The

RECONSIDER
Quarterly
WINTER 2001—2002 VOLUME 1, NUMBER 4

The EDUCATION Issue

Michael Roona — This advisor to the new D.A.R.E.
program developers asks, “Are we doing enough?”

Edward Shepard — His groundbreaking study

reveals the high cost — and hidden costs — of D.A.R.E.

Rocky Anderson — As mayor of Salt Lake City,

Anderson refused to fund D.A.R.E.

Rodney Skager — This drug education expert shares

his ideas on how to reinvent drug education for teens.

Craig Reinarman — His sociology class on drugs

takes students far beyond the “Just Say No” message.

Marsha Rosenbaum — This medical sociologist

discovered first-hand that drug education was amiss.
Then she did something about it.

And much more...

P R E S ER V E L I B E R T Y & R E D U C E H A R M
The
RECONSIDERQuarterly..... is actually only published intermittently
by ReconsiDer: Forum on Drug
Policy as time and money allow. We
continue to call it a quarterly, however,
Table of Contents because, according to our executive di-
rector, it sounds good and, after all, one
Features: can cut or fold it into quarters! Its pur-
2 Are We Doing Enough? pose is to provide members and non-
By Michael R. Roona and Alexandra Eyle members with information about the
Drug War in order to promote discus-
4 A Guide to Shopping for Drug Education Programs sion of drug policy issues among its
By Alexandra Eyle readers and their friends and col-
leagues. It also serves to communicate
6 We Wasted Billions on D.A.R.E. to local political leaders that there is a
By Edward Shepard, Ph.D. growing, active, informed and deter-
12 What It Was Like to Drop the D.A.R.E. Program mined constituency that wants funda-
An Interview with Salt Lake City Mayor Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson mental changes in drug policies.

14 On Reinventing Drug Education for Adolescents

By Rodney Skager, Ph.D. Publishers: Alexandra & Nicolas Eyle
22 Notes on Drug Education for College Students Editor: Alexandra Eyle
Design /Layout: Arthur W. Lange
By Craig Reinarman, Ph.D. Copyediting: Hugh and Kate Mason
26 A Focus on Safety First Strikes a Universal Chord Proofreading: Hugh and Kate Mason
By Marsha Rosenbaum, Ph.D. All photographs in this issue are
29 Article Endnotes reprinted by permission of the
subjects.
Departments:
Send Letters to:
1 Editor’s Letter: Where Do We Go From Here? Editor
The ReconsiDer Quarterly,
19 Recommended Reading: After Prohibition: An Adult Approach 205 Onondaga Avenue,
to Drug Policies in the 21st Century Syracuse, NY 13207
Reviewed By Kevin B. Zeese email: quarterly@reconsider.org

