I ask adults around age 30 about prevention, they always mention the DARE program. Your efforts work. Lives and futures are saved.

Sessions may believe that the program saved lives, but decades of evidence-based research, including some conducted by the Justice Department he now heads, has shown the program to be ineffective - and it might even make the drug problem worse. A little history:

DARE was founded in 1983 as a partnership between the Los Angeles Police Department and the L.A. public schools. The idea was simple: Officers would go into schools to talk to kids, "boosting the self-esteem of students so that they can resist the temptation to use drugs," as the Los Angeles Times put it in a 10-year retrospective on the program in 1993.

The program drew bipartisan praise and spread like wildfire. Politicians realized that by supporting DARE, they could paint themselves as pro-cops and pro-kids: a win-win. President Ronald Reagan proclaimed the first "National DARE Day" in 1988, a tradition that continued well into the Obama administration.

Eventually, the program was in place in up to 75 percent of the nation 's school districts, by DARE's own count. At its height, the group boasted an eight-figure budget, with much of that money coming from government sources. Individual state affiliates raised millions more.

But with success came scrutiny. Public health researchers started looking for evidence that the program was meeting its goals of reducing teen drug use. The first wave of studies, published in the early 1990s, didn't find any.

"The effectiveness of DARE in altering students' drug use behavior has yet to be established," concluded a University of Illinois at Chicago study in 1991.

Other research arrived at similar conclusions. In 1994, the Research Triangle Institute, funded in part by the Justice Department, conducted a meta-analysis of all the existing research on DARE. Its conclusion was withering: DARE had little to no impact on rates of teen drug use.

"DARE's limited influence on adolescent drug use behavior contrasts with the program's popularity and prevalence," the authors wrote. "An important implication is that DARE could be taking the place of other, more beneficial drug use curricula that adolescents could be receiving."

The Justice Department was so incensed by this unexpected finding that it refused to publish the study, according to contemporaneous news reports. "I don't get it," DARE's executive director at the time said of the RTI study's findings. "It's like kicking Santa Claus to me. We're as pure as the driven snow."

But the kicking had only just begun. More studies showing similar findings trickled out in the 1990s. One study even suggested that DARE students were more likely than their peers to experiment with drugs and alcohol. The authors of that study chalked that up to a possible boomerang effect: "an attempt to persuade resulting in the adoption of an opposing position instead." Telling a certain type of kid that he shouldn't do drugs may simply result in him trying drugs out of spite.

By 2003, the former General Accounting Office launched its own DARE study to see if the Justice Department was getting a decent return on its DARE investment. The conclusion? "No significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received DARE" and those who didn't.

The GAO report was the beginning of the end of DARE as most of us knew it. Funding started to dry up: In 2002, before the GAO report, DARE had an annual budget of over $10 million. By 2012, that figure had shrunk to $3.5 million.

By the late 2000s, DARE was faced with a choice: change or die. They opted for the former. The group decided to cautiously embrace evidence-based research after decades of antagonism toward it. The most significant change was the adoption of a new curriculum, titled " keepin' it REAL."

Cringe-worthy title aside, some of the research on this program to date suggests it actually works. It was commended in the recent Surgeon General's Report on drug addiction for demonstrating efficacy at preventing substance use. The secret? "It's not an anti-drug program," a co-developer of the new curriculum told Scientific American in 2014. "It's about things like being honest and safe and responsible."

If it almost seems like DARE isn't really an anti-drug group anymore, that's because it isn't. The group explicitly spells out this new reality in its tax filings. Prior to 2009, DARE stated on its 990 IRS filings that its mission was "to implement and support drug abuse resistance education and crime prevention programs in the USA."

Post-2009, its mission is to simply "teach students good decision making skills to help them lead safe and healthy lives."

Not everyone in the public health community is convinced the new DARE is any better than the old DARE. A peer-reviewed study published last year found that the specific versions of the keepin' it REAL curriculum used by DARE haven't been tested for efficacy.

"The systematic review revealed major shortfalls in the evidence basis for the KiR D.A.R.E. programme," that study's authors conclude. "Without empirical evidence, we cannot conclusively confirm or deny the effectiveness of the programme. However, we can conclude that the evidence basis for the D.A.R.E. version of KiR is weak, and that there is substantial reason to believe that KiR D.A.R.E. may not be suited for nationwide implementation."

There's no doubt, however, that DARE is currently making an effort to adopt more of an evidence-based approach than in prior years, when the program's practices were largely driven by the belief that they were "pure as the driven snow." This brings us back to the central irony of Jeff Sessions's remarks on Tuesday, when he yearned for a return to the DARE of "the 1980s and the 1990s."

Decades of research are unequivocal: The DARE of yesteryear didn't work, and it may have actually made the drug problem worse. Instead of embracing DARE's new evidence-based practices, Sessions offered up a return to the bad old days of drug policy, when decisions were driven by gut feeling and political expediency.

We already know how that story ended: billions of dollars spent, millions of people imprisoned and stronger, cheaper drugs. DARE is already trying to turn the page on the harsh and ineffective drug policies of the past. At the moment, it appears the Justice Department is trying to revive them.

guidelines or contact the commenting team here.

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Analysis | A brief history of DARE, the anti-drug program Jeff Sessions wants to revive

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Speaking at a DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) conference this week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the past work of the famous anti-drug program, saying it saved lives: I believe that DARE was instrumental to our success by educating children on the dangers of drug use. I firmly believe that you have saved lives.

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"No significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received DARE" and those who didn’t."

This study caused DARE funding to start to dwindle. In 2002 DARE had a budget of over $10 million. By 2012 it was $3.5 million. This loss of funding forced to DARE to change its practices and curriculum.

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Assessing the Effects of School-Based Drug Education: A Six-Year Multilevel Analysis of Project D.A.R.E.

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Assessing the Effects of School-Based Drug Education: A Six-Year Multilevel Analysis of Project D.A.R.E.

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Research showed that suburban kids who went through DARE programs actually had higher drug use rates than those that did not go through a DARE program. The authors of this study coined the term, "Boomerang Effect": an attempt to persuade resulting in the adoption of an opposing position instead.

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A randomized longitudinal field experiment was conducted to estimate the short- and long-term effects of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (D.A.R.E.) on students' attitudes, beliefs, social skills, and drug use behaviors. Students from urban, suburban, and rural schools (N = 1,798) were followed for more than six years, with surveys administered each year from 6th through 12th grades. Teachers were also surveyed annually to measure students' cumulative exposure to supplemental (post-D.A.R.E.) drug education. Multilevel analyses (random-effects ordinal regression) were conducted on seven waves of posttreatment data. The results indicate that D.A.R.E. had no long-term effects on a wide range of drug use measures, nor did it show a lasting impact on hypothesized mediating variables, with one exception. Previously documented short-term effects had dissipated by the conclusion of the study. Some D.A.R.E.-by-community interactions were observed: Urban and rural students showed some benefits, whereas suburban students experienced small but significant increases in drug use after participation in D.A.R.E.

