Jeff Sessions wants to bring back D.A.R.E.

As anybody who ever traded a solemn promise to never snort cocaine for a kick-ass T-shirt back in the ’90s knows, the D.A.R.E. program used to be a pretty big deal in America’s schools. But the drug and violence resistance program has taken a number of hits over the years, with numerous scientific studies disputing the effectiveness of its “But you promised to say ‘No!’” approach to youth education. The end result has been a heavy slashing of the program’s budget—which must have come as a huge blow to its T-shirt printers—and its gradual disappearance from America’s schools.

But never fear, nostalgic fans of Drug Abuse Resistance Education: hip ’50s kid Jeff Sessions wants to bring the program back. “D.A.R.E. is, I think, as I indicated, the best remembered anti-drug program today,” the attorney general said at a D.A.R.E. training conference in Texas today, pinpointing the organization’s biggest selling point: brand loyalty. After all, it doesn’t matter if Scientific American reported in 2014 that “the program does little or nothing to combat substance use in youth,” or that the National Criminal Justice Reference Service issued a 1998 report to Congress that stated, “No scientific evidence suggests that the D.A.R.E. core curriculum as originally designed or revised in 1993, will reduce substance use in the absence of continued instruction.” People remember the letters E, R, D, and A, and that’s what’s going to keep our kids drug-free.

http://www.avclub.com/article/today-90s-nostalgia-jeff-sessions-wants-bring-back-257972

man, it's like a whole gang of drunk, perverted grandfathers have taken over the US government.
a bunch of excessively wealthy old guys with no sense of class, compassion or sincere desire to help people - but plenty of regressive, unoriginal, failed ideas to attempt to distract everyone from their shady behaviour.

i've said it elsewhere on here, but even though i knew this administration was going to be bad, it has exceeded even some of my more pessimistic expectations.

what a fucking disgrace

my thoughts go out to all the decent anti-trump americans on bluelight. i feel for you guys - it must be awful to see your country get highjacked by these rotten mutants.

There is more he said as well:

"Jeff Sessions wants to make illegal drugs less potent and more expensive.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a lengthy speech on drug policy today at a conference for DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the anti-drug program that was big in the 80s and 90s.

While much of the speech was Sessions' standard law-and-order messaging, one line, about the role of the Justice Department in decreasing illicit drug use, really stood out:

Now, law enforcement is prevention. And at the Department of Justice, we are working keep drugs out of our country to reduce availability, to drive up its price, and to reduce its purity and addictiveness. [emphasis added]

This is a standard supply-side anti-drug mantra: make drugs illegal, drive up their price, make them harder to manufacture and harder to get.

Let's just check in on how that's going.


This chart, using federal data, plots the inflation-adjusted price per pure gram of heroin from 1980 to 2012. You'll notice that over that period the price fell nearly tenfold. The steepest declines, in fact, happened in the late 80s and early 90s -- the "tough on crime" era that Sessions yearns so strongly for in his speeches.

The data shows that the prices of other drugs, like cocaine and methamphetamines, fell similarly during this period.

You see a similar, though less-pronounced trend when examining illicit drug purity. Here's heroin.


The average purity of street-level heroin seizures rose from 10 percent in 1981 to 31 percent in 2012, a threefold increase. Again, most of that increase in purity happened during the tough-on-crime era of the 80s and 90s.

In fact, heroin purity showed a steady decline throughout most of the 2000s, right when policymakers were starting to abandon the harsh rhetoric for more treatment-based options.

By Sessions' goalposts of raising price and reducing purity, the Justice Department has been failing miserably at its job for much of the past 30 years.

Now granted, giving Sessions the benefit of the doubt perhaps he's aware of these trends and wants to reverse them going forward. But his constant invocation of the harsh drug rhetoric of yore suggests that'll be an uphill battle.

Numbers like these are why a number of reform groups, including the ACLU and the Drug Policy Alliance, say an enforcement-centric approach to drug policy, like the one Sessions advocates for, is incapable of dealing with an increasingly deadly national opiate epidemic. They'd rather decriminalize personal drug use to get drug users out of prisons and into the treatment they need.

Many advocates point to Portugal, which decriminalized the use of all drugs in 2001 and saw drops in rates of illicit drug use and drug overdose as a result, as a model for the U.S.

But with Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department, such policy is further away than ever. "It is not enough that dangerous drugs are illegal," Sessions said before the DARE conference today. "We have to create a cultural climate that is hostile to drug abuse."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ore-expensive-weve-got-some-bad-news-for-him/

Jeff Sessions wants to make illegal drugs less potent and more expensive.