20 Guest Speaker: Ignorance Hurts Both

Drug Users and Their Families
By Susan P. Koningen
RECONSIDER:
FORUM ON DRUG POLICY
Board of Directors: Capt. Peter Christ
(Ret.); Bruce Coville; Alexandra Eyle;
Nicolas Eyle; Anthony Malavenda; James
Schofield, Esq.; Michael Smithson.
Executive Director: Nicolas Eyle
Statement of Purpose Treasurer: James Wright
Board of Advisors:
ReconsiDer: Forum on Drug Policy is a nonpartisan, grass roots mem-
Dr. Jennifer Daniels, MD, MBA; William
bership organization that works by consensus and through the volunteer ef- Kinne, Onondaga County Legislature;
forts and contributions of its members. It is a New York State not-for-profit Minch Lewis, City Auditor, Syracuse, NY;
corporation, with its headquarters in Syracuse. It is supported by individual J.F.X. Mannion, CEO, Unity Life Insurance
contributions and grants. (Ret.); Patrick Murphy, Chief of Police,
Syracuse, NY (Ret.);Van Robinson,
Its unifying belief that the War on Drugs has failed grounds its fundamental Councilor-at-Large, City of Syracuse; Carol
purposes: to effect substantial change in United States drug policy; to pro- Shepperd, Housing Authority, Syracuse, NY;
mote, support, and engage in open discussion of alternatives to the War on Dr. Gene Tinelli, MD, PhD; Patricia
Waelder, President, Syracuse School Board
Drugs; to form numerous chapters that challenge citizens and local political (Ret.)
leaders to rethink drug policies; and to help enact pragmatic legislation that Web Site: www.reconsider.org
reduces harm and preserves liberties. Toll-Free Number: 1-800-992-3299
Editor’s Letter:
When Drug Abuse Resistance Education
(D.A.R.E.) was first launched in 1983,
parents welcomed it, believing it would
help keep their children safe. But some
found that D.A.R.E. wasn’t working the
way they’d hoped it would.
“In 1994, D.A.R.E. invaded the serenity of
our home,” Steve Finichel, a doctor from
New Jersey, told us last fall. “My 10-year-
old son began to cry uncontrollably at
dinner, informing his mother and me
that the wine we were about to drink
takes 14 minutes from our lives. He also
informed us that we were alcoholics. To
make matters worse, he put a tip into the
classroom D.A.R.E. box and was fright-
ened that soon we would be taken off to
jail. . .”
To make matters worse, studies found
that the program wasn’t working. In
2001, the U.S. Surgeon General placed it
under the category of “Ineffective
Programs.” D.A.R.E. America first
defended the program, then worked with
the Institute of Health and Social Policy,
at the University of Akron, to revise it,
using a grant from the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation.
About 37,000 7th-graders are now taking
part in the program, known as the
Adolescent Substance Abuse Prevention
Study, which was launched in September
2001 in 87 school districts in six selected
cities — New Orleans, Houston, Los
Angeles, Newark, St. Louis, and Detroit.
All of the districts were randomly
assigned the new program, with half
getting the new program and half serving
as the control group and continuing
their old drug abuse prevention activi-
ties. To determine the program’s success,
all 37,000 students will be surveyed from
Drug Education —
Where Do We Go
from Here?
September 2001 through June 2006. The
survey will include an assessment of how
well the program was implemented,
students’ receptivity to the program,
interviews with dropouts, and analyses of
school and community data in order to
understand the contextual impact on the
program’s delivery and outcome.
Is D.A.R.E. America to be applauded for
revising its program? Or should it be
condemned, as Salt Lake City Mayor
Rocky Anderson put it, for foisting this
fraud on the American public in the first
place, and trying to salvage its reputa-
tion by using our children as guinea
pigs? How did we end up in this situa-
tion? And where should we go from here?
Experts in the field helped us answer
these questions.
Michael R. Roona, executive director of
Social Capital Development Corporation,
served as an advisor to the developers of
the new D.A.R.E. curriculum. He takes us
from D.A.R.E.’s beginnings up to the
present, and shares his concerns about
the new program.
Edward Shepard, Ph.D., associate
professor and chair of the LeMoyne
College Department of Economics,
undertook a ground breaking study to
find out how much D.A.R.E. has cost us.
In the process, he discovered that D.A.R.E.
costs more than we knew.
Rodney Skager, Ph.D., professor emeritus
of the UCLA Graduate School of Educa-
tion and Information Studies, draws on
his talks with teens to tell us what
educational approaches might be best to
follow.
Craig Reinarman, Ph.D., professor and
chair of sociology at the University of
California, tells us how he helps his
sociology students decode drug educa-
tion messages — and what it takes to
gain students’ trust.
Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson, mayor of Salt
Lake City, talks about how citizens of
Salt Lake City reacted when he stopped
funding D.A.R.E. — and offers advice to
other mayors.
Marsha Rosenbaum, Ph.D., a medical
sociologist and the director of the
Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Founda-
tion, tells how she came to write her
ground breaking booklet, Safety First.
Susan Koningen, a single mother from
Australia, shares her story of how she
has coped with drug abuse in her own
family — and is helping others to do the
same.
We also offer a brief Guide to Shopping
for Drug Education Programs.
Shifting our focus from drug education
to the broader issue of drug policy, we
invited Kevin Zeese, president of Com-
mon Sense for Drug Policy, to review
After Prohibition: An Adult Approach to
Drug Policies in the 21st Century, edited
by Timothy Lynch, director of the Cato
Institute.
This special issue of the Quarterly is far
from the final word on drug education.
But if it motivates teachers, parents and
community leaders to rethink our
approach to find new and productive
ways to cut drug use and the harms it
inflicts, then we’ve achieved our goal.
Only by examining this issue openly can
we uncover better ways to talk to kids
about drugs.
R
Alexandra Eyle, editor
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 1
Poor Results Prompt D.A.R.E. to Create New Curriculum;
One Drug Education Expert Wonders…
Are We Doing Enough?
By Michael R. Roona
and Alexandra Eyle
W
hen most people think of
D.A.R.E., they think of the ubiquitous
17-week drug education program
taught to fifth- or sixth-graders in 80%
of the school districts across the United
States. But D.A.R.E. is more than this
one program. D.A.R.E. is both a se-
quence of drug education curricula
designed to be implemented in elemen-
tary, middle, and high schools and a
complex set of institutional relation-
ships that collectively constitute the
most comprehensive infrastructure for
the implementation of prevention pro-
gramming across the United States and
the world.
D.A.R.E. had rather humble beginnings.
It was established in Los Angeles in
1983 by a curriculum developer named
Ruth Rich who was working with the
Los Angeles Unified School District and
the Los Angeles Police Department.
About half of Rich’s Drug Abuse Resis-
tance Education (D.A.R.E.) curriculum
used materials and artwork developed
by Dr. William Hansen, who had cre-
ated them for his Project S.M.A.R.T.
drug education program.
When the first preliminary evaluation
of D.A.R.E. showed that the program
had the potential to prevent substance
use by kids, the D.A.R.E. system began
to grow prolifically. Nancy Reagan,
wife of then President Ronald Reagan,
had launched her “Just Say No” cam-
paign, providing a context for D.A.R.E.’s
rapid growth. The “Just Say No” man-
tra, while hopelessly naïve, was consis-
tent with the zealous, zero-tolerance
attitude of Darryl Gates, Chief of the
2 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
Editor’s Note: Michael R. Roona, executive director of the Social Capital Devel-
opment Corporation, serves on several national and local substance abuse ad-
visory boards, including the one advising the program developers who rede-
signed — and will evaluate the effectiveness of — the new D.A.R.E. curriculum.
He also is directing an evaluation of a family-strengthening and student assis-
tance counseling program for children whose parents are in methadone main-
tenance and other drug treatment programs (for the Center for Substance Abuse
Prevention); helping substance abuse and mental health treatment providers
improve treatment for clients who are simultaneously dealing with mental
health and substance abuse problems (for the Center for Mental Health Ser-
vices); and conducting a meta-analysis of school-based drug education pro-
gram evaluations (for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). He has written
the sections on childhood and adolescent substance abuse for the first edition
of The Encyclopedia of Prevention and Health Promotion, available this June.
He is an active ReconsiDer member. Michael Roona may be reached at 518-
433-1755 or at mroona@social-capital.org.
D.A.R.E. Then and Now: The original D.A.R.E. program only emphasizes
dangers of drug use through lectures. The revised program will try to ex-
plore the dangers through interactive teaching methods, and will, D.A.R.E.
says, also help students to:
• Examine and understand their own beliefs related to alcohol, tobacco,
inhalant and other drug use and consequences
• Communicate positively in social and interpersonal situations
• Develop and use assertiveness/refusal skills
• Recognize, defuse, and avoid potentially violent situations
• Make positive quality-of-life decisions.
Los Angeles Police Department, which Darryl Gates’ extremist fantasies that
together with the Los Angeles Unified the D.A.R.E. program emerged and
School District, spawned D.A.R.E. A grew. But D.A.R.E.’s ideological foun-
frightening glimpse into Gates’ mind, dations are less relevant today, partly
and the setting in which D.A.R.E. grew because this emphasis on abstinence
and prospered, can be found in Gates’ has been reinforced by the Drug Free
1990 testimony before the U.S. Senate Schools and Communities Act, which
that the “casual user ought to be taken denies financial assistance to schools
out and shot, because he or she has no for any federal program unless those
reason for using drugs.” When asked schools teach that the use of illicit
about this outrageous testimony, Gates drugs and the unlawful possession and
stressed that he was not “being face- use of alcohol is wrong and harmful.
tious” and asserted that marijuana us- In addition, D.A.R.E. has become a
ers were guilty of treason.1 multimillion-dollar industry with cor-
porate officers earning six-figure sala-
So it was in the context of Nancy
ries; D.A.R.E. now may be more inter-
Reagan’s “Just Say No” crusade and
ested in preserving its lucrative empire
than advancing an ideological position. stitutional relationships, not a single
D.A.R.E. America, the national parent organization. Independent tax-exempt,
organization headquartered in Los An- nonprofit D.A.R.E. organizations are in-
geles, had assets of $3,574,848 and in- corporated in many states, and these
come of $11,593,663 in 1998, the last organizations have budgets ranging up
year for which data are publicly avail- to $5,000,000. According to a recent
able. Revenue sources included con- (unpublished) study conducted by Jeff
tributions ($4,135,476), government Merrill and his colleagues at the Rob-
grants ($2,188,187), special events ert Wood Johnson School of Medicine,
the average amount of
funding for D.A.R.E. at the
state level is $528,000 and
this funding comes from a
wide variety of sources. In
12 states the primary
source of funding is legis-
lated (for example, the use
of asset forfeiture proceeds
to fund D.A.R.E. programs).
In 12 other states, the pri-
mary source of funding is
federal or state grants (in-
cluding the Byrne formula
grants provided to states
by the feds until President
Bush eliminated the Byrne
program shortly after tak-
ing office). In only seven
states is the primary
source of funding for
D.A.R.E. the U.S. Education
($2,360,590), annual
license royalties
($2,682,975), and
...the “casual user ought to be
investments
($226,435). The gov-
taken out and shot, because he or she
ernment grants for
the most part are not
has no reason for using drugs.”
competitive grants.
Rather, they are spe-
Darryl Gates, Chief, Los Angeles Police Department
cial appropriations
of funds (earmarked for drug education
programs taught by uniformed police Department’s Safe and Drug Free of penetration at the junior and senior
officers) that are not part of the nor- Schools program and only one of those high school levels will soon change,
mal budget debate. These ear marks, states has a D.A.R.E. operation with a however.
or hard marks (more commonly known budget in excess of $1,000,000. Hence,
as pork), are inserted into program or even if the Principles of Effectiveness
agency budgets by legislators who like for drug education programs, promul-
D.A.R.E. gated in 1999 by the Safe and Drug Free
Schools program to prohibit federal
The balance sheet and income state-
funding of ineffective drug education
ment of the parent organization, how-
programs, directly affect D.A.R.E., the
ever, do not capture D.A.R.E.’s full scope,
impact will be dramatic in only a few
because D.A.R.E. is a complex set of in-
states.
Nonetheless the Principles of Effective-
ness did indirectly affect D.A.R.E.; they
gave new force to the findings of nu-
merous prior evaluations of D.A.R.E.’s
flagship 17-week program, which have
shown it to be ineffective at reducing
substance use. Furthermore, these
evaluations demonstrated that it didn’t
matter where the program was imple-
mented. Evaluations conducted in Il-
linois,2 Kentucky,3 North Carolina,4
South Carolina,5 British Columbia,6
and elsewhere consistently demon-
strated no effect on self-reported sub-
stance use by youth.7 But it is impor-
tant to note that no moderate or high-
quality evaluations of the D.A.R.E. pro-
gram for higher grade levels or of the
cumulative effects of D.A.R.E. on youths
who receive D.A.R.E. in elementary,
middle, and high school have been con-
ducted. D.A.R.E. America, for its part,
has always contended that it is naïve
to expect that a one-shot program in
fifth or sixth grade would be effective
and, from the start it proposed a multi-
year program, beginning in elementary
school and running through high
school.
D.A.R.E. Now Will Reach
Older Students, Too
While ubiquitous
at the fifth- and
sixth-grade level
(and quite com-
mon at lower
grades), D.A.R.E.
has generally
been unable to
penetrate junior
and senior high
schools. This lack
Today, drug education developers and
researchers agree that multi-year pro-
grams are the way to go and that multi-
year programs should focus on the
needs of middle-school students. Some
contend that one reason for the failure
of D.A.R.E.’s flagship program is that it
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 3
targeted kids who were too young.
Most prevention researchers who ad-
here to an “inoculation” model of sub-
stance abuse prevention believe that
kids must be inoculated closer to the
age when they enter the youth drug
subculture, which generally occurs in
middle school.
Revamping D.A.R.E.
It is with this perspective in mind that
the Institute for Health and Social
Policy at the University of Akron set
about designing a new state-of-the-art
drug education program, funded by a
$13.7 million grant from The Robert
Wood Johnson Foundation. The result
of this initiative is a ten-lesson, sev-
enth-grade curriculum that was imple-
mented by D.A.R.E in the fall of 2001
in 176 middle schools in New Orleans,
Houston, Los Angeles, Newark, St.
Louis, and Detroit. In addition, a new
ninth-grade curriculum, currently
under development, will be imple-
mented in the 80 high schools those
176 middle schools feed into two years
hence, when this year’s seventh-grad-
ers are in ninth grade. Youth who par-
ticipate in the seventh- and ninth-
grade curricula will be followed
through eleventh grade, at which time
self-reports of substance use will be
collected to determine whether stu-
dents who went through the junior/
senior high school program have lower
rates of substance use than compari-
son students who haven’t gone
through the program. The curriculum
developer at the University of Akron
responsible for the new seventh- and
ninth-grade D.A.R.E. curricula, Dr. Ri-
chard Hawthorne, also is developing a
new fifth-grade D.A.R.E. curriculum to
replace the one currently in use in 80%
of the school districts across the United
States, in an effort to see if this invest-
ment can be salvaged and made more
effective.
Whether these new curricula, alone or
in sequence, will have an impact on the
substance use or abuse behaviors of
eleventh-graders remains to be seen.
The curricula that have been developed
4 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
are based on active learning and sup-
portive teaching strategies, which are
regarded by curriculum and instruc-
tion scholars as effective pedagogical
practices. In the context of drug edu-
cation programs, these strategies also
are recognized as beneficial. In the nar-
rower domain of abstinence-based pro-
grams that have the goal of eliminat-
ing use of drugs, the evidence of what
works to promote abstinence from il-
legal drug and alcohol use is largely
based on short-term evaluations; there
is no long-term evidence that active
learning and supportive teaching strat-
egies offer the best approach to pro-
moting abstinence, or that promoting
abstinence is itself an effective sub-
stance abuse prevention strategy.
The Education Department’s Principles
of Effectiveness and the numerous
studies that have shown D.A.R.E. to be
ineffective have had a larger effect than
the mere revamping and expansion of
the D.A.R.E. program. They also have
opened the way for other, alternative
programs to penetrate the drug edu-
cation marketplace. The Life Skills
Training program is one well-known
A Guide to Shopping
for Drug Education Programs
A Basic Rule of Thumb:
By Alexandra Eyle
One of the biggest problems that school
boards and their communities face
when cutting D.A.R.E. from schools is
deciding what should take its place. Un-
fortunately, there’s no easy solution to
that problem. This is not due to any
lack of alternatives — there are hun-
dreds out there. So many, in fact, that
to make a good selection, school board
or community members must first arm
themselves with these basic under-
standings:
commercially available alternative to
D.A.R.E. While analyses of the Life Skills
Training program and other alternative
programs have shown some to be ef-
fective in the short term, most have not
been evaluated in the long term. It re-
mains to be seen if the students (who
for the most part were not substance
users when they participated in these
programs) will report markedly lower
levels of substance use or abuse when
they mature into the youth drug sub-
culture, or whether the strategies used
to “educate” them will backfire.
What Problems Lie Ahead?
As one of the advisors to the Univer-
sity of Akron group that developed and
evaluated the “state-of-the-art” cur-
ricula implemented this fall by
D.A.R.E., I am curious to see what the
evaluation will yield. We may find, for
instance, that the same intervention
components that delay the onset of use
at a younger age increase the likelihood
of abuse when the students mature.
For example, teaching seventh-graders
that fewer of their peers use a particu-
lar substance than they previously
• While many programs have been
evaluated for their effectiveness in pre-
venting use of cigarettes, alcohol and
marijuana, none has demonstrated its
effectiveness in preventing cocaine,
heroin, or speed use. Despite this fact,
programs are regularly labeled as “ef-
fective substance abuse prevention pro-
grams.”
• Government endorsement of a pro-
gram does not mean it prevents all
drug use. For instance, the popular Life
Skills Training program has been
shown to be effective in reducing ciga-
thought might reduce use in the short
term by eliminating pressure to con-
form with unrealistic expectations
about substance use by their peers. But
reinforcing the natural tendency of
adolescents to conform to the social
norms of their peers may have the re-
verse effect in eleventh grade, when
most kids are using or have used those
substances; if the norm in eleventh
grade is to use drugs (whereas in sev-
enth grade the norm was to not use
them) the students may now decide to
conform by using. Thus, it is conceiv-
able that teaching kids to conform with
social norms in the seventh grade re-
duces the likelihood that a seventh
grader will drink alcohol, but that once
kids are taught to conform to social
norms, when they get older they not
only will drink alcohol, but will drink
to get drunk if that is the normative
behavior in eleventh grade.
It is likely that abstinence promotion
intervention components work well for
some kids who are predisposed to not
use substances (by reinforcing their
negative attitudes toward drugs). These
same interventions, however, may be
“Buyer Beware”
rette use, has had mixed results with
alcohol use, and has not been evalu-
ated in preventing use of harder drugs,
such as heroin, cocaine, or speed.
• Opinions of “expert panels” should
be closely scrutinized. For instance, the
panel created by the Department of
Education to evaluate 132 prevention
programs did not focus on the effect of
programs on substance use behaviors.
Rather, the Education Department’s
panel determined which programs
were exemplary by assessing whether
program content and processes had
counterproductive with youths who
use substances because those youths
may be involved in a “deviant” subcul-
ture that not only rejects abstinence,
but also rejects moderation. Modera-
tion, like tolerance, is a fundamental
virtue that, unfortunately, due to fed-
eral restrictions, cannot be taught in
American schools dependent upon fed-
eral funding.
Still Not Reaching
Those Who Truly Need Us
Finally, what the new curricula won’t
do is address the very real needs of the
small percentage of kids who get drunk
or high because they are trying to re-
lieve psychological and emotional pain
caused by serious problems. Evidence
culled from the 1997 National House-
hold Survey on Drug Abuse by the Pa-
cific Institute for Research and Evalu-
ation indicates that less than 3 percent
of 12- to 14-year-olds and a mere 12
percent of 15-to 17-year-olds consume
over 80 percent of the alcohol imbibed
by youths in their age groups. Many of
these kids have been sexually molested,
physically abused, or otherwise victim-
ized and their use of alcohol and other
clearly stated rationales and whether
they were implemented effectively.
While such factors may contribute to
program effectiveness, using such in-
puts rather than outputs — such as sta-
tistically significant drops in drug use
among the program participants — to
define program effectiveness is prob-
lematic. “One problem with ‘expert
panel’ reviews,” says a program analyst,
who wished to remain anonymous, “is
that they often consist of an old boy
network more interested in maintain-
ing funding for prevention programs
drugs is a symptom or consequence of
their dysfunctional home life rather
than a cause of their problems. These
children need to be protected from
abuse and counseled to help them posi-
tively cope with the experiences —
rather than seeking solace in a high
that momentarily liberates them from
their pain. The drug experiences of
these students are very different from
those of healthy kids who get high be-
cause they want to try a new experi-
ence or because they’ve gotten high
before and found they like it. Spend-
ing money (and valuable class time in
this era of high-stakes academic test-
ing) trying to reduce the prevalence of
substance use among the majority of
youth who are unlikely ever to develop
a substance abuse problem at the ex-
pense of the small percentage of youth
with real problems that may even be
aggravated by their substance use be-
haviors would be misguided. Alterna-
tives to universal classroom-based drug
education programs, like student as-
sistance programs that provide coun-
seling to troubled youth, may be a wiser
investment of limited public resources.
(Endnotes — page 29) R
than in critically reviewing the re-
search.”
In the Department of Education’s case,
the panel identified 33 “promising”
programs and nine “exemplary” pro-
grams for the Department of Educa-
tion. The nine exemplary programs
cited are: Athletes Training and Learn-
ing to Avoid Steroids ( ATLAS ),
CASASTART, Life Skills Training, OSLC
Treatment Foster Care, Project ALERT,
Project Northland- Alcohol Prevention
(Continued on page 11)
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 5
 $
A new study finds...
We Wasted Billions on D.A.R.E.
1

By Edward Shepard, Ph.D. Editor’s Note: Edward Shepard is an associate professor and chair of the LeMoyne
College Department of Economics. He is also a ReconsiDer member who has
been interested in economic evaluations of drug policy issues for several years.