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Assessing the Effects of School-Based Drug Education: A Six-Year Multilevel Analysis of Project D.A.R.E. - DENNIS P. ROSENBAUM, GORDON S. HANSON, 1998

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A randomized longitudinal field experiment was conducted to estimate the short- and long-term effects of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program (D.A.R.E.) on students' attitudes, beliefs, social skills, and drug use behaviors. Students from urban, suburban, and rural schools (N = 1,798) were followed for more than six years, with surveys administered each year from 6th through 12th grades.

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Deep dive into DARE program. Written in 95 and talks about how the DARE program wasted everyone's time and money.

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The October 1994 government flyer seemed like sweet vindication to the thousands of parents, police, and teachers who supported the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program, better known by the acronym DARE. "The D.A.R.E. Program: A Review of Prevalence, User Satisfaction, and Effectiveness," the headline on the single page boasted, describing a new study of the drug-education program. More happy news followed. "Not only is DARE widespread and popular, but demand for it is high," read the flyer. DARE's "...appeal cuts across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines [with] considerable support for expansion of the program."

Sweet vindication indeed. Since its inception in 1983, the DARE curriculum had rapidly spread from the Los Angeles area to schools across the country. In fact, more than half of all schools in the United States currently use the program; almost 20 million schoolkids a year are visited at least once by a DARE instructor. Despite such success, however, critics had been increasingly vocal in recent years, attacking the program as a costly and ineffective way of teaching kids about the perils of drug abuse. They claimed that DARE was just another untested pedagogical gimmick that served no purpose other than soaking up private donations and local, state, and federal tax dollars.

The newly released study, then, would simultaneously silence naysayers while boosting DARE's shot at more public funds and deeper penetration into schools. This is no penny ante business, either: DARE, which was specifically held up as exemplary in two sections of last fall's crime bill, is competing with other drug-ed programs for a chunk of the more than $500 million the feds put aside for such instruction. And running DARE takes a lot of money. A DARE spokesperson claims the program costs somewhat less than $200 million annually, but other credible estimates range as high as $700 million, once all costs are considered.

The claims in the government flyer were accurate-to a point. The three-year study, commissioned by the National Institute of Justice, the research office for the U.S. Department of Justice, did include those observations. Researchers found that DARE raises children's self-esteem, polishes their social skills, and improves their attitudes toward police.

But unfortunately for DARE boosters, the study also proved something else: DARE doesn't have a measurable effect on drug abuse. While the flyer devoted ample space to puffery, it dismissed the critical heart of the study in just two terse sentences. And it did not mention that NIJ had refused to publish the study, despite positive peer review.

Charges and countercharges flew throughout the early weeks of October. NIJ was trying to put a positive spin on bad news and suppressing the study, claimed DARE critics. Not so, NIJ Director Jeremy Travis replied in one letter to the editor: Questions about "the scientific validity" of the study were raised by NIJ reviewers, and the work did not meet their "high standards of methodological rigor."

Travis's letter was a stinging rebuke to the prestigious Research Triangle Institute (RTI), which has authored hundreds of government studies without complaint. Under pressure to withdraw the study or rewrite the conclusions, the scientists stood by their work. "We agreed to disagree," says principal author Susan Ennett.

Accusations of faulty research trouble Ennett and her co-authors, who point out that ongoing government reviews examined their work in progress. "We worked with NIJ throughout, sending drafts and getting back comments," says Ennett. "[The review] didn't just happen at the end." Ennett says there were four outside reviews over the lifetime of the three-year project, as well as in-house reviews by NIJ itself.

Another curious aspect of the government reaction is that the RTI study contained no original research. Only previously published studies were examined, and all had reached the same dismal conclusions about DARE. Says Ennett, "The results of all the studies used in the meta-analysis were consistent; it's not like the conclusions of these different studies were all over the place. We did not find any support for [a statistically significant] impact on drug use, and they show DARE has no effect at all on marijuana use." Another author of the study is more blunt: "The kids learn to have respect for police: fine and dandy. But if it's sold for the prevention of drug use, it's not working."

But even if NIJ had signed off on the study, the government had another excuse ready: A new, improved DARE was introduced in the autumn of 1994. And, as the flyer noted, "The effects of the new curriculum on learning and behavior may in turn call for a new evaluation." In the eyes of the Justice Department, in other words, all the research that proves DARE ineffective is now invalid.

This position infuriates many researchers, who view it as a disingenuous attempt to deflect criticism. Claiming that a revised program is entirely new is a well-known academic shell game. "There's not a new curriculum-there's a slightly changed curriculum," argues Richard Clayton, director of the Center of Prevention Research at the University of Kentucky. Clayton, who is now concluding a five-year evaluation of DARE in Kentucky, says his findings also match the conclusions in the RTI study.

"I'm really not surprised NIJ refused to publish it," says Clayton, "but I'm disappointed. DARE has a leadership role to play because it's in half the schools. An organization that receives that much public funding has an obligation to be honest with the public."

In the quiet, scholarly circles of drug-prevention research, the true reasons why NIJ hurried to distance itself will be debated for years. Was there pressure from DARE? "Roberta Silverman doesn't speak for the National Institute of Justice," a spokesperson for NIJ coldly explains. "We can't control DARE America. We don't give them any money. We don't have anything to do with them."

Roberta Silverman is the spokeswoman for DARE America, the nonprofit that provides training for the police officers who teach the curriculum in schools and that also supplies DARE diplomas, hats, umbrellas, pencils, shirts, and other paraphernalia sold to promote the program. Although DARE America had no direct influence on the decision by NIJ, Silverman admits contacting a scientific journal that intended to publish the critical RTI analysis of DARE. "I called The American Journal of Public Health. They didn't know the whole study hadn't been released and they didn't know it was taken out of context [of the NIJ report]."

One of the most respected academic journals in its field, The American Journal of Public Health accepted the RTI paper after it had been peer reviewed. Sabine Beisler, Public Health's director of publication, told USA Today that "DARE has tried to interfere with the publication of this. They tried to intimidate us." Beisler declines further comment, except to confirm that she was accurately quoted, and that the journal received several calls from DARE America.