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what a creep.

"It is not enough that dangerous drugs are illegal," Sessions said before the DARE conference today. "We have to create a cultural climate that is hostile to drug abuse."

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so, the US prison industrial complex - with more prisoners than any nation has ever had in human history - is not enough?
the hundreds and hundreds of people dying of overdoses to fent analogues and other fucked up shit caused by the drug war (turf wars, poverty, desperation etc) is not enough?
fuck this guy.

that's some nasty, nasty bullshit. i really hope to see all the trumps and their associates get locked up themselves (any other citizen would have been charged by now) - but i'm not holding my breath.

seriously depressing stuff

Can this little prick die already?

spacejunk said:

man, it's like a whole gang of drunk, perverted grandfathers have taken over the US government.
a bunch of excessively wealthy old guys with no sense of class, compassion or sincere desire to help people - but plenty of regressive, unoriginal, failed ideas to attempt to distract everyone from their shady behaviour.

i've said it elsewhere on here, but even though i knew this administration was going to be bad, it has exceeded even some of my more pessimistic expectations.

what a fucking disgrace

my thoughts go out to all the decent anti-trump americans on bluelight. i feel for you guys - it must be awful to see your country get highjacked by these rotten mutants.

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Things are getting downright scary in the US right now. It's disheartening to see the little progress we made under Obama being flushed out the window so rapidly.

Nice, I can use the magic, anti cop force-field provided by the DARE sticker on my car when scoring in the hood or moving serious weight. I'm feeling the nostalgia..

I prefer the "My son is an Eagle Scout" sticker on my mom's van, so lowkey 8)

Whats one definition of insanity?

But I guess maybe its changed?

i was a dare kid. with officer dan. don't remember what i promised not to do, but i know i've done it.

cj said:

Things are getting downright scary in the US right now. It's disheartening to see the little progress we made under Obama being flushed out the window so rapidly.

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Agreed. I was expecting a repressive ennviriment under this administration, but the disregard for empirical ANYTHING is beyond disturbing.

I have noticed that the current climate is helping bring oppressed people together a bit, but that's hardly much of a silver lining.

toothpastedog said:

Agreed. I was expecting a repressive ennviriment under this administration, but the disregard for empirical ANYTHING is beyond disturbing.

I have noticed that the current climate is helping bring oppressed people together a bit, but that's hardly much of a silver lining.

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It's brought together all the bigoted idiots that is for sure. They see the president is one of them so they now feel comfortable in spreading there filth everywhere.

All the young addicts and the growing heroin problem and their solution is to bring back dare? Who do they think was in school when dare was still running?

falsifiedhypothesi said:

All the young addicts and the growing heroin problem and their solution is to bring back dare? Who do they think was in school when dare was still running?

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Very true

falsifiedhypothesi said:

All the young addicts and the growing heroin problem and their solution is to bring back dare? Who do they think was in school when dare was still running?

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I literally laughed about this I was in DARE in fifth grade somethin' early like that, and I don't remember much about it in the first place. And now I'm a poly-substance use/abuser

At the risk of seriously dating myself, I predate DARE. The "Just Say No" club was the biggest "organization" at my high school. You didn't need any special skills or good grades to be in it, so basically everyone said they were in it just to get out of class whenever they had an assembly/photo/whatever. The vast majority didn't even go. They just hung out somewhere discreet and you guessed it...did drugs!

I am so old I had to watch the "Reefer Madness" movie in school. The teacher (Mr. Fisher) was reading about a woman who took LSD and locked herself in a freezer because she thought she was an orange and someone would turn her into orange juice. I was in 8th grade and knew then and there that I was going to take acid as soon as it was available to me. Of course it was the real LSD 25 back then. I didn't find any until I was 18. Loved it.

^What an inspirational drug program, inspiring kids to do drugs through blatantly false information. Was that the 50's they showed reefer madness in schools?

^I was the same way, I decided I was gonna try cannabis and LSD several years before I ever had the opportunity.

falsifiedhypothesi said:

All the young addicts and the growing heroin problem and their solution is to bring back dare? Who do they think was in school when dare was still running?

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Lot of these kids doing heroin now are STILL IN SCHOOL! DARE has already missed the mark lol

We didn't really get DARE at my school, and I'm solidly a millenial. I think they got rid of it some places before others. We got drug education for sure, but is wasn't DARE brand.

The officer who taught our DARE program was apparently caught selling weed to students. That is the only thing I remember about DARE, that and I got a t-shirt that's still lying around my house somewhere.