S
ince D.A.R.E. first opened in Los
Dr. Shepard has over two decades’ experience in conducting economic studies
Angeles schools in 1983, it has grown
and received his doctoral degree in Economics from Boston College. Areas of
into a national curriculum. According
specialization are microeconomics, labor economics, cost-benefit research, and
to D.A.R.E. America and the U.S. De-
applied productivity studies. He has authored or coauthored papers that have
partment of Justice, almost 50,000 po-
appeared in Industrial Relations, Working USA, the International Journal of
lice officers have been trained for the
Manpower, the Journal of Housing Economics, and Public Finance Quarterly.
program since its inception, and are
Dr. Shepard has presented research findings at several national conferences,
teaching classes in over 10,000 commu-
including the 1999 and 2001 Drug Policy Foundation conferences. Prior work
nities and in over 300,000 classrooms
on drug testing and productivity received attention in the national press in
in all 50 states. By the late 1990s, the
articles in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Morning
program reached an estimated 80 per-
News. He also provided input into the ACLU report on drug testing in the work-
cent of school districts nationwide.2
place and was interviewed about the economics of drug testing on National
The extensive use of D.A.R.E. in the Public Radio. Dr. Shepard is married, with three children in the public school
nation’s schools points to the need for systems in Central New York. He may be reached at shepard@mail.lemoyne.edu.
an economic evaluation of the costs,
benefits, and effectiveness of the pro-
gram. Are law enforcement and edu-
of D.A.R.E., but focuses instead on esti- significant uncertainty, and a wide
cational resources being utilized effi-
mating the program’s economic costs. range of conflicting estimates, about
ciently by the program? Does it gen-
Over the past decade there have been a the costs or resources that are used to
erate benefits for the community and
number of studies that address effec- support the program. This provided the
society at large? Are alternative pro-
tiveness issues but, as mentioned ear- central motivation for the research that
grams more effective or less costly in
lier, no formal scientific study of eco- is summarized in my report —
achieving the goals of reducing illicit
nomic costs. Yet information on eco- LeMoyne College Institute of Industrial
drug use or abuse? In recent years
nomic costs should be an important Relations Research Paper Number 22,
there have been scientific evaluations
part of a comprehensive evaluation of November 2001, The Economic Costs
of the program that found that D.A.R.E.
the D.A.R.E. program. Economists hold of D.A.R.E. My goal in conducting this
has not succeeded in reducing illicit
that the economic merits of a program study was to provide reasonable esti-
drug use among young people.3 (See
can be evaluated by applying cost-ben- mates of the economic costs of the pro-
Are We Doing Enough, page 2 of this
efit and cost-effectiveness analyses. In gram. In this exclusive article for The
issue.) Since this is its major goal and
a cost-benefit analysis, the economic ReconsiDer Quarterly, I am reporting
purpose, this suggests that there may
costs and benefits of a particular pro- the estimates arrived at by this study,
be no direct benefits at all for commu-
gram are quantified to determine and reviewing the research method
nities from participation in the pro-
whether net benefits are generated and and overall findings. I hope that this
gram. There is even less information
whether society is better off with a pro- information will prove valuable to
about the costs of D.A.R.E., and no for-
gram than without it. In a cost-effec- other researchers, who might wish to
mal scientific studies of D.A.R.E. costs
tive analysis, two or more alternative evaluate D.A.R.E.’s cost-benefit or cost-
are currently available. Since D.A.R.E.
programs are evaluated to determine effectiveness issues. (The complete
is funded primarily through tax dollars,
which is most efficient — that is, which study is available at www.reconsider.
it is essential that reliable information
program achieves the program goals at org, or by contacting shepard@mail.
about both costs and benefits be ob-
lowest cost. To do either analysis, reli- lemoyne.edu.)
tained to evaluate the overall efficacy
able information on economic costs is
of the program. The study found that the estimated
needed. There is, however, no central-
annual economic costs of D.A.R.E., na-
This article does not address the ized accounting of the funds used in
tionwide, are between $1 billion and
broader concerns of the effectiveness D.A.R.E. programs, and thus there is