Despite pressure, Public Health published the report in September 1994. Public Health Editor Dr. Mervin Susser sees the attempt to interfere with the publication of a scientific paper as misconceived at best, censorious at worst. Susser adds, "The worst of it is, that this study was exceptionally well-reviewed by peers in the field. It's very rare that an article passes so unscratched through review. The uniform appraisal was that it was first rate."

How can Public Health reviewers think the work first-rate when NIJ reviewers viewed it as flawed? Roberta Silverman has an idea: "I've asked myself that before. I think [NIJ] had a better understanding of the issues, and it reflects [ Public Health's] dispute with NIJ. It was hot and sexy for Public Health to criticize DARE."

"[We] decided not to publish it because there were problems with the research," says NIJ spokeswoman Ann Voight. Last fall, Voight told the Boston Globe, "We stand behind the DARE Program as it has evolved. It has made a positive impact on children and law enforcement."

In other instances, DARE supporters have lashed out against those who fault the program. After a 1993 story questioning the effectiveness of DARE appeared in USA Today, reporter Dennis Cauchon received letters from classrooms in different parts of the country, all addressed to "Dear DARE-basher," and all using near-identical language.

When a major television network planned a story on the program, DARE America cooperated until it became apparent that the story wasn't going to be a puff piece. "They worked very hard to get our story suppressed," the producer says. After filming a segment about one prominent anti-DARE activist, the producer remembers an angry confrontation with Silverman, who asked why they were "talking to a pro-marijuana supporter."

To tell DARE supporters that you have spoken with program critics often invokes astonishment, like telling Baptists you've been to hell and chatted with Old Nick himself. This us-against-them viewpoint is clearly stated in a November 1994 press release announcing the Substance Abuse Prevention and Law Enforcement Community Partnership Conference. Titled "Pro-Drug Groups Behind Attack on Prevention Programs," the release damns as advocates of drug legalization any who criticize DARE.

"Our detractors like to characterize DARE as an 'Orwellian reality' or 'Big Brother' at work," DARE America Executive Director Glenn Levant is quoted as saying. "These bush-league tactics are transparent for what they are: attempts to support various individual personal agendas at the expense of our children."

But with all that has been written about DARE, few critics have actually been inside a DARE classroom, and few supporters know the origins of the controversial program. Only when you understand both does the true picture emerge. Whether that picture appears "Orwellian" depends on the viewer, but it certainly supports the claim that DARE fails at its basic goal of preventing drug use.
In the DARE Classroom
DARE Officer Terry Campbell is on stage. It is the first time he has visited this fourth-grade class, but most of the children already know him well. As the full-time DARE instructor for Petaluma, California, he has been in the classrooms since 1988. One of the program's recent graduates was Polly Klaas, whose abduction and murder brought sad fame to this small town, 45 minutes north of San Francisco.

After he introduces himself, the 20-minute lesson begins. Campbell asks if anyone knows what DARE means and a girl is quick to respond, "Drug Abuse Resistance Education."

"What's a drug?" Campbell asks. The kids have ready answers, a mix of formal names and common slang. Cocaine. Alcohol. Tobacco. Coke. Pot.

"I know a different kind of drug," a boy adds. "It's a medicine."

Campbell asks, "What is it?"

"Penicillin." The officer asks if his parents ever gave him Children's Tylenol for a headache. Yes, they have.

"Did you take it in the right way?"

"Yes."

"Today, maybe you have a bad headache. Should you take 10 Tylenol?"

"No," the children chorus.

"That's right. That's called drug abuse. That's all a drug is-something that can help you or hurt you, depending on how you take it."

The children listen attentively. Campbell is more than a police officer; he is also a natural teacher, demonstrating a genius that outreaches mere talent. In front of a class, he is transformed, riffing off the kids' questions and comments like Robin Williams, connecting with every child in the room. Hands down, he is one of the best teachers imaginable. DARE and the city of Petaluma are fortunate.

In all classes, time is set aside for questions. Before school, Campbell accurately predicted the first question: "Have you ever shot anybody?" Similar career-day questions follow as the intrigued fourth graders quiz their visiting policeman. His profession is close to their minds; like all DARE officers, Campbell wears his uniform-but sans handgun, walkie-talkie, and other tools of his trade.

These brief kindergarten through fifth-grade classroom visits, Campbell later explains, lay the groundwork for the DARE core curriculum, taught in the sixth grade. Campbell gives safety advice, reminds them to call 911 "if they need to," and prepares them for their DARE sessions. Not insignificantly, he also becomes a familiar and trusted figure. "One of the most beneficial things of the program is that kids get to see police officers like human beings," he says, corroborating a finding of the NIJ-sponsored study.

Next in his schedule is a sixth-grade DARE lesson, where Campbell teaches the fourth of the 17 lessons in the DARE curriculum. It opens with one of the most controversial elements of the program: the DARE Box. On a window shelf rests the decorated shoebox, where anonymous notes can be passed to Campbell.

Campbell reads the first question: "Someone in my family is doing drugs and I'm worried that if I say anything it will make it worse." Heads spin. Who is it?

"Don't look around," Campbell says quickly. "It isn't important to know who wrote it."

A girl raises her hand. "Maybe that kid wants to talk to you about it."

"I'm more than willing to do that," he smiles warmly. "You all know me." He asks them the consequences of using an illegal drug.

"You could get in trouble," one child says. Another adds, "You could die."

Says Campbell, "It's probably OK to get them into trouble, if that's going to happen."

A boy asks, "What if it's one of your parents?"

"You should talk to a teacher or a counselor, or another adult you trust." As Campbell begins the lesson proper, he slips the note into his pocket.

Of the 27 children in this class, only the boy who apparently asked the question does not immediately open his workbook. Instead, he toys with the paper nameplate sitting on his desk. On the side of the wide triangle facing him are printed the eight ways to say no as taught by DARE. On the opposite side-the side facing Campbell-is the child's name.

What happened to the note? "I threw it away," Campbell says later. "But I didn't put it in the wastebasket in the classroom because one of the kids could find out who wrote it." Campbell was occupied with preparing for the lesson and didn't notice the nervous boy. Still, he says he wouldn't have acted on it if he had. "First, we don't know if they were illegal drugs-it could be alcohol or tobacco. Secondly, I may have a feeling that a child is having problems, but I can't make that assumption. Maybe he was fidgeting because he needed to go to the bathroom."

