Beyond The Blackboard: DARE's Failure

BA

Bluelight Crew
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It's hard to believe Drug Abuse Resistance Education turned 20-years-old last week. I remember the hoopla that took place surrounding the birth of the program when Daryl Gates, then Los Angeles chief of police, and the Los Angeles Unified School District officials came together with the concept that was to save teen-agers from the ravages of illicit drugs.

DARE's message and purpose was simple: Keep kids off of drugs, educate them, and help them have the courage to dare to say no to anyone attempting to draw them on to the dark side.

Who can forget such vivid television images as the thin young woman with the frying pan and egg, cracking the egg and dropping its contents into the hot pan and declaring, "this is your brain on drugs," as the egg sizzled into oblivion. I've always wondered if that scare tactic worked. Apparently not.

A few facts: In 2000, 47 percent of eighth-graders and 88.5 percent of senior high school students said marijuana was easy to obtain, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Approximately 24 percent of eighth-graders and upward of 48 percent of seniors reported powdered cocaine was easy to get.

There's more, according to a fact sheet compiled in April 2003, by Ariel Kalishman of the Drug Policy Alliance:

  • Studies have consistently shown that DARE has no significant effect on student drug use.
  • Estimated costs of DARE annually is $1 to 1.3 billion.
  • The Department of Education prohibited schools from spending its Safe and Drug-Free Schools money on DARE because they did not consider it effective in reducing drug use. Parent organization DARE America continues to receive money because it's trying to update the curriculum.
  • National surveys report that more than 50 percent of American teen-agers said they experimented with an illegal drug before completing high school; 80 percent owned up to drinking alcohol during those impressionable years.

Porterville's teen-agers are just as subject to the above statistics as the rest of the nation's young people, if not more so because of the high incidence of methamphetamine being produced and sold in our area. A case in point is the law enforcement drug raid early this month, which resulted in arrests at 18 locations including homes in Porterville, Bakersfield, Terra Bella and the Tule River Indian Reservation.

During a telephone conversation last week, Marsha Rosenbaum, director of Safety First/Drug Policy Alliance, told me that, if nothing else, every scientific evaluation of the DARE program has proven its ineffectiveness. During this time of severe budget cuts in education, spending billions of dollars on a failed drug program is ludicrous.

Without a doubt, even a small portion of $1 - $1.3 billion could be better spent educating parents on how better to help their children in this area and making sure teachers have jobs.

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9-19-03
 
Sierra's "Police Quest" computer game series got mighty gnarly and racist when they brought Darryl Gates on. Goes to show!
 
It pisses me off to see billions and billions of dollars spent world wide on anto drug campaigns that have never fucking worked.
Fuck, they could give me a million dollars and i would stop doing drugs, probably more effective than their egg on frypan add
 
All that DARE money could have been used for drug harm reduction rather than to educate kids on how to say no to drugs.


P.S.
As a matter of face, DARE taught me about drugs that I never knew could exsist and I got somewhat interested in them. Now I use drugs.
 
DARE was implemented in elementary school ... where I'm from, drugs are completely unheard of at that age. They were an abstract concept, all the stuff they told us was totally irrelevant and unapplicable.
Years later when we get older and drugs are availible, we've long forgot the propaganda of DARE anyhow, not to mention we've come to realize it was a load of crap.
 
ive said it a thousand times: DARE got me into drugs. I still remember those classes in 5th grade.

Some random pig cop: "LSD is a terrible drug. It will make you see things that are not real, hear things that are not there. You will see sounds and feel colors, you will see people melting and morphing. Its terrifying."

Me: "Sweet. Cant wait till I get to high school and some big kid offers me some!!!"
 
When I was in DARE they didn't talk very much about drugs.
They touched on the subject, but I was surprised. I thought that DARE was going to be a big long "say no to drugs lecture", but it wasn't. Most of the class was about identifying gangbangers and gang activity. It was just as bad as drug propoganda. After the classes my school instituted a sort of dress code: You couldn't wear an outfit of all one color (ie a red hat, shorts and shirt8( ). You couldn't wear any kind of bandana or "rag" or "sag" your pants (because they thought you had a gun in your crotch).
None of the Mexicans could wear thier Jesus or "vive la raza" shirts and the black kids couldn't wear thier cross color shit either. We were also encouraged not to wear nice shoes, because it's a well known fact that the crips will cut your feet off for a pair of the new '91 Jordans.8(

So yeah, DARE worked great on me! Never joined a gang or any kind of organized crime.

I DAREd to resist violence! (still working on the drug thing tho...)8)
 
heh, when DARE came to my school in the 5th grade, it was a big sploosh of gang/drug 'say no to it all' thing.... i did learn a few things about gangs, but as for drugs... well.... i got interested in them... i mean, they sounded so damn cool... and in fact, it was because of DARE i knew how to make my first deal and toke my first bowl.... its been dow...errr, up.. no wait... well... hills man... hills.... since that is....
 
I never had Dare (thank god)...

Some of my friends did and made off with a bag of pot that the Officer was passing thru the class. Big uproar...lol

I do remember the Nancy Regan "Just Say No" march, whatta friking joke. March the whole population of school kids to a local park and have them release thousands of balloons on command (Some of which probably choked some local wildlife when the broken balloon was mistaken for food). Fortunetly I was wobbly from chugs from the peppermint schnapps bottle that day.
 
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