6 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY

$1.3 billion, or close to $200 per stu-
dent each year. This is significantly
higher than numbers that are com-
monly reported in the press.4 These
costs should be taken into account by
local communities, school districts,
and participating law enforce-
ment organizations when de-
ciding whether to adopt or
continue a local D.A.R.E. pro-
gram.
Overview of the
D.A.R.E. Program
A fact sheet prepared by
D.A.R.E. for the U.S. Depart-
ment of Justice reported that
the program expected to reach
about 8.5 million elementary
school children in the year
1999. Twenty-five million ad-
ditional children were ex-
pected to benefit from a range
of D.A.R.E. activities, including
visits to other grades, after-
school activities, and parent
programs. D.A.R.E. America
currently reports that within
the United States more than 26
million children will benefit
from the programs, with ap-
proximately one quarter (or
6.5 million) participating in
the core elementary school
program.5
Exaggerated Estimates
These estimates appear to be exagger-
ated, however. Information about the
school-age population provided by the
U.S. Department of Education and the
U.S. Census suggests that 4 million is
probably a more reasonable estimate
of the number of children in the core
program within the United States.6
D.A.R.E. America is a nonprofit tax-ex-
empt organization that controls the
training and curriculum for law en-
forcement officers to provide education
in the schools about illicit drugs. It
also markets and provides support and
technical assistance for the program,
licenses merchandise vendors, and
conducts assessment and research.
D.A.R.E. America reports that each year
approximately 3,000 police officers are
trained to administer the program.
Their four regional training centers are
funded by an annual $1.7 million U.S.
Department of Justice grant. In addi-
tion, 46 states have their own training
centers that have received funding
from different sources.7
The 17-week course for elementary
(5th or 6th grade) school students uses
trained law enforcement officers to
teach D.A.R.E. lessons in the classroom.
Middle and high school courses have
been introduced in many communities
to reinforce the core messages first
taught in the 5th or 6th grades. To
teach in the core program, an officer
must attend a two-week training pro-
gram at a state or regional training cen-
ter. To participate in the middle school
(10-week) or high school (9-week) pro-
gram, officers must have additional
training provided through three- to
four-day training courses.
D.A.R.E. officers also visit grades K–4
to introduce the program to young
children and warn them about strang-
ers and illegal drugs, and par-
ticipate in other events, includ-
ing after-school programs, par-
ent programs, fund-raising
dinners and dances, events
with recreation or entertain-
ment, presentations, and pic-
nics.
Multiple Funding Source
Funding for local programs
comes from many sources, in-
cluding the federal govern-
ment, state and local govern-
ments, individual school dis-
tricts, local and state police de-
partments, corporate dona-
tions, asset seizures, and vari-
ous fund-raising events.8 Ac-
cording to the Office of Na-
tional Drug Control Policy
(ONDCP), $41 million in fed-
eral support was provided to
the program in a recent year.9
In addition, the U.S. Depart-
ment of Justice has provided
law enforcement assistance
grants.10 These can be used to
provide resources needed by lo-
cal law enforcement agencies
to support the D.A.R.E. program.
Officials in the U.S. Department of Edu-
cation, who administer over $500 mil-
lion of Safe Schools federal grant
money to state education and gover-
nors’ offices, do not know and do not
keep records of how much goes to sup-
port the D.A.R.E. program.11 A 1992
survey of local D.A.R.E. administrators
indicated that almost 50 percent of
them obtained some funding from the
Department of Education.12 However,
state and local government officials
may now be reluctant to use Safe
Schools grants to support D.A.R.E.,
partly because it is not among the pro-
grams demonstrated to be effective,
based on the Department’s “Principles
of Effectiveness.”13
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 7 R
Local D.A.R.E. administrators some-
times rely on corporate donations and
fund raising events to help cover costs
or to pay for promotional merchandise,
such as the D.A.R.E. automobile, and
the bumper stickers, T-shirts, caps,
jackets, and bags available from li-
censed vendors. Some police depart-
ments consider D.A.R.E. to be an im-
portant part of community policing or
community relations, and this leads
them to contribute officer services for
the program. A
1997 report by the
Research Triangle
Institute, which
Estimated annual costs range
surveyed local dis-
tricts during the
between $1 billion and $1.3 billion and
early to mid 1990s,
found that “for
are significantly greater than
most districts in
the study . . .
what is reported in the press...
D.A.R.E. programs
were supported wholly or in part by the
local or state enforcement agencies.”14
There have been a series of negative
evaluations of the program, and re-
cently, Oakland, California; Seattle,
Washington; Salt Lake City, Utah; and
Rochester, New York, have dropped
it. 15 However, D.A.R.E. remains ex-
tremely popular, and any shortfall in
state or federal funding is made up
from other sources, including local
police departments, local school dis-
tricts, and city, town, and county bud-
gets. In some communities, officers
have used their own vehicles to pro-
vide transportation for the program; in
other communities, seized vehicles
have been reconditioned to become of-
ficers’ D.A.R.E. cars. Once adopted, the
program — because of its popularity
with parents, students, and local law
enforcement agencies — is often diffi-
cult to drop.
At What Cost?
Prior estimates of the costs of D.A.R.E.,
provided by investigative journalists for
the popular press, have varied widely,
ranging from about $200 million to
close to $1 billion annually.16 D.A.R.E.
8 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
America estimates the annual costs of
the officer services to be about $215
million.17 There is uncertainty about
the real costs because there is no cen-
tralized accounting of the funds, expen-
ditures, and resources used to support
the program. The decision to use
D.A.R.E. is made by local school dis-
tricts, and the needed resources are
provided for by local city or town bud-
gets, local school districts, or local po-
lice departments. These offices, in turn,
have access to state or federal support
through a variety of programs.
Research on the economic costs should
be an important part of a comprehen-
sive evaluation of the program. Mea-
surement of the economic costs of a
program requires an evaluation of the
value of resources that are devoted to
it instead of the “next best” alternative
uses (the opportunity cost principle).
Thus, actual expenditures and account-
ing costs of a program normally com-
prise a part but not all of the economic
costs. For the purpose of estimating
economic costs, it does not matter
whether compensation is provided for
a resource or whether there were do-
nated services or contributions. In eco-
nomics there is never a free lunch, and
resources being used for one purpose
cannot then be used for another. For
example, when a local police depart-
ment offers the services of an officer
to D.A.R.E., or when a local school pro-
vides class time for D.A.R.E. programs,
that officer cannot be out on patrol, and
that classroom cannot be used for art,
music, or other educational purposes.
The economic costs of D.A.R.E. can be
grouped into five general categories:
• D.A.R.E. uses trained law enforcement
officers to teach the program in the
schools, and so the costs of officer ser-
vices are part of the economic costs.
The costs of officer services include the
wages and salaries and benefits (such
as insurance, retirement, vacations,
health coverage, etc.) as well as the
costs of equipment, transportation, ad-
ministration, and supervision.
• There are costs of training the offic-
ers in the four regional and 46 state
training centers,
which include
the costs of the
trainers, materi-
als and equip-
ment, rental of
training areas,
and the salaries
and hotel and
living expenses
of the officers
during the training program.
• General and administrative costs as-
sociated with program development,
refinement, coordination, research and
assessment, and supervision must also
be counted. The program is controlled
by D.A.R.E. America, which markets the
program, licenses the D.A.R.E. vendors,
modifies or refines the curriculum over
time, coordinates the training of offic-
ers, conducts research and assess-
ments, and provides technical assis-
tance and instructional materials to
communities. The resources used by
D.A.R.E. America in performing these
functions are part of the economic
costs. The administration and coordi-
nation of the program also involves state
agencies, and most states have one or
more coordinators as well as a D.A.R.E.
training center. These costs must also
be included.
• There are costs of materials and sup-
plies — D.A.R.E. workbooks and items
such as T-shirts, caps, pencils, bumper
stickers, and other items that may be
provided to students in the program.
• Finally, there are costs of the educa-
tional resources the program uses. Les-
sons are taught in schools with the
classroom teacher normally present,
taking valuable time away from teach-
ing academic topics. Determining the
average cost of a school year provides
a way to estimate this cost.
To estimate all the economic costs, it
is necessary to have reliable estimates
of the number of participating officers
and school children nationwide, the
number of school classroom hours de-
voted to D.A.R.E. activities, and the
costs per student of materials, supplies,
and merchandise provided. Since there
is no formal or centralized accounting
of D.A.R.E. activities, in conducting our
study we estimated costs using infor-
mation from a number of sources, in-
cluding the U.S. Departments of Edu-
cation and Justice, the Bureau of La-
bor Statistics, state D.A.R.E. offices
(New York and Maryland), and D.A.R.E.
America. A complete description of the
basis for the estimates used here is con-
tained in the LeMoyne College report.18
As shown in the report, the total num-
ber of children enrolled in the elemen-
tary program is estimated to be close
to 4 million. An estimated 3.3 to 3.9
million classroom hours and 72 mil-
lion student hours are devoted to the
core program. One to two million ad-
ditional children are esti-
mated to be in the middle
or high school programs.
The number of full-time
...students and the community
received no measurable
equivalent D.A.R.E. officers
nationwide is estimated to
be between 7,838 and 9,264.
This information was used
benefit from participation in
to estimate the annual eco-
nomic costs of D.A.R.E. na-
tionwide.
National Estimates of the
Economic Costs of D.A.R.E.:
A Summary of Findings
Cost of officer services: According to
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data,
the average wages and salaries of full-
time patrol officers nationwide is ap-
proaching $40,000 per year.19 Benefits
for insurance, retirement, health cov-
erage, and so forth, are usually about
30 percent of total compensation, or
$17,143. Estimated total compensation
is therefore $57,143.20 General and ad-
ministrative expenses, including super-
visory, overhead, and equipment and
transportation costs, are likely to add
at least 20 percent to total compensa-
tion, or $11,429. Thus, the full cost of
a D.A.R.E. officer is $68,572 per year.
Multiplying this value by the estimated
number of full-time equivalent offic-
ers nationwide yields an estimated
value of officer services between 537
million and 635 million dollars per
year. This number is more than double
the value estimated by D.A.R.E.
America.
When the annual cost of officers is di-
vided by the estimated number of stu-
dents served in the elementary, middle,
and high school programs, the esti-
mated costs range between $90 and
$127 per student. This is consistent
with reports from communities around
the country, but accounts for only
about half of the economic costs asso-
ciated with the D.A.R.E. program.
Officer training costs: Officers teach-
ing in the core program must gradu-
ate from a two-week training course at
the program....
a regional or state training center. The
U.S. Department of Justice provides
$1.7 million each year to D.A.R.E.
America, which uses the funds for
training at four regional training cen-
ters located throughout the country.
In addition, 46 states have established
their own training centers. The esti-
mated cost of training a D.A.R.E. officer
is about $4,000.21 In many cases the
training is paid for, at least in part, by
federal or state funds. With an esti-
mated 3,000 officers trained during
each of the last few years, training costs
are estimated to be about $12 million
annually.22 Because this is a compara-
tively minor amount, an error in this
estimate will not significantly influ-
ence total estimated costs.
General and administrative costs:
D.A.R.E. America has a staff of about two
dozen professionals who are respon-
sible for designing, implementing,
overseeing, licensing, and marketing
the program. D.A.R.E. America is a
nonprofit, tax-exempt organization
that is supported primarily by corpo-
rate donations, contributions, royalties
from the sales of D.A.R.E. merchandise,
and a small amount of federal funds.
The overall operating budget for
D.A.R.E. America provides a good basis
for estimating its costs. According to
D.A.R.E. America, the overall budget is
about $9 million.23 During a recent tax
year (1998), D.A.R.E. America reported
an annual income of about $11.5 mil-
lion.24
Some of the funds or grants for re-
search and training that are received
are awarded to subcontractors or to the
regional training centers to support of-
ficer training. A number of
research and evaluation
studies have been funded by
states, the U.S. government,
or private foundations. Last
year, for example, a grant
for $13.7 million from the
Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation was awarded to
the University of Akron for
a five-year study to evaluate
and redesign the D.A.R.E. curriculum.25
The costs of research, evaluation, as-
sessment, and redesign of the curricu-
lum should be included as part of the
economic costs of the program. A cost
of about $3 million per year appears
reasonable and is a very small part of
the overall cost of the program.
Most states have offices with state em-
ployees or law enforcement officers
who serve as D.A.R.E. coordinators.
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 9
These offices typically serve as inter-
mediaries between local school dis-
tricts or local law enforcement agen-
cies and D.A.R.E. America. Functions
include overseeing or coordinating the
state training centers and collecting
data from local school districts or po-
lice departments participating in the
program. A report by the Research Tri-
angle Institute in 1992 indicated that
states spend close to $300,000, on av-
erage, on these activities. With 50
states, this yields an estimated national
cost of about $15 million.26
Adding up the costs of
D.A.R.E. America, re- ... this suggests that the
search and evaluation,
and coordination of the
D.A.R.E. program by
program has been costly,
states, the economic cost
for this part of the
ineffective, and possibly
D.A.R.E. program is esti-
mated to be about $27
counter-productive...
million. This amount is
likely to vary from year to year, but it
should remain a very small part of the
total economic cost.
D.A.R.E. materials and supplies: The
cost includes the workbooks and mer-
chandise typically provided to D.A.R.E.
students. The workbooks and course
materials are a small part of the cost
(less than $1 per student), but other
items are more expensive. Pencils,
caps, shirts, jackets, bags, bumper
stickers are available at prices ranging
from pennies to $40 or more. The
amount spent per child varies signifi-
cantly, depending on the community
and the funds available to support the
program. Only a minimal expense for
instructional materials is needed to
conduct a D.A.R.E. class, and a few com-
munities, including New York City,
provide little else.27 Expenditures on
D.A.R.E. merchandise are not reported,
and licensed D.A.R.E. vendors consider
the information confidential.28 How-
ever, during a recent tax year (1998),
D.A.R.E. America reportedly earned
over $2,500,000 in license royalties.29
10 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
Information on expenditures came
from D.A.R.E. officers and newspaper
reports from around the country. In a
rural county in New York State, a local
D.A.R.E. officer estimated that the
county had spent approximately $5–$7
per student enrolled in the core course
over the past few years. Other sources
indicated that there is variation in
spending depending on available fund-
ing, with some communities spending
more and some less.30 Based on this
information, $5–$10 in materials costs
per student appears to be a reasonable
estimate. With an estimated 4 million
students in the elementary school pro-
gram, and 1–2 million additional stu-
dents in the middle and high school
programs, the total cost is estimated
to be between $25 and $60 million an-
nually.
Value of educational resources used for
the program: One cost that is usually
not included in newspaper reports is
the economic cost of the educational
resources used by the program. There
is no accounting information for this
cost because there are no formal ex-
penditures for classroom time when
school is in session. Nevertheless, the
cost should be accounted for because
classroom time devoted to D.A.R.E.
could have been (but is not) allocated
for other educational activities. Edu-
cation costs are now approaching
$7,000 per student annually; this
amount includes the costs of school
buildings and grounds, maintenance
and utilities, teaching and administra-