Several times in the last six years, Campbell has found signed notes in the DARE Box. "If a child wrote that he was being abused or in danger, of course I would follow up on it." Recently, he received a note indicating child abuse. "I got the child appropriate help," says Campbell.
The 14 Percent Solution
"How many of you think people will actually force you to use drugs?" Campbell asks, bringing Maggie, one of the girls in the class, to the front of the room. (The names of the children have been changed.) "It's possible that somebody's gonna hold a gun to your head and say, take these drugs. More common is the form that Maggie and I have been best friends since kindergarten and I say, 'Hey, Maggie, I got some marijuana here and I think it's really great'..."

"NO!" the child interrupts loudly, with a self-conscious giggle.

"...Would you like to try it?"

"NO!"

"Come on, we won't be best friends if you don't."

"NO!"

It is the introduction to a lesson on peer pressure and leads into a discussion of how friends can subtly coax agreement. Campbell reads from the DARE workbook: "How many seventh-grade students out of 100 have been drunk from any alcoholic beverage?" The children, organized into groups of five and six, are to come up with a collective answer.

More than a little confusion spreads through the classroom about the assignment. The workbook explains this is the result of a "recent national survey," but many don't understand what that means. Does it include New York? one child asks. San Jose? A couple of minutes pass as the children struggle to understand what they are asked to do.

As the groups debate, Campbell wanders through the room, eavesdropping. Just as he approaches, one of the groups settles on 17.5 percent. A girl writes the number in her workbook as Campbell peers over her shoulder. She looks to him for approval but he says nothing, and his face remains blank. As he moves to the next group, she turns to classmates: "Let's go a little bit higher; he didn't seem to like that."

The five groups come to five different solutions, ranging between 42 percent and 70 percent. Campbell smiles; the exercise has worked. The correct answer, he reveals, is 14 percent. He points to the group that first had a 17.5 percent answer. He overheard one boy vote for 15 percent but relent against the collective will of the group. "This demonstrates how peer pressure works," Campbell says. "We allowed our peers to talk us into it. Is everybody out there doing drugs?"

The class chimes no, in unison.

"Just because somebody does it doesn't mean everybody does. Did I surprise you that the figure was so low?" Campbell asks.

"No," the class responds again, but weaker.

Unfortunately, the 14 percent statistic used in the lesson is incorrect. And it's not even from a recent nationwide survey-the number comes from research done between 1989 and 1990 in California alone. The survey is done every two years for the state attorney general, and the most recent figure for seventh graders who have ever been intoxicated is 23 percent.

Even though DARE's statistic is wrong, it is still lower than any of the estimates by the children. The objective of the lesson is valid; childhood perceptions of normal behavior can be badly skewed.

More troublesome is the lesson design. Only a wrong answer is "right"; the lesson fails if the class picks accurate numbers. When one group chose 17.5 percent, Campbell-probably unconsciously-led them to raise their guesstimate by implying disapproval. Such subtle problems with design can give even brilliant teachers like Campbell fits.

Shown a transcript of this session, researchers not associated with DARE agree that the point of the lesson was valuable but dismiss the DARE exercise as useless. "Kids don't relate to national or state data," says Joel Moskowitz, who has authored evaluations of several drug education programs. "It's what their friends are doing that counts."

Moskowitz and others were also critical of the role-playing between Campbell and Maggie. "It should have been between two adolescents," Moskowitz says. "She just parroted the lines the police officer expected. It's not going to be so easy to say no to a friend if it's going to make them your enemy."

As the primary author of the DARE curriculum, Dr. Ruth Rich responds to their criticism. "The problem with this lesson is that the kids don't understand the math," she says. Not so, at least in Petaluma. The children in this class actually skidded to a halt over the concept of a nationwide survey. The same confusion was repeated in another sixth-grade class, later in the day. If the point of the lesson is to teach kids that not everyone does drugs and "that concept is not being taught, we need to work on it," Rich concedes.

What about the complaint that a peer should have played the role of the friend offering Maggie drugs? Says Rich, "We have the officers role-play with the youngsters. We try to get the situation as real as possible, but we would never have a child offering a joint-it reinforces the negative."
Birth of a Notion
The problems with this lesson demonstrate something else as well: Designing an effective anti-drug program ain't easy.

When Maggie role-plays saying no to Officer Campbell, she reinforces her skills at turning down drugs from a uniformed policeman. Not a likely real-life scenario. But if Maggie rejects a reefer from classmate Tommy, Maggie has a more realistic experience-and Tommy gets some practice in pushing drugs.

Similarly, it's important for kids to know that drug abuse is the exception rather than the norm. Is there a better solution than the troublesome "national survey" question?

"They borrowed that from SMART," says veteran researcher Bill Hansen. "We moved well beyond that, but it took us years to find out how to best get the information across to kids."

Started in 1981, Project SMART (short for Self-Management and Resistance Training) was one of the pioneer anti-drug school programs, preceding even Nancy Reagan's plea to "Just say no." Hansen was one of the researchers hired by the University of Southern California to develop SMART. To test their theories, they used the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District.

By all accounts, those were heady times for the scientists. With over 20,000 middle-school students available, L.A. Unified was a living laboratory. At weekly meetings, then-L.A. Unified health education specialist and eventual DARE curriculum author Ruth Rich provided classroom-based feedback to the team of USC researchers developing the program.

USC was testing two completely different versions of the SMART curriculum. Bill Hansen explains: "One was 'affective.' It focused on self-esteem and setting goals. The other was 'resistance training,' which concentrated on social influences, such as [cigarette and alcohol] ads."

But while Project SMART was still in its toddling stages, another player joined the game: then-Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates. "In 1983, Daryl Gates came on board," Rich says. "They had just had another high school drug bust, and he said he'd rather deploy his resources for prevention, that they were going to be coming into the schools."

Fortunately, a promising new drug-prevention program was at hand: Project SMART. Rich approached Andy Johnson, leader of the USC research team, with the idea of sharing SMART with the cops. "They [police] were going to be coming into the schools," says Rich. "I asked Andy if we could work with him and he said, no, he had problems with [police in the classroom], so we took SMART and used that."

Though sympathetic to Rich's dilemma, Johnson says he had serious objections to handing an experimental educational program over to the local police. He worried that police might have credibility problems with sophisticated, urban Los Angeles seventh graders.

Another concern was unrelated to drug education: He wanted the police version of SMART confined to L.A. Unified-the program was copyrighted by USC. "There was discussion about copyright concerns, but Ruth said they had made changes [to the curriculum]. I made the decision to let it go, not pursue the issue. We never thought it would become an international movement and DARE would take on a life of its own."

Rich says they asked permission to use the SMART curriculum, and, for her new program, boldly combined the affective and resistance-training models. She also incorporated police officers to teach the material. Did Gates try to dictate what would be taught? No, Rich insists: "There was pressure that we had to provide a program, but [Gates] didn't tell us what had to be in it."

DARE premiered later in 1983, piloted in 50 schools with 10 police officers. Rich heeded Andy Johnson's advice about grade level. The new DARE program was taught in fifth and sixth grades instead of seventh.

This slide to a younger age leads DARE critics to suggest that the program is developmentally inappropriate, that the material is better suited for older children. Several reviewers who read the "national survey" transcript commented that it revealed that the children weren't ready for this type of material.

As DARE was going forth and multiplying in L.A. Unified schools, the USC team continued its research. They discovered an important difference between the two versions of the SMART curriculum: The affective program didn't work. Not only that, it had the dreaded "boomerang" effect-it actually encouraged some children to fiddle with drugs. Yet the school district had already adopted the affective program as part of the new DARE curriculum.

"L.A. Unified grew distant," recalls Hansen. "Which cut them off from our research of the two programs, the one that worked and one that didn't. They just put the two together. What they took was the prototype; we went through 30 versions of the curriculum, so a lot of the stuff they lifted was antiquated, in our view."

Andy Johnson also sees DARE as reflecting the "antiquated" SMART prototype, and remembers offering to help fix it. "We talked to them about evaluating it, but DARE was never interested," he says. Johnson recalls there was an "anti-intellectual attitude" among the new leadership elbowing their way into the program. But to Gates and others, DARE didn't need fixing; what it needed was money, and friends in high places.
Spreading the Gospel
By the autumn of 1985, DARE was entrenched in the Los Angeles schools. That by itself was good news in the "Just Say No" years; most of the other drug-prevention programs in use around the country were small-scale projects, untested outside of a handful of classrooms. And worse, many of those programs were found to have little or no effect on drug use when evaluated. Some even had the boomerang effect, like the prototypes of Project SMART. There was just one problem with DARE: It hadn't been independently evaluated at all.

To find out how well it worked, the National Institute of Justice sent consultant William DeJong to California. "I wrote the first published study of DARE [in 1986], and it showed that there were positive results," says DeJong. "Based on my study, NIJ decided to devote money to DARE." Another reason NIJ went ahead, according to DeJong, was that DARE was based on Project SMART. Then in its fifth year, the government-funded SMART had refined its program several generations beyond the prototype adapted by DARE.

With the stamp of NIJ approval, Gates won a $140,000 grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, a part of the Department of Justice, to take DARE nationwide. DeJong continued to be involved, authoring the DARE implementation manual for BJA.

While $140,000 might be enough to fund a hometown anti-drug program, DARE needed far more to go national. The solution came from Congress in the form of the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act of 1986. Buried in the small print was an entitlement for at least 10 percent of the state grants to governors to go only to programs that included "classroom instruction by uniformed law enforcement officials." A host of other criteria were listed that were met only by programs "such as Project Drug Abuse Resistance Education." By 1992, their share of the federal pie came to almost $10 million.

To manage the growing DARE movement and help spread the gospel, the nonprofit corporation DARE America was formed in 1987. More grants from BJA soon followed, which allowed DARE America to establish regional training centers throughout the United States. DARE was fast becoming America's de facto drug-education program.

The 1986 entitlement helped fuel DARE's explosive growth, but it by no means paid all the bills. Most funding came from the army of fervent DARE supporters in the community, eager to find an easy solution to the problem of juvenile drug abuse. DARE became "a rallying symbol to do something positive about the drug abuse problem," as one state director of DARE told Congress in 1990.

Once again, Petaluma, California is probably typical. It costs the city over $100,000 each year to pay the salaries for Officer Campbell and a part-time reserve officer and to supply DARE workbooks and awards to approximately 800 children. (Graduates are given free DARE T-shirts, pencils, rulers, and a diploma.) Civic-minded real-estate developers have supplied most of these funds since 1990, and individuals in the community also make donations. But the contractors' tithe ends this year; what will the city do?

Probably look to Uncle Sam. The Drug Free Schools and Communities Act-now called the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1994-includes more than $400 million dollars for DARE and other programs. Gone is the $10 million entitlement; now DARE competes with other programs for its piece of the federal action. But of the 14 activities listed in the bill, most are vague: "Before-and after-school activities" is a typical description. And not only is DARE mentioned by name, it is specified twice, in different parts of the act. (The only other specific program mentioned is "Project Legal Lives," a program for district attorneys to conduct mock trials.)

And it's not difficult to predict how a city like Petaluma will spend its drug-education dollars. DARE has enormous grassroots support; the kids like it; the parents and teachers like it; and perhaps most of all, the local police like it. Any program with such grassroots support wields considerable clout on Capitol Hill; when the Clinton administration recommended eliminating drug-education entitlements in March 1994, the House killed the motion, 418 to 1.

DARE also appears twice in the crime bill, where it will wrestle all comers for $284 million by 1996, rising to $375 million by the end of the decade. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chair of the Judiciary Committee, takes credit for the inclusion. "As you know, it's a pretty popular program, so it wasn't a question of not including it," says a Biden staffer.

How much does DARE cost nationally? Several newspapers have claimed $700 million annually, close to the appropriation for the entire Drug Enforcement Administration. DARE America spokesperson Silverman sees the $700 million statistic as sloppy journalism. "In 1992, we estimated the value of officer services at $153 million. Actual cash for DARE America was $1.5 million. I don't know where they got $700 million."

But according to USA Today reporter Dennis Cauchon, the estimate comes from her boss, DARE America Executive Director Glenn Levant. "Levant and I went over all the numbers," Cauchon says. "Including every cent in private donations. It includes all money actually spent on DARE every year."

All told, local DARE programs are eligible for a direct share of more than half a billion federal dollars annually, still short of the $700 million total in operating costs. As in Petaluma, the difference will be made up by civic groups, individuals, and local government. School districts that are strapped to buy textbooks pitch in, as do cities and counties teetering on bankruptcy. In Petaluma, DARE Officer Terry Campbell tells a story: "At the end of the school year, the teacher asked the kids what they wanted to do with the leftover class treasury. She told them they could have a pizza party, whatever they wanted. The kids said they wanted to give the money to DARE." With such enthusiasm for the program, it almost begs the question: What if it doesn't work?
The Emperor's Clothing
DARE keeps children away from drugs. That raison d'être sold thousands of communities on the program and keeps DARE in the schools, even if budget cuts must be made somewhere else. But by 1991, there were more than a dozen studies that claimed DARE didn't work at all. Not that it was useless: It had positive effects on children's knowledge about drugs, helped develop their social skills, and improved their attitude about police. But all these studies said the same thing about drug use-if DARE had any effect at all, it was short lived.