tion, equipment and supplies, transpor-
tation, and after-school activities.31
Because students are in school, on av-
erage, for 6–7 hours a day (including
transportation and after-school activi-
ties) for about 180 days a year, they can
be expected (barring illness and absen-
teeism) to spend on average of between
1,080 and 1,260 hours a year involved
with school activities. Dividing the es-
timated annual cost per student
($7,000) by the range of hours spent
yearly in the classroom yields an esti-
mate of the cost per student per hour
of between $5.56 and $6.48. With a
national average class size of 24 stu-
dents, this means that a classroom
hour has implicit costs of between $133
and $156 per hour.32 A D.A.R.E. class
that used 18 hours would
“cost” between $2,394 and
$2,808 in estimated value of
educational resources.33 With
an estimated 3.3 to 3.9 million
hours in the classroom used
annually for the program na-
tionally, this means that the
estimated economic costs of
educational resources for the
program are between $438.9 million
and $608.4 million.
Cost Summary
The cost estimates of this study are
summarized and totaled in the sidebar
(see page 11). Estimated annual eco-
nomic costs range between $1 billion
and $1.3 billion per year and are sig-
nificantly greater than what is com-
monly reported in the press using in-
formation provided by D.A.R.E. The
value of officer services and the costs
of educational resources used by the
program account for the bulk of these
costs and therefore deserve greater
scrutiny. If the programs are as wide-
spread as claimed by D.A.R.E. America,
these estimates could be biased down-
ward. With an estimated five to six mil-
lion students enrolled in D.A.R.E.
courses, the economic costs of the pro-
gram are estimated to be $173 to $268
per student annually.
Scientific research of the program pro-
vides information needed to assess its
benefits. Many evaluations, however,
show a neutral or negative effect of the
D.A.R.E. program. (As a result, D.A.R.E.
is no longer included on the list of ap-
proved programs, based on the “prin-
ciples of effectiveness” by the U.S. De-
partment of Education.) The evalua-
tions that have been done suggest that
the students and the community are
receiving no measurable benefit from
participation in the program. From an
economic perspective, this suggests
that the program should be discontin-
ued because it is costly, ineffective, and
possibly counterproductive.
However, even if D.A.R.E. generated
benefits of the magnitude needed to
justify the costs of its program, it is still
important to compare its cost-effective-
ness with that of other programs. A
number of alternative programs have
been developed that appear promising
based on the findings of preliminary
Buyer Beware! (Continued from page 5)
Curriculum, Project T.N.T.-Towards No
Tobacco Use, Second Step: A Violence
Prevention Curriculum, and Strength-
ening Families Program: For Parents
and Youth 10-14. In the case of Life
Skills Training, the program developer,
Gilbert Botvin, also served on the panel
of experts.
• In selecting programs, schools
should also beware of the term, “best
practice.” “There are numerous lists of
‘evidence-based practices’ and ‘best
practices’ in drug prevention,” says
Michael Roona, executive director of
Social Capital Development Corpora-
tion. The problem is, programs that le-
gitimately land on one list may find
their way onto lists where they don’t
belong. For instance, the success of
Botvin’s Life Skills Training (LST) pro-
gram in smoking prevention landed it
in the National Institute of Drug
Abuse’s 1997 guide, Preventing Drug
Use Among Children and Adolescents:
A Research-Based Guide. But LST also
found its way onto the “Blueprints for
Violence Prevention” list of recom-
mended programs, even though its ef-
research. In choosing among alterna- ing the allocation of resources used for
tive programs, the most cost-effective drug education. (Endnotes — pages 29
program — that which provides the and back cover.) R
greatest benefit per dollar cost —
should provide the basis for determin-
Preliminary Estimates of the
Economic Costs of the D.A.R.E. Program
1. Officer services $537 to $635 million
2. Officer training $12 million
3. General and administrative $27 million
4. Materials and supplies $25 to $60 million
5.Value of educational resources used $439 to $608 million
6. Totals: National estimates of D.A.R.E. costs $1.04 to $1.34 billion
7. Estimated economic cost per student each year $173 to $268
fects on adolescent violence had not for Disease Control and Prevention,
been evaluated. This occurred because Office of Juvenile Justice and Delin-
the Blueprints for Violence Prevention quency Prevention, Center for Mental
were based broadly on preventing de- Health Services, National Institute of
linquency, which included cigarette Mental Health, and the U.S. Depart-
smoking, not on preventing violence. ment of Education — to decide how to
So LST came to be known as an “evi- use current drug prevention research
dence-based” violence prevention pro- to build the best programs.
gram, even though there was no evi-
What did they conclude? “That we don’t
dence that it prevented violence.
know enough about what works to even
Whether or not it reduces violence
begin talking about moving effective
doesn’t matter. It’s still considered an
programs into practice,” says Roona,
evidence-based best practice.
who was a summit participant. “The
To date, there has been only one major research is too thin to do that.”
nongovernmental effort to identify ef-
So what is a school district, commu-
fective top prevention practices – the
nity, or family to do? One factor that
“Prevention 2000: Moving Effective
does seem to be consistent is that
Programs into Practice” summit, or-
youths do best when they’re kept busy
ganized by The Robert Wood Johnson
pursuing long-term goals that also re-
Foundation, the largest nongovern-
sult in personal development. Old-fash-
mental funder in the substance abuse
ioned after-school sports, arts, aca-
arena. This summit (and follow-up
demic, and community programs — as
conference calls and meetings)
well as involved, nurturing parents —
brought two dozen of the nation’s top
may be the best way to divert kids from
prevention researchers together with
temptations like drugs. R
the heads of all the federal agencies that
fund prevention programs — Center
for Substance Abuse Prevention, Na-
tional Institute on Drug Abuse, Center
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 11
Mayor Rocky Anderson
Talks About What It’s Like to…
Drop the D.A.R.E. Program
An Interview with the Mayor
by Alexandra Eyle
Q: Why did you decide to cut D.A.R.E.
from your schools?
A: I had written a column for a local
newspaper about this issue, about two
years before I was elected. After I be-
came mayor, I updated my research. I
studied the literature and found that
there were numerous peer-reviewed
research articles establishing that
D.A.R.E. had no effect on long-term
drug use.
Q: As a citizen, and as a mayor, as some-
one who was investing tax money in
D.A.R.E., how did that make you feel?
A: I was – and still am – convinced that
the American people had been badly
betrayed. D.A.R.E. had created, through
its public relations efforts, including t-
shirts and bumper stickers and such,
the sense, among the public, that we
were really doing something by utiliz-
ing D.A.R.E. in our public schools to
reduce long-term drug use in our pub-
lic schools. The net result has been lost
and ruined lives, many of which could
have been saved through the utiliza-
tion of effective drug prevention pro-
grams. I’m not simply against D.A.R.E.;
I’m for effective programs.
Q: Which programs are you thinking
of, when you speak of effective pro-
grams? As far as I know, none have
been objectively peer reviewed by in-
dependent researchers, and although
the Department of Education recently
12 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
Editor’s Note: Salt Lake City, Utah, Mayor Ross C. “Rocky” Anderson took of-
fice on January 3, 2000, after spending 21 years as an attorney specializing in
civil litigation. One of his first acts as mayor was to cut the city’s D.A.R.E. pro-
grams and to urge the schools to use more effective drug education/prevention
programs. He also established other programs for youths, including after-school
and arts programs. In this exclusive interview with ReconsiDer Quarterly edi-
tor Alexandra Eyle, Anderson talks about what it was like to end D.A.R.E. and
the challenges that lie ahead. Mayor Anderson may be reached through his
assistant, Christy Cordwell, at 801-535-7743 or at christy.cordwell@ci.slc.ut.us.
reviewed 132 programs, reviewers in- esting that, now that even D.A.R.E. of-
cluded program developers, and not ficials themselves admit that the pro-
statisticians. gram has not been effective, and when
the Surgeon General and the Depart-
A: The problem has been that the pub-
ment of Education have rendered the
lished research has been by the people
same sorts of findings, people still
who have created the programs. Life
proudly drive their cars around with
Skills Training, for instance, appears to
D.A.R.E. bumper stickers on them.
be an outstanding program, but, un-
fortunately, almost all of the research We have a big Pioneer Days parade here
has been done by Gilbert Botvin, the every July 24th, and the first year I was
director of Life Skills. I understand that in that parade there were pockets of
there are two independent evaluations people along the parade route wearing
being conducted now on Life Skills D.A.R.E. t-shirts and the mothers were
Training and I hope that the outcomes chanting, “We want D.A.R.E.” I’d also
in those research projects will be as go to community meetings and, when
positive as Dr. Botvin’s have been. challenged about canceling D.A.R.E., I
would lay out the research and show
Q: You ended all the D.A.R.E. programs
them the unequivocal findings that
in 2000?
showed the ineffectiveness of the pro-
A: Yes. gram. There were times when people
would look at me in astonishment and
Q: How did you go about communicat-
shake their heads and say, “I don’t be-
ing the failures of D.A.R.E. and your vi-
lieve it!”
sion for the future. Were your constitu-
ents resistant at first? Q: The old, “Don’t confuse me with the
facts!” response!
A: Yes. And they are still resistant. It’s
virtually impossible, no matter how A: Exactly. And my response was, “This
many times you speak out on this is- isn’t religion. This happens to be sci-
sue, regardless of how much the me- ence. Unless you can show something
dia treats the issue, to overcome the that demonstrates that D.A.R.E.’s effec-
huge public relations campaign con- tive, how can you say that we’re really
ducted by D.A.R.E. I find it really inter- pursuing drug prevention when we’re
actually filling up these time slots and
using our resources on something
that’s proven to be ineffective?” But
there’s a huge emotional component
to this, and D.A.R.E. knows it. That’s
why they have all their t-shirts and
their feel-good approach.
You know, when you talk about how
ineffective D.A.R.E. is as a drug pro-
gram, D.A.R.E. advocates fall back on
the argument, “Well, isn’t it great to
have the police build up a relationship
with the students?” I agree with that. I
think having officers in the schools is
a very good thing. But that begs the
question: “What about drug preven-
tion?” That’s why D.A.R.E. was there in
the first place.
Q: As mayor, you don’t control the
schools, so it’s up to the elected school
board to put new programs into place.
What program or programs is it install-
ing in the schools?
A: They have put in the ATLAS program,
for male high school athletes. And
there’s an experimental program called
Athena for female high school athletes.
Besides these programs, they have a
sort of homegrown program, called
Prevention Dimension, but it hasn’t
been evaluated. I’ve been urging the
school board and the superintendent
to put in place a comprehensive grade
5 through 12 drug prevention program
that’s research-based and effective.
Q: Do you have one in particular in
mind?
A: The two that I’ve recommended are
the STAR and Life Skills programs.
Q: And do you think they’d adopt them?
A: I don’t know. It’s astounding to me
that everybody gets so riled up about
drug use, but the school board does not
seem all that concerned about putting
into place programs that seem to re-
ally work.
Q: Why do you think that is?
A: You know, I read a book years ago
by Mathea Falco called A Drug-Free
America, and she pointed out that one
of the reasons for D.A.R.E.’s popularity
may be the fact that school adminis-
trators and faculty can simply wash
their hands of the program and turn it
over to the police. They don’t have to
be accountable, and they don’t have to
do anything to confront the need for
drug prevention.
Q: If you were to give advice to a mayor
wanting to do what you’ve done, what
advice would you give?
A: First, become familiar with all of the
research in the area. Two, learn to com-
municate very clearly the rationale for
terminating the D.A.R.E. program. I did
not do this well, but you need to em-
phasize the positives – that what you
want to do is put in place programs that
work. You want to get away from the
message that it’s a termination of
D.A.R.E.
D.A.R.E. has built up their infrastruc-
ture through a huge fraud on the
American people. Now, they’ve com-
pletely lost credibility, but instead of
letting them use 37,000 more of our
school kids as their guinea pigs as they
revamp their program, we ought to be
replacing them with programs that
have integrity and are effective.
And we need to have a goal of not just
keeping kids off drugs entirely but also
reducing the harm to those kids who
do try drugs. And that’s something that
just drives a lot of people nuts – to even
admit that some kids will do drugs no
matter what programs are offered to
them. But I think a harm-reduction
approach is far more honest and is go-
ing to be far more effective in saving
lives and in promoting the interests of
everybody, including taxpayers.
Q: What has been the response of other
mayors to you?
A: I spoke to a group of municipal lead-
ers where one mayor told me that when
he raised the issue with his city coun-
cil as to the advisability of evaluating
the effectiveness of D.A.R.E., there was
such a public outcry that he had no
option but to back down. Some may-
ors, after the evidence came out as to
how ineffective D.A.R.E. has been, still
stand by their programs. That’s truly
cowardly politics. Anybody who takes
a look at the literature will understand
that by utilizing D.A.R.E. we’re depriv-
ing kids of effective drug prevention.
Q: At quite a cost.
A: At a huge cost. Both in lives, and
monetarily. In Salt Lake City, we were
spending $289,000 annually on the of-
ficers’ salaries, vehicles, and equip-
ment. There have been estimates that
over $700 million a year nationwide has
been spent on D.A.R.E. (See We Wasted
Billions on D.A.R.E., page 6.)
Q: This has been a hot issue for you,
and you will no doubt take some bash-
ing in the next election for taking this
on. Are you glad you did it anyway?
A: I am always glad to do the right
thing. R
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 13
On Reinventing Drug Education,
Especially for Adolescents
Rodney Skager, Ph.D.
T
here is no doubt about it. Fed-
eral drug education programs have
failed. The government is spending
between 1 and 1.3 billion a year try-
ing, through its D.A.R.E. program, to
get kids to stop using drugs.1 The data
regularly show that students continue
to use drugs despite abstinence-based,
zero-tolerance drug education pro-
grams.
Last year an annual national survey,
Monitoring the Future, reported that
54 percent of American 12th-graders
had tried an illicit drug at least once in
their lifetime.2 Forty-nine percent had
tried marijuana. The true rates of use
are probably higher, however. Even on
anonymous surveys, self-reported use
is likely to be somewhat lower than
true rates of use, because not all re-
spondents will be willing to report il-
legal behavior even under conditions
of apparent anonymity.
When teens are asked to estimate the
percentage of schoolmates of their own
age who have tried marijuana, the
numbers are much higher than the
percentages obtained from self-report
surveys. In the latest California survey
72 percent of 11th-graders believed
that half or more of their peers had
tried marijuana, while only 46 percent
said they ever used it. Forty-four per-
cent believed half or more used
monthly, but only 26 percent said they
used it in the previous month!3
Some researchers dismiss youth esti-
mates of peer drug use, arguing that
they exaggerate actual prevalence lev-
els. In so doing, these researchers miss
the point entirely. Estimated peer use
reflects youth perception of how things
14 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
Editor’s Note: Rodney Skager is Professor Emeritus in the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA. He served for 10 years as pro-
gram director at the School’s Center for the Study of Evaluation and while on
academic leave served as senior researcher at the UNESCO Institute of Educa-
tion in Hamburg, Germany (1975-76). He has been a consultant or part-time
staff member at WestEd (formerly Southwest Regional Educational Labora-
tory) since 1992.
In 1985 he was asked by California Attorney General John Van de Kamp to
develop and administer a secondary school survey of substance use and related
information (California Student Substance Use Survey). The survey was later
mandated as a biennial effort by the California legislature and now is also spon-
sored by the California Department of Education and Alcohol and Drug Pro-
grams. WestEd, a nonprofit California educational R&D organization, has ad-
ministered the survey since 1991 and Dr. Skager has continued as its co-
director. In addition, he served as outside evaluator for the Addiction Technol-
ogy Transfer Center at UC San Diego on a long-term project sponsored by the
Center for Substance Abuse Treatment and also as Principal Investigator for a