Except, of course, for one study: the 1986 evaluation by William DeJong, used by NIJ to start the DARE bandwagon rolling. When DeJong's research appeared in the Journal of Drug Education, his colleagues called the design of his study "seriously flawed." Among their complaints was that the children were given no test before starting the DARE program, which made it impossible to evaluate any claims of improvement. Critics also noted that the study revealed positive effects only with boys; there was a significant negative impact on the DARE girls-the boomerang effect.

In 1991, NIJ decided to settle the question of DARE's worth by hiring analysts at Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to do a comprehensive evaluation. To DARE, it seemed like vindication and due respect was finally at hand. "The review of the DARE evaluation literature will give us ammunition to respond to critics who charge that DARE has not proved its effectiveness," read a DARE letter sent to state coordinators.

RTI researchers, of course, found no new ammunition for DARE in the studies. Yes, the program improved the relationship between schoolchildren and the police, and taught the kids many useful things. But as far as stopping them from using drugs... sorry.

A preliminary version of the RTI report was released at a 1993 San Diego conference, which devoted an entire day to DARE. After listening to the presentations, DARE America's Glenn Levant dismissed the criticism out of hand. He said, "The only way that I know that you can determine if DARE is effective is through a long-term, seven-year-plus longitudinal national evaluation." The studies discussed, Levant argued, were merely "a bunch of $200,000 and $300,000 superficial evaluations" that were not conclusive. A valid criticism, perhaps, but these were the same "superficial evaluations" that DARE was prepared to accept for vindication.

A former Los Angeles deputy police chief, Levant added that few children were arrested for looting during the 1992 L.A. riots. Drug-dealing was also down in the schools, he said. "Why? Because the officers, undercover, on campus, are talking to kids about where they get drugs on campus. They're getting the DARE message from high school kids. So does DARE work? You're darned right it does."

Levant's remarks about "officers, undercover, on campus" reflect the original justification used by Gates: Get police into the schools to arrest drug dealers. While it may serve the laudable goal of keeping drugs out of the schoolyard, covert evidence-gathering police work is not one of the stated objectives of DARE.

These comments also typify DARE America's response to criticism. A 1993 Gallup poll of recent DARE graduates is frequently cited by Levant to demonstrate the program's worth, as is a survey of enthusiastic school administrators. But surveys and anecdotes are far different from rigorous scientific evaluation. If these same policemen obtained evidence of a crime, would they want professional technicians to analyze it or would they ask Gallup to quiz the public?

Project SMART researcher Bill Hansen was surprised by DARE's attitude toward researchers in San Diego. "It created a firestorm. Before that, they had never talked to a scientist; they didn't consider discussing the curriculum relevant to what they were doing."

After San Diego, DARE America created a nine-member "Scientific Advisory Board" for the first time. The board has recommended that a "learning lab" be created for testing of the curriculum, but DARE America has not taken their advice.

A new curriculum was first mentioned at the conference, where Hansen and others learned that DARE was planning the first major changes in 10 years. To Hansen, this announcement presented an amusing contradiction: "They basically said at San Diego, 'Our program doesn't have a problem-and don't worry, we're fixing it.'"
Spin Control
The new version of DARE hit the schools in the fall of 1994. The program now includes lessons on gang violence and added emphasis is given to the evils of tobacco.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, the new emphasis on violence and cigarettes also matches new criteria for funding. Violence is a key word in the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, and similar wording can be found in the federal crime bill. States such as California and Massachusetts also have hefty set-asides for anti-tobacco programs, funded by cigarette taxes. The new, improved description of DARE seems almost custom-designed for these new requirements.

Also, says author Ruth Rich, "the new curriculum is 70 percent more interactive than the old. Now there's no place [in the program] where we don't have the child involved."

This change appears to be a positive one. "Interactive" means the child is an active participant, as opposed to quietly listening to a lecture by the DARE instructor. Although all researchers shown the transcript of the "national survey" question faulted the merits of the lesson, they all approved of the way DARE had the children discuss it in small groups.

Despite the revamped curriculum, controversy ensued as DARE America tried to influence The American Journal of Public Health and NIJ released the good news-only flyer. Spokespersons from NIJ insist that DARE America did not influence their decision to tone down the negative aspects of the research, claiming instead that their independent reviewers had recommended that approach. Who were these reviewers, and how "independent" were they? NIJ declines to reveal their identities. "It's always been our policy to keep the names private, so there won't be pressure," says a NIJ spokeswoman. "We feel strongly about the independence of our evaluators."

But DARE America readily supplies the name of one of the reviewers: William DeJong. The same man whose early, positive critique was so pivotal in rooting DARE in our schools.

Says DeJong, "RTI should have said, 'Here's what we did. It's the best we can do with [our analysis], but not too much should be made of this because there's a new curriculum.' They should have kept it in perspective."

Now a lecturer at Harvard, DeJong says he hoped "RTI would back away from its strong anti-DARE conclusion." DeJong particularly objects to comparing DARE to programs that showed better results but were university-based and required intensive training or a difficult-to-sustain level of resources. "It's like comparing a nurtured hothouse flower to a national program."

DeJong's comment brings to mind a fundamental complaint made by critics: DARE is fast becoming a government-sanctioned monopoly. DARE is now in 8,000 communities and more than 50 percent of our schools. Six million children will receive DARE instruction this year, and another 19 million will have classroom visits from their local DARE officer. DARE has grown like the kudzu vine, blanketing the country and smothering competing "hothouse" drug-prevention projects. For instance, both Andy Johnson and Bill Hansen have developed drug-education programs since the days of Project SMART, but compared to the enormous numbers of kids receiving DARE, these are little more than humble science-fair projects.

And without research, we won't know what-if anything-will prevent kids from abusing drugs. This is the dismal news about drug education: All programs are qualified failures, providing only small gains that soon disappear. For all the tinkering over the years, Project SMART has achieved only modest reductions in drug abuse, primarily by postponing the age at which a child begins to experiment with cigarettes, alcohol, and other drugs.

Asked if the new version of DARE was tested before it was introduced into classrooms nationwide, DARE America spokeswoman Roberta Silverman says there were pilot tests, but "we only did a limited evaluation of the new curriculum-just a checks-and-balances kind of thing about the pilot testing."

The new DARE curriculum might be better than the old. Although highly unlikely, it is also possible that it could be worse, more likely to produce a boomerang effect. Without evaluations, we don't know. Are there at least plans to put the new program under a microscope? "We don't have any research lined up, but we're seeking government funding to do a longitudinal study," says Silverman.

Even if started today, a five-year longitudinal study would be completed in the year 2000, just as the children of the first DARE graduates will be introduced to their DARE officer in kindergarten. By 2000, DARE will likely be in all our schools, and all those "hothouse" programs will have become academic footnotes. And doubtless all of the parents, teachers, administrators, and police departments will still embrace the painless, easy solutions that DARE offers, happy that at least they're doing something positive to stop the scourge of drug abuse by children.
Jeff Elliott is a freelance journalist who writes most frequently about science, environmental issues, and technology.

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The October 1994 government flyer seemed like sweet vindication to the thousands of parents, police, and teachers who supported the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program, better known by the acronym DARE. "The D.A.R.E. Program: A Review of Prevalence, User Satisfaction, and Effectiveness," the headline on the single page boasted, describing a new study of the drug-education program.

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DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Worked

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DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Worked

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Gives some history of the DARE Program, originates from Los Angeles from a partnership between the LAUSD and LAPD Chief Daryl Gates.

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If you went to grade school in the 1980s or 90s, chances are good you were publicly offered drugs at school by a uniformed police officer.

"Hey," he might have said, "Want to meet up behind the gym after school and get high?"

Luckily for you, you were savvy enough to understand that this wasn't an earnest offer. It was an exercise in resistance.

"No thanks!" you'd say. "I have homework to go do."

"Come on," he'd retort. Impressed with your delivery, he'd decided to step up the simulated peer pressure. "I thought you were cool."

"Not doing drugs is cool," was your reply.

Your classmates might have applauded, at the officer/teacher's prompting. Then you went back to your seat, and the officer would go over the things you did well in the exercise, so the class could learn by your example. In addition to teaching the other students, the officer was also building up your self esteem.

There was just one problem: DARE didn't work.

Students who went through DARE weren't any less likely to do drugs than the students who didn't. In fact, there's some well-regarded research that some groups of students were actually more likely to do drugs if they went through DARE.

Scientists knew DARE was ineffective relatively early on, but the program grew anyways. The program's eventual reform was the result of a long and hard battle between evidence-based research, and popular opinion.

DARE's Humble Beginnings

"We had 'buy programs' in the schools where undercover officers would buy drugs from students. We kept buying more and more. It was appalling, depressing. I finally said: 'This is crazy. We've got to do something.' "

The LAPD, in conjunction with the local rotary club and the LA Unified School District (LAUSD), came up with the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program, DARE (also, incidentally, a pun with Chief Daryl Gates' first name.)

Without Johnson's oversight, Rich took the SMART curriculum and patterned her own off of it. In 1993, there were two main versions of SMART: one that focused on developing personal goals and self esteem, and another that focused on resisting things like peer pressure and advertisements. Rich combined the two approaches.

"[People were] eager to find an easy solution to the problem of juvenile drug abuse. DARE became 'a rallying symbol to do something positive about the drug abuse problem.'"

Like that, DARE became a national, nationally funded movement. In 1988, U.S. presidents started recognizing National DARE Day, a practice that continued into the Obama administration . By 1992, the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act money accounted for almost $10 million nationally . By 1995, DARE estimated its own costs at $200 million .

That first independent review of DARE, which found that it had an effect on drug use, quickly started to look like an extreme anomaly. By 1991 there were already more than a dozen published studies claiming that DARE had absolutely no measurable effect on drug use. This negative finding proceeded to bear out through another two decades of research.

This came as no surprise to the social scientists behind DARE's original curriculum, the SMART program. A few years after DARE started, the USC researchers made an alarming discovery about SMART: early versions of the program didn't work. In fact, some of them had a "boomerang effect," by which participation correlated to higher rates of drug use. But by the time of this discovery, the LAUSD had grown "distant", according to SMART researcher, Bill Hansen . Hansen and Johnson claim they reached out to DARE to help revise the curriculum, but were rejected.

The problem was that, to a lot of people, it seemed like common sense that DARE would just work. "Everyone believed that if you just told students how harmful these substances and behaviors were-they'd stay away from them," Frank Pegueros , the current president and CEO of DARE. America, has said.

He went on, "For 10 years, I've been living and breathing DARE, and it's all been about helping kids. That's our program, and that's what we're going to keep on doing."

There was also a behind-the-scenes battle that played out between DARE and scientific research. While DARE was doing its best to publicly combat and distract the scientific naysayers, they also tried to silence critics before they reached the public spotlight at all.

In the early 90s, the NIJ hired the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to do a meta-analysis of the existing evaluations of DARE's efficacy. In 1994, RTI concluded the study, announcing that DARE had no measurable effect on drug use, and that other, existing programs, seem to do better. DARE could be improved, and if it refused to improve, it could be replaced. From the study's conclusion :

"DARE's limited influence on adolescent drug use behavior contrasts with the program's popularity and prevalence. An important implication is that DARE could be taking the place of other, more beneficial drug use curricula that adolescents could be receiving."

Then, despite positive peer review, and despite the fact that the NIJ had closely reviewed the study throughout its development, the NIJ refused to publish the results. They did not elaborate on their refusal, beyond claiming the work did not meet their, "high standards of methodological rigor." The NIJ then issued a press release, reporting on the unpublished study, including the positive findings that DARE is popular, and growing, and omitting the claims of ineffectiveness.

"Not only is DARE widespread and popular, but demand for it is high," it read. "[DARE's] appeal cuts across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines [with] considerable support for expansion of the program."

When RTI sought publication in an independent journal -- the American Journal of Public Health -- DARE pressured the journal against publishing. The Journal's editor, Sabine Beisler, told USA Today, "DARE has tried to interfere with the publication of this. They tried to intimidate us." The paper, which flew through peer review, was published anyways.

The paper's lead author commented on the fact that the concerns over methodological rigor were particularly problematic because the paper was a meta-analysis of existing research. RTI did not conduct any new experiments. As they told :

"The results of all the studies used in the meta-analysis were consistent; it's not like the conclusions of these different studies were all over the place. We did not find any support for [a statistically significant] impact on drug use, and they show DARE has no effect at all on marijuana use."

When asked how the NIJ reviewers refused an article that the American Journal of Public Health reviewers "uniformly appraised" as "first-rate," a DARE spokesperson told Reason, "It was hot and sexy for Public Health to criticize DARE."

Hot and sexy or not, the RTI study was by no means the last to find DARE completely ineffective. No matter how researchers sliced it -- by observing students exposed to more up-to-date versions of the curriculum, or who had taken DARE for multiple years -- they could not find any evidence that DARE reduced drug use. There was some evidence that it temporarily improved students' self-esteem, or gave them negative attitudes towards drugs. But there wasn't any evidence that it actually had an effect on the behavior it was supposed to target.

But these reports themselves seemed ineffective at reaching the public in a meaningful way. Nor were they effective at slowing DARE's growth. Then, nearly 20 years after DARE launched with a faulty curriculum, things started to change.

Then, in 2003, another government organization evaluated DARE. This time, it was the Government Accountability Office (GAO) -- a federal watchdog on government spending of taxpayer money. GAO's interest in DARE was obvious. DARE was funded with federal, state, and local taxes. In 2003, DARE's cost was estimated at between $200 million and $2 billion.

GAO selected six long-term evaluations for review -- studies that looked at kids 5 to 10 years after the DARE program and evaluated its effect. All of the studies found "no significant differences in illicit drug use," between the DARE group and the control group. Five of the six reported on students attitudes towards drugs and found, "no significant differences between the [DARE] and control groups over the long term."

Although GAO left the detail out of its report, some of the research it included in its review found that DARE had the dreaded "boomerang" effect on some students. As the authors of the original paper wrote, "Suburban students who were D.A.R.E. graduates scored higher than suburban students in the Control group on all four major drug use measures."

The DARE money finally started to ebb. Cities and districts started shutting down their DARE programs -- Rocky Anderson, as mayor of Salt Lake City, famously called the program a "fraud on the people of America." Threatened with extinction, the shrinking DARE got serious about reforming itself into an evidenced-based practice. Suddenly, they needed and wanted the scientific community's help.

"It was state of the art when we launched it," Levant said in 2001, when he announced the planned curriculum overhaul. "Now it's time for science to improve upon what we're doing."

is DARE's long-awaited answer to evidenced-based programming.

Today's DARE promotes an education program that has a stamp of approval from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The replacement program, titled "keepin' it REAL," launched in 2011. Its developers say it's "not an anti-drug program," but is more centered on decision-making skills, "things like being honest and safe and responsible." But, unlike DARE, it's been demonstrated in a handful of studies to reduce the risk of drug abuse :

"The reports from students who completed keepin' it REAL indicated that they sampled these substances less than those in a control group, and used a wider variety of strategies to stay sober. Their antidrug attitudes were also more likely to stick over time."

After two and a half decades of research, and the threat of extinction by defunding, DARE is finally friends with science. It's been a long hard road, but America's most popular drug resistance education program finally actually teaches kids to resist drugs.

For our next post, we investigate Donald Trump's misadventures in professional football. To get notified when we post it → . A version of this article was originally published October 1, 2015.

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DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked

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If you went to grade school in the 1980s or 90s, chances are good you were publicly offered drugs at school by a uniformed police officer. "Hey," he might have said, "Want to meet up behind the gym after school and get high?"

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Time Magazine article from 2001 "Just Say No to DARE"

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Time Magazine article from 2001 "Just Say No to DARE"

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Criticizes DARE for being ineffective. Cites research from University of Illinois that showed that some kids who went through DARE were more likely to do drugs than kids who had not gone through DARE.

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NATE HOWARD/ROCHESTER POST-BULLETIN/AP

Heres a news flash: "Just Say No" is not an effective anti-drug message. And neither are Barney-style self-esteem mantras.

While most Americans wont be stunned by these revelations, theyve apparently taken a few DARE officials by surprise. According to the New York Times, after years of ignoring stubbornly low success rates, coordinators of the 18-year-old Drug Abuse Resistance Education program are finally coming around to the news that their plan to keep kids off drugs just isnt working. That means a whole new DARE program — one which critics hope will sidestep existing pitfalls.

An ineffective past
DARE, which is taught by friendly policemen in 75 percent of the nations school districts, has been plagued by image problems from the beginning, when it first latched on to Nancy Reagans relentlessly sunny and perversely simplistic "Just say No" campaign. The programs goals include teaching kids creative ways to say "no" to drugs, while simultaneously bolstering their self-esteem (which DARE founders insist is related to lower rates of drug use). It's apparently not a bad way of educating five-year-olds about the dangers of drinking cleaning fluid. But it's a bust at keeping teenagers from smoking pot.

According to an article published in the August 1999 issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, DARE not only did not affect teenagers rate of experimentation with drugs, but may also have actually lowered their self-esteem. The study, called "Project DARE: No Effects at 10-Year Follow-Up," bluntly deconstructs every claim the program makes. More than 1,000 10 year-olds enrolled in DARE classes were given a survey about drug use and self-esteem, and then, a decade later, the same group filled out the same questionnaire.

The findings were grim: 20-year-olds whod had DARE classes were no less likely to have smoked marijuana or cigarettes, drunk alcohol, used "illicit" drugs like cocaine or heroin, or caved in to peer pressure than kids whod never been exposed to DARE. But that wasnt all. "Surprisingly," the article states, "DARE status in the sixth grade was negatively related to self-esteem at age 20, indicating that individuals who were exposed to DARE in the sixth grade had lower levels of self-esteem 10 years later." Another study, performed at the University of Illinois, suggests some high school seniors whod been in DARE classes were more likely to use drugs than their non-DARE peers.

The weakness in the old DARE program, as several studies suggest, was the simplicity of its message — and its panic-level assertions that "drug abuse is everywhere." Kids, program directors learned, dont respond well to hyperbole, and both the "Just Say No" message and the hysteria implied in the anti-drug rhetoric were pushing students away. Its also possible, some researchers speculate, that by making drugs seem more prevalent, or "normal" than they actually are, the DARE program might actually push kids who are anxious to fit in towards drugs.

Trying something new
The new DARE curriculum, designed with these criticisms in mind, is less preachy, more experiential. It applies to a broader age-range than the old program, reaching kids not only in fifth grade but in seventh and ninth grades as well. It hinges on discussion groups rather than lectures. And it pointedly does not say "drug abuse is everywhere" — a new angle that researchers hope will make kids realize that maybe everyone doesnt use drugs after all — so maybe they dont need to either.

Programs like this inhale money, and by introducing a new curriculum, DARE officials guarantee a renewed federal grant, whether the program works or not. Obviously, the officials are hoping for the best. But even if the program fails, we can hope for a silver lining: Perhaps this first failure has taught DARE directors a degree of humility; maybe this time around it wont take them 10 years to recognize failure and plot a new course.

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Breaking News, Analysis, Politics, Blogs, News Photos, Video, Tech Reviews - TIME.com

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Heres a news flash: "Just Say No" is not an effective anti-drug message. And neither are Barney-style self-esteem mantras. While most Americans wont be stunned by these revelations, theyve apparently taken a few DARE officials by surprise.