national project sponsored by the Center for Substance Use Prevention. The
latter incorporated developmental programs addressing children and parents
in substance abusing families and adolescent mothers.
Dr. Skager has published research articles and reports on school-based identi-
fication and intervention programs for children from alcohol and drug abusing
families, self-esteem and substance use, school characteristics associated with
student substance use, attributes of high-risk adolescent substance users, and
prevention policy. He is a contributing editor of Prevention File and a member
of the board of directors of the Phoenix Houses of California as well as a former
member of the research advisory board of “Just Say No” International. He has
taught measurement, research design and qualitative research methods at the
graduate level. His current teaching responsibilities include adolescent devel-
opment and prevention education. Rodney Skager may be reached at 831-484-
2767 or at rskager@redshift.com.
really are, and it is perception that es- cated people now feel that it’s not re-
tablishes what is ordinary or normal. ally a serious drug. It’s funny, it’s ac-
Believing that a majority of one’s peers cepted, we know most people have tried
have tried marijuana tends to legitima- it at some point, so it’s not a bad drug.”
tize use of that drug, but this does not (This and later comments from young
necessarily apply to other illicit drugs people in their late teens or early 20s
or to problematic use. As a third year were collected by peer interviewers as
university student observed, “We ac- part of an ongoing study of youth atti-
cept pot way more than other drugs. I tudes about, and experience with,
mean, you watch TV and there are jokes drugs.)
about pot. Everybody’s laughing. If they
Most teenagers know things about
talk about shooting up heroin,
drugs than they were never told in pre-
nobody’s really laughing…most edu-
vention education. Consider what one
female college student said recently
about her initiation into the use of
marijuana at age 15.
“In high school drugs were around and
my friends and I knew where to get
Alicia Montero, Rod Skager, and Claudio
Montero, a former doctoral student of
Skager’s, enjoy a reunion at San Francisco
them. People accepted it as a part of
high school life. When I was in 10th
grade, my friends and I were hanging
out after school. We decided that we
wanted to smoke some pot, so we
walked around the quad and asked the
people that knew about drugs where
we could get some. We went to the
honor roll students who sold drugs. We
didn’t trust the stoners because they
probably laced their drugs. We bought
… and smoked it that day. That was
the first time that I tried drugs.”
The story provides a concrete example
of just how easy it is for high school
students in California to obtain mari-
juana. It also reveals that without guid-
ance from adults even relatively young
teens can learn to be intelligent con-
sumers. In deciding to buy their drugs
from the honor students, they were
applying, at age 15, an important prin-
ciple of harm reduction—get your dope
from a safe source.
The fact is, substance use has become
normalized among mainstream Ameri-
can adolescents. Normalization means
that drugs are an accepted part of the
culture in which most American ado-
lescents live. It means that users as well
as many nonusers accept experience
with drugs as normal. It means that a
substantial majority of older teens be-
lieve that most of their same age peers
have tried marijuana and that student
leaders and other social icons have
tried it and that many or most cur-
rently use it. Substance use is firmly
embedded in the teen social scene, part
of the shared experience of both users
and nonusers.
If drugs are part of the normal teen ex-
perience in a country where billions of
tax dollars have been poured into pre-
venting drug use, what happened?
Where did we go wrong?
Indoctrination Does Not
Work in an Open Society
By definition, education must be hon-
est. But in embracing zero-tolerance
drug prevention education, teachers
must exaggerate dangers. They must
present only one side of the story. They
must indoctrinate, in other words.
But indoctrination “works” only when
students do not have access to contra-
dictory information. Unfortunately, on
entering secondary school most teens
soon learn that many older students
enjoy drinking and using without suf-
fering significant negative conse-
quences or progressing to problematic
use. As a result, many students think
that their teachers, by espousing the
now discredited “gateway theory” and
ignoring the fact that many people en-
joy moderate use of alcohol, marijuana,
and ecstasy without ill effects, may also
have exaggerated the dangers of using
cocaine or heroin.4 And once young
people realize that they have been
conned by drug education, they often
dismiss the entire message, including
the valid dangers that they were warned
about.
Three False Assumptions
Undermine Current Drug
Education Programs
Zero-tolerance drug education pro-
grams also fail miserably because they
are shaped by three erroneous assump-
tions about youth development and
socialization: teens use drugs because
they are naïve; teens use drugs because
they feel bad about themselves; and
peer pressure forces teens to use drugs.
Assumption #1: Young people try drugs
because they are naïve. How can this
be in a teen social environment replete
with all kinds of information about
drugs and their effects? Like the 10th-
graders buying marijuana, most teens
learn a great deal about drugs by mid-
adolescence or even earlier.
Another aspect of this assumption is
the widely prevailing view among
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 15
adults that even after puberty adoles-
cents remain in a biologically distinct
stage of development. It is this belief
that allows so-called experts to concoct
irrelevant or even patronizing forms of
prevention education that alienate and
insult so many young people.
Human development specialists have
long been aware that early in adoles-
cence most youth develop the capacity
to reason like adults. What Piaget la-
beled as “formal reasoning” empowers
them to think hypothetically and thus
to question the world as it is. To edu-
cators and parents, this means that
what adults say is
no longer taken
for granted, espe-
...teachers must exaggerate
cially when con- dangers...but indoctrination works only
trary informa-
tion and opin- when students do not have access to con-
ions are avail- tradictory information....if prevention is to
able. This is why
attempts to “in- work, teaching must be honest.
oculate” elemen-
tary school chil-
dren against later experimentation
with substances have flopped so re-
soundingly once those children be-
come adolescents.
David Moshman concludes in his re-
cent textbook that adolescence is best
understood as the first stage of adult-
hood. He presents evidence that the
crucial difference between adolescents
and adults is in accumulated life expe-
rience rather than biological develop-
ment.5 This is consistent with the long-
known fact that by age 16 youth do as
well on tests of intelligence as they ever
will. Adolescent and adult populations
also overlap on critical indicators of
personal maturity. Significant num-
bers of adolescents are better at antici-
pating consequences of their behavior,
controlling impulses, and interper-
sonal skills than some adults who never
achieve these hallmarks of maturity.
Understanding and building on these
teen capabilities is crucial to creating
successful drug education programs.
16 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
Assumption #2: Adolescents use ille-
gal drugs to erase negative feelings
about themselves. All deficit hypoth-
eses assume that most adolescents are
deficient in some way and drink or use
to feel better about themselves. Early
programs targeted self-esteem, but re-
search failed to support either their
efficacy or the assumption itself.6 Life
skills education, the best-known cur-
rent deficit program, targets deficits in
self-efficacy. Yet this approach has been
found to be itself deficient in produc-
ing results.7 Common sense also sug-
gests otherwise. Many high school stu-
dent leaders — the most successful stu-
dents in the high school social world
— use alcohol and marijuana. In fact,
these social leaders belong to an elite
social group to which many ordinary
students aspire to belong. It is espe-
cially unlikely that these popular stu-
dents lack social skills or that the icons
of high school athletics feel ignored
and dismissed.
Stories about alcohol and other drug
use by student leaders are common in
the interviews. A graduating senior
woman recalled, “The president, vice-
president, treasurer and athletes used
marijuana. Most consumption of illicit
drugs was done at parties. The teach-
ers and administrators knew the iden-
tities of the drug users, but they
seemed to look the other way.”
Assumption #3: Kids use drugs because
their peers pressure them to do so.
Training in so-called “refusal skills” has
been the antidote to this assumed fact.
But research in both the U.S. and Brit-
ain supports the alternative explana-
tion that kids simply like to imitate
spontaneously what they believe their
peers are doing.8 Given the normaliza-
tion of substance use, it would be more
accurate to say that students begin us-
ing drugs because they are modeling
behaviors that they perceive to be nor-
mal or “cool.”
Nevertheless, the peer pressure hy-
pothesis has particular appeal for many
adults. After all, it makes adolescents
themselves responsible for the problem
and ignores the contributions of an
adult society that adores drugs,
whether illegal, pharmaceutical, or
derived from a process of fermentation.
Yet, insightful observers such as
Patricia Hersch in
her book A Tribe
Apart have noted
an atmosphere of
mutual tolerance,
a do-your-own-
thing ethic of per-
sonal relationships
among adolescents
today.9 As a college
student who had
abstained from drug use reported, “My
friends offered marijuana because of
courtesy…because they felt obligated
since we were friends. However, they
never teased me for not smoking.” An-
other said, “Among my friends some
people choose not to use (marijuana)
and others do it. And nobody thinks less
of any other person.” These kinds of ob-
servations were made frequently in the
interviews.
Members of all groups actively contrast
themselves with members of other
groups. This process of defining just
how one’s group is distinctive helps
fashion important facets of personal
identity, especially beliefs and associ-
ated behavior. For many young people,
to drink or use is to participate in a
ritual that affirms group identity. It is
often a way of saying, “We are different
from adults. We do things that they
forbid us to do.” Unfortunately, the
ways in which we go about prevention
play directly into this process; by for-
bidding use, we inadvertently encour-
age it.
Zero-Tolerance Deterrent
Punishment Fails, Too
When our zero-tolerance prevention
education programs fail, we punish
drug users by suspending or expelling
them from school — standard practice
among schools throughout the United
States. The idea is that such severe
punishment will frighten others and
deter them from using drugs. Yet this
approach has failed, in large part be-
cause very few users are identified and
caught. Teens that do drugs do not ex-
pect to be caught, and many enjoy the
adventure involved in doing something
that adults forbid.
But there is a more negative effect of
this policy. Suspension and expulsion
merely eject youthful offenders out of
the classroom and onto the street. As
one university student said, “Expulsion
is getting rid of the problem kids and
not getting rid of the problem in those
kids.”
A better approach would be for schools
to apply consequences for al-
cohol and other drug use that
allow most students to re-
main in school. After all, stu-
dents who are caught violat-
ing the rules are not neces-
sarily problematic users. Nor
are they automatically caus-
ing harm to themselves or derived from a process of
others. As for those who are
most severely involved with
drugs — they often drop out
of school without having to be pushed
out. Applying reasonable and humane
sanctions, including on-site suspen-
sions and exclusion from extracurricu-
lar activities, may be sufficient for teens
who have not demonstrated problems
in living associated with substance use.
Another problem with deterrent pun-
ishment is that it prevents concerned
people from reporting students whom
they suspect are using drugs. Teachers
and worried peers dare not report what
they see for fear of severe consequences
to the student in question — or to
themselves, in the form of retaliation
by the student. Thus, the harsh, puni-
tive nature of the system forces com-
passionate people to become
“enablers,” by keeping silent. This “no-
talk” rule invariably prevails when de-
terrent punishment rather than assis-
tance and ordinary discipline domi-
nates institutional policy toward those
who break the rules.
Reinventing Drug
Education in a World
Where Drug Use Will Persist
Drug prevention can and should be
reinvented. Not because a reinvented
prevention would eliminate substance
use in the adolescent population —
drugs other than alcohol are here to
stay. Accepting this fact is the first step
out of the morass in which we find
ourselves.
Starting with Realistic Goals
Acknowledging that illicit drug use will
persist in this society relieves us from
pursuit of the impossible. We are free
...adult society adores
drugs, whether illegal,
pharmaceutical, or
fermentation.
to set more realistic and pragmatic
goals for prevention education. Let me
list a few:
• Delay age of first use.
• Reduce (rather than eliminate) over-
all drug use.
• Help students to understand that
there are bad times and places to do
drugs.
• Reduce problematic use including
bingeing, mixing drugs, using un-
known or impure substances.
• Promote responsibility for self and
others and related knowledge about (a)
signs of abuse and dependency, (b) how
to approach and assist people showing
signs of problematic use, and (c) aware-
ness of helping resources in schools
and communities.
Drug prevention education can address
these and other pragmatic goals with-
out giving permission to use, as those
who defend the status quo invariably
charge. In any case, kids do not ask
adults for permission to drink or use.
This approach recognizes that young
people are going to make choices about
how to live their own lives. It gives
them tools with which to make in-
formed choices if they do decide to try
drugs.
Interactive Teaching & Learning10
If prevention is to work, teaching must
be honest and relationships between
teachers and students authentic. This
means that we must recognize and
value the experience of young people.
We must encourage student participa-
tion and interaction. Predetermined,
adult-delivered curricula work against
this principle, however. Worst of all, a
lock-step curriculum ignores the sig-
nificance of the teachable mo-
ment, that information or ex-
perience is best shared when
it is relevant, when learners
want to know.
• A lesson or program is in-
teractive when the teacher
stimulates discussion and cre-
ates activities wherein teens
can ask for the information
they need. Dialog is superior
to top-down teaching because it en-
courages active participation in the
learning process. Adult facilitators can
take it for granted that most teens have
had their own encounters with drugs,
even if they have abstained from use.
They deserve honest, straightforward
answers to their questions.
• The facilitator must be a credible and
reliable source of information. Teenag-
ers participating in focus groups in a
California study conducted by Joel
Brown and his colleagues frequently
expressed doubts about the expertise
of their prevention teachers.11 The fa-
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 17
cilitator must demonstrate at the out- and expulsion. The program may be as- for any programs that approach sub-
set an understanding of the culture of sociated with the school or with a com- stance use honestly and openly. In ad-
drug use, be able to use the drug words munity organization. Both should be dition, it may be that most schools as
in use among teenagers, and accept located in a place that protects the ano- we know them cannot provide the type
that many students associate alcohol nymity of students who are referred. of learning process proposed here.
and other drugs with positive experi- They may lack teachers who are com-
ences. Barriers to Implementation of fortable with truly interactive learning
Interactive Learning Programs situations, or who have internalized
• The approach must be non-judgmen- The barriers to the implementation of the knowledge that is required when
tal. The facilitator understands that these proposals and identifying the predetermined, lock-step curricula are
participants will make their own kinds of adults who can make them abandoned. Community agencies inde-
choices about drugs. Safety rather than work should not be underestimated. To pendent of schools may be a more ap-
morality is the theme. Reducing harm- begin with, current federal guidelines propriate venue. But the issue, at least
ful drug use and developing rational de- permit funding for abstinence-based in my view, is not whether we do these
cision-making skills are legitimate programs only. Support is not available things, but when and how. R
goals for teens who are heavily in-
volved with drugs but are as yet un-
willing to accept abstinence as a solu-
tion.
• Ordinarily information is offered in
response to questions asked by the stu-
dents. Attempting to convince many
teenagers that they should not use
drugs is usually counterproductive.
Instead, facilitators should concentrate
on giving complete information on
drugs including specifics such as what
drugs are and their effects, keeping
personal safety in mind, public policy
and the legal implications of use, how
to identify problem users, and the sig-
nificance of personal development and
social responsibility.

Helping Teens
Who Are in Trouble with
Alcohol or Illicit Drugs
Good teachers are likely to be ap-
proached by students seeking help for
their drug problem, whether it is with
alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs. They
cannot turn away at this critical mo-
ment. They must know how to inter-
vene effectively, and connect the child
to appropriate resources or agencies in
the school and community. Ideally,
there should be a substance abuse
counselor at the school to whom the
classroom facilitator can refer problem
users.
All schools should offer a Student As-
sistance Program for such students.
This is the compassionate and socially
responsible alternative to suspension
Still True? Still True!
18 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
Recommended Reading:
AFTER PROHIBITION: AN ADULT APPROACH
TO DRUG POLICIES IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Timothy Lynch, Editor
Cato Institute 2000
Paper. 193 pp.
$18.95
By Kevin B. Zeese
From inside the beltway it is rare to
see drug policy discussed sensibly.
So often, rather than acknowledge
the ineffectiveness of our current
approach to drug control, federal
officials just seem to want to repeat
the mistakes of the past. The Cato
Institute is often a refreshing oasis
inside the beltway. It brings forward
issues in ways that others tend to
avoid. In the drug policy field, it has
helped achieve federal forfeiture
laws when it published Forfeiting Our
Property Rights, by Rep. Henry Hyde,
which exposed the rampant abuse
of forfeiture powers. Now, with its
recent publication of After Prohibition:
An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in
the 21st Century, it challenges the
drug prohibition paradigm. Edited by
Timothy Lynch, director of the Cato
Institute’s Project on Criminal
Justice, After Prohibition recognizes
the bankruptcy of current policy
and seeks to come up with a new
approach for the 21st century. Since
1980, the U.S. has spent approxi-
mately a half-trillion federal, state,
and local tax dollars on the Drug
War. But while the drug warriors
achieved record numbers of arrests
and incarcerations, and record
interdiction and eradication of
drugs, drug-related problems
became worse than ever. Cocaine
and heroin are purer and cheaper
than in 1980, and there are more
overdose deaths and mentions of
drugs in hospital emergency rooms created widespread violence,
than ever. endangered whole nations, and
created a system of law enforce-
Facing the fact that we are losing
ment that favors racial profiling of
this war, and badly, Lynch has
black Americans. McNamara urges
brought together forward-thinking
the land of the free to stop making
people, including former drug
what is merely an unconventional
warriors, some of whom have been
life style a crime. He concludes: “It is
members of the Drug Enforcement
clear that doggedly continuing a
Agency or police departments, and
policy that has failed for nearly a
noted academics and drug reform
century is no way to start a new
advocates, who provide a variety of
century.” The only disappointing
perspectives on drug policy. Perhaps
essay is that of former California
the most important is the Republi-
Attorney General Dan Lungren,
can Governor of New Mexico, Gary
who supports the Drug War except
Johnson – one of the few politicians
to say, “We should always be ready
in America who is ready and willing
to re-examine our positions.” After
to face reality and argue for a new
Prohibition comes at an important
paradigm. He is in favor of decrimi-
time in the evolution of the Drug
nalizing marijuana possession and
War. Our military is becoming
making its sale legal, with age
increasingly involved in the Colom-
restrictions and other controls.
bian Drug War, we’ve gone through
Johnson argues that legalization
a record prison-building binge and
would weaken international cartels
the public seems to be tiring of this
and street drug gangs and bring the
war. Reformers have won initiatives
marijuana market above ground
in each of the last three elections on
where it can be regulated like other
various reform issues. The time is
businesses. Noting that New Mexico
right for our nation to begin to take
has the highest heroin overdose
drugs seriously and come up with an
rate in the U.S., he also argues for
approach that learns from past
making health care more easily
mistakes, stops repeating them, and
available to users and adopting harm
develops an effective, humane, and
reduction strategies that have been
sensible drug policy. This book is a
successful in Europe and Australia.
good start to launching that dia-
With the federal Drug War budget logue.
approaching $20 billion annually,
Kevin Zeese is President of Common
former Police Chief Joseph
Sense for Drug Policy, a drug policy
McNamara asks, “What have we got
reform organization in Washington, D.C.
for our money?” In addition to the
(http://www.csdp.org).
undiminished problem of drug R
abuse, he points out, drug profits —
markups as great as 17,000 percent
— have corrupted public officials,
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 19
Guest Speaker:
Ignorance Hurts Both
Drug Users and Their Families
By Susan P. Koningen
A
lmost seven years ago, I
awoke in the middle of the
night to the sound of someone
pounding on my door, a force-
ful rat-tat-tat that stated ‘Get
up — this is important!’ I
grabbed my dressing gown and
bolted for the door.
“Dear God,” I thought, “please
let everything be okay.”
Opening the door, I faced two
policemen. A million scenarios
flashed through my mind, but
none came even close to the re-
ality of why the boys in blue
were calling on me that night.
One of the officers spoke. “Do
you have a son called Brett?” I
answered “Yes, I do.” Then, “Do
you know of an Amy Johnston?”
Again I answered “Yes, she is
my son’s fiancée. What’s hap-
pened?”
I motioned for them to enter. Once in-
side, the older of the officers spoke.
“I’m afraid we have some bad news.”
My bland stare belied my terror. I held
my breath while he continued. “I have
been advised to inform you that Amy
is dead, and your son is in intensive
care at St. John’s Hospital. We believe
it was a drug-induced suicide pact.”
I felt as though my heart had been torn
from my body, and the pain was so in-
tense that I could barely draw breath.
Then tears of grief flooded my con-
sciousness.
That was seven long years ago. The fol-
lowing months were a nightmare. I
20 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
didn’t know what to say to my son to
help him! Each morning when I awoke,
my first two thoughts were: Is he okay,
or will I find him dead in his bed? Oh
God, please help me find a way to help
my son.
My fingers became worn to the bone
through trying to find someone to help
us. The ignorance and judgmental at-
titudes of those in the “helping” pro-
fessions, plus their lack of compassion,
inexperience or inability to counsel us,
left us feeling isolated and alienated
from society. I thank God that my son
was able to find some support to try to
make sense of his life. I was not so for-
tunate.
Determined that no parent should have
to face this shattering experience alone,
Editor’s Note: Susan P. Koningen worked
in business in her early 20s, cofounding
a sheet metal engineering company in
the Caribbean as well as a “colonial home
design and supply” arm of a building
company in her native Australia. She has
also owned and operated a real estate
office. While working with a local char-
ity, she coauthored a working model for
training and developing skills among the
long-term unemployed.
Koningen, a single mother, tells her story
of almost losing her child to drugs. She
now works full-time helping parents and
children cope with drug addiction.
She has created a 12-week recovery pro-
gram for families, Empowering Families
to Break Down the Barriers. Over the past
six years, over 700 families have sought
and received information, education, and
support from her. According to Koningen,
80 percent have “been empowered to take
responsibility for developing solutions to
their problems and, thereby, reconcile
and consolidate the family unit.” Twenty
percent drop out, but some return. As for
the children who are the focus of the
families’ efforts, Koningen says:
• 40 percent are in remittance.
• 40 percent have reduced usage, im-
proved social skills, and strengthened
family bonds.
• 20 percent have been referred to other
health organizations because of exten-
sive psychiatric/psychological difficul-
ties, and the family has united and been
supportive.
Koningen has just formed The Federa-
tion of Youth & Family Affairs, where she
serves as CEO and “life skills specialist,”
addressing the multiple problems faced
by youth and families in today’s society
through three programs. In addition to
offering the Empowering Families to
Break Down the Barriers program, the
federation is forming two more pro-
grams: The Chrysalis Program, an early
intervention program to help teens draw
on their inner resources, and use them
for their own health, well being, matu-
ration, and sense of satisfaction; and
Freedom of Choice, which will help
people leaving treatment to re-enter so-
ciety without relapsing into drug or al-
cohol abuse.
I formed Empowering Families, a sup- If we don’t change our mind-set about Together, we can stop the snipers kill-
port group for families of children us- how we deal with drugs in society, then ing off our children, one at a time, in
ing or abusing drugs. We meet at my we can expect more and more of our this so-called “War on Drugs.” We can
home, and at every meeting we have children to be incarcerated or die, in end the reign of terror.
one goal in mind: “To break down the this continuing and pointless tragedy.
Susan P. Koningen runs Empowering
communication barriers dividing us
It’s time to work together to put the Families from her home in Surfers
and to reconnect with our children, so
emphasis on education rather than Paradise, Australia. She may be
that we could support their recovery.”
enforcement, and rehabilitation rather reached at P.O. Box 2554 Burleigh
Because so few resources are there for
than incarceration, to consolidate our M.D.C. 4220 Queensland, Australia, or
families, I also published my own
families, communities, and our soci- at susan@magiccomputers.com.au.
ebook, Empowering Families to Break
ety.
Down the Barriers, available at R
www.zeus-publications.com. I want to
help families understand that their
children can’t recover alone, and to
help them to:
• Stop blaming themselves for their
children’s addictions.
• Understand the many life experiences
RECONSIDER
MAKE A GREAT IMPRESSION…
that influence and impact on their
children’s lives.
• Learn about addictions, rehabilita-
tion, and the recovery process.
• Become more aware of their actions
and reactions to their drug use.
• Communicate more effectively and
honestly with their children.
• Base their value on who they are, not
what they are or what they have.
• Value themselves for the miracle they
are.
• Teach their children how to value
themselves.
• Empower other members of the fam-
ily to take responsibility for their lives. Wear the
• Develop strategies that create posi-
tive changes in family and addict be-
ReconsiDer T.
haviors. You’ll get a LOT
• Rewrite their life stories of who they of positive
are and what they want out of life. comments!
• Empower their children to do the
same. Send your size and
• Reunite the family unit. a check for $12 plus
• “Minimize” the lapse/relapse poten- $3 s&h to:
tial of the child in recovery. ReconsiDer T, 205
• Prevent younger siblings taking up Onondaga Avenue,
Syracuse, NY
drug use.
13207.
• Love themselves more honestly and
openly.
I urge all families who need to come
out of the darkness to walk with me,
and find your way back into the light,
and fight for your precious children.
They desperately need strong allies.

THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 21

Notes on Drug Education
for College Students
By Craig Reinarman, Ph.D.
R
obert M. Hutchins, former Presi-
dent of the University of Chicago, once
wrote that “the object of education is
to prepare the young to educate them-
selves throughout their lives.” I do not
think drug education as currently prac-
ticed meets this objective, because I
think drug education is not generally
designed as education at all. At best,
most so-called drug education is de-
signed to teach young people what to
think rather than how to think. At
worst, it is moral ideology masquerad-
ing as medical science. In this essay, I
attempt to describe some of the lessons
I have drawn from my experiences
teaching a university-level sociology
course about drugs, in the hope that
these reflections will stimulate other
teachers to reflect upon their own ex-
periences.
The overwhelming focus of drug edu-
cation efforts is on elementary and high
school students. On one level, this is
as it should be: get them before they
start and you'll have less aggregate risk.
But on another level, there is an irony
here, for college is when millions of
young people begin their drug use —
if not their very first use of any drug,
often their first use of some drugs, and
more often than not their first regular
use, especially underage alcohol use,
which is, for most of them, “illicit drug
use.” It is in college where the family
norms that most parents hope will keep
their children away from drug abuse
are most attenuated.
Not that colleges and universities don't
have drug and alcohol education avail-
able for students; they do. At my uni-
22 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
Editor’s Note: Craig Reinarman is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the Uni-
versity of California, Santa Cruz, and Visiting Scholar at the Center for Drug
Research at the University of Amsterdam. He has served on the board of direc-
tors of the College on Problems of Drug Dependence, as a consultant to the
World Health Organization’s Programme on Substance Abuse, and as principal
investigator on research grants from the National Institute of Drug Abuse and
the National Institute of Justice. Dr. Reinarman is the author of American States
of Mind (Yale University Press, 1987), coauthor of Cocaine Changes (Temple
University Press, 1991), and co-editor of Crack in America: Demon Drugs and
Social Justice (University of California Press, 1997). He has published articles
on drug use, law, and policy in Theory and Society, British Journal of Addiction,
International Journal of Drug Policy, Addiction Research, and Contemporary
Drug Problems, and other journals. Craig Reinarman may be reached at 831-
459-2617 or at craigo@cats.ucsc.edu.
versity, for example, each and every evitable if not normative. All this is a
new student is briefed on the dangers way of saying that one of the things that
of drugs — licit and illicit — and the we might want to think more about is
rules against using them, upon enter- the nature, efficacy, and unintended
ing the dormitory (which, some par- consequences of drug education for
ents suspect, may be as much about college and university students.
covering the university’s institutional
To prepare this essay, I tried to reflect
ass as it is about anything else). Yet,
on my own practices after teaching a
beyond the exposure students get to
course called “Drugs and Society” to
drug education as part of their orien-
about 200 undergraduates each year for
tation, there is little more than the
the past 15 years. These practices, I
usual array of “just say no” and “here
soon realized, were not so much
are the risks” pamphlets, local 12-step
thought out ahead of time as they were
group meeting schedules in the
figured out as I went along, flying by
counselor's waiting room, and hapless
the seat of my pedagogical pants, learn-
residence assistants halfheartedly
ing from those I was teaching. In what
spouting the rules in what is, outside
follows, I try to make explicit some of
of some Bible colleges, usually a
the things I intuited as I went along
Sisyphian struggle against students’
and to share a few principles that seem
search for altered states.
to have worked.
After all, going away to college is to
A Paradoxical Premise
some degree about testing oneself,
about taking risks, about exploring One of the first things I learned from
consciousness, and about living inde- my students was that they had been
pendently, out of visual range of the bombarded by what they saw as heavy-
panopticonic parental gaze from which handed anti-drug propaganda, and that
the student has just, in a sense, es- if I wanted them to take me seriously,
caped. If that is a reasonable albeit par- to believe I knew something worth
tial description of college life, then a
certain amount of drug taking is in-
learning, I could not even pretend to
be giving them only value-free, “scien-
tific” information unearthed by elite
“experts” and provided to them “for
their own good.” Clear majorities of my
students walk into the classroom with
deep suspicions of what they have been
given thus far in their
lives in the way of drug To preach abstinence values
education.
Two recent examples: I
alone...is to be seen as a
had occasion to visit
the new Drug Enforce-
moralist and to risk having
ment Administration
Museum, on the
the information dismissed.
ground floor of a high-
rise office building just across the
Potomac from Washington, DC. The
Museum's exhibits were designed to get
across some basic information having
to do with the evils of drugs. I was im-
mediately struck by one picture show-
ing a rather ordinary looking group of
young people on a street corner, with
the caption, “Hepsters — black and
white (only black were shown) — who
smoke marijuana care nothing for the
American Dream. They prefer instead
to seek creativity, spontaneous plea-
sure, freedom, and excitement.” The
DEA “curators” made several false and
rather telling assumptions in writing
and publicly displaying such a caption:
(1) that “creativity, spontaneous plea-
sure, freedom, and excitement” are not
part of the American Dream — which
would be shocking news, for instance,
on Madison Avenue; (2) that these ex-
periences are so self-evidently wrong
that no condemnatory rationale was
needed; (3) that absent the influence
of marijuana, American youth would
not desire such sensations on their
own; and (4) that most of the 70 mil-
lion Americans who have at least tried
marijuana have lost interest in the
American Dream as a consequence.
I tried to imagine how my students
would interpret the same caption, how
they would “decode” such a “text.” I
could not persuade myself that they
would infer anything that might reduce
the likelihood that they would try mari-
juana or increase the likelihood that
they would believe their government’s
messages about drugs.
A recent story in the Washington Post
reported that Senator Orin Hatch (R–
Utah) had written the preface to a book-
let titled How Parents Can Help Chil-
dren Live Marijuana-Free. In this pref-
ace Hatch urged parents to study the
booklet in order to learn the danger
signs that their children may be using
drugs. Among the “signs” of drug abuse
cited in the booklet is “excessive pre-
occupation with social causes, race
relations, environmental issues, etc.”
Where to begin? What student in her
right mind would allow herself to be-
come preoccupied with “social causes,
race relations, environmental issues,”
and so on? Obviously such horrid
symptoms could only occur under the
influence of marijuana. If this is any
indication of the right-wing political
and moral ideology that is being thinly
veiled as drug education, then the mys-
tery is not why so many young people
try marijuana but why more young
people don’t. In short, as a teacher I
have come to believe that if I want to
engage in drug education, I have to be
a critic of drug education.
Some Pedagogical Practices/
Principles
• The first and most important thing I
learned is that I must try to get stu-
dents to “just say know,”1 rather than
merely to “just say no.” This is, after
all, precisely what we try to teach them
in every other course; it is perfectly in
keeping with the best norms and val-
ues of universities. To preach absti-
nence values alone, even if dressed up
in scientific garb, is to be seen as a
moralist and to risk having the infor-
mation dismissed. University students
have worked very hard to get where
they are and have thus earned the right
to be given a full range of information.
After all, we encourage them to con-
sider all sides of
other issues and
to think critically
about everything
else, so by what
logic can we ask
them to forget all
that when it
comes to drugs?
And if we did, how
long would it take
them to figure out that we had done so
and to protest? About two seconds,
that’s how long. So I begin my drug
course by telling my students that
while this is not a “how to” course on
drugs, it is also not a “just say no”
course either.
• Every time I fail to make distinctions
between drugs some student “busts”
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 23
me. Students have heard authorities
invoke the great chemical bogeyman
“drugs” throughout their lives, often
from kindergarten on, and by the time
they get to their second or third year
of university they know better. So if I
don’t make distinctions among drugs
based on relative risks, then I run the
risk of being dismissed as an inexperi-
enced ideologue or an old fogey, or both
(and the closer I get to actually being
an old fogey, the more important I
seem to think it is to avoid such dis-
missals).
• I am teaching this course in a soci-
ology curriculum. Most students have
had some sociology and/or criminol-
ogy, so they under-
stand that drug is-
sues constitute a I...want them to understand how
wonderful window
the selective enforcement of
on the structure of
society — on the so-
cial construction of drug laws is the source of the
social problems, on
the sociology of law,
on how the criminal
greatest single category of
justice system func-
tions, on the politics
offenders in our prisons.
of public policy. So I
include material on how drug use gets
defined as deviant; about the condi-
tions under which drug scares, as phe-
nomena in their own right, arise; and
how “drug problems” get constructed
as such. I do this, as I try to stress to
my students, not in order to de-legiti-
mize the anti-drug messages they’ve
gotten and certainly not to claim that
there are no risks in drug use. On the
contrary, I feel that only by showing
that I am not part of the Drug Czar’s
chorus, that I am not willing to take
government claims about the horrors
of drug use at face value, and that I am
willing to look critically at everything,
will I then have their trust — the sine
qua non of any kind of education.
I try to get my students to use their
sociological imaginations so that they
come to see that one cannot under-
stand drug problems apart from the
24 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
matrix of social problems in which
these problems are invariably embed-
ded. I try to get them to take seriously
the notion that social context is cru-
cially important — e.g., to understand
that “bad trips” on LSD and heroin
overdoses are caused by more than
malevolent molecules; that the very ef-
fects of a drug are shaped in important
ways by the contexts in which it is used,
contexts which are themselves shaped
in important ways by our current drug
laws — these laws being overwhelm-
ingly the products of a long sequence
of drug scares that began with the anti-
alcohol crusade at the start of the 19th
century. And since some of these stu-
dents have studied criminology, and
since the U.S. is the world leader in
imprisonment, I especially want them
to understand how the selective en-
forcement of drug laws is the source
of the single greatest category of of-
fenders in our prisons.
• I try to combat pharmacological de-
terminism, which in my view contrib-
utes to the false perception that drugs
are all-powerful and that, once in their
grip, users are powerless. I want my
students to understand that there is
nothing in the molecules of these sub-
stances or in their own brains to lead
us to believe that any specific behav-
ioral consequence flows from the in-
gestion of any drug. Behavioral conse-
quences are contingent, not inevitable,
products of complex social interaction
rather than nature.
• I try to get my students to take their
own experience seriously as data. This
works two ways: first, I ask on day one
of the course how many personally
know someone who has seriously hurt
themselves or truly messed up their
lives and the lives of those around them
because of their drug use. Nearly all
raise their hands. Then I ask them to
enumerate all they know about those
persons, including what else was go-
ing on in their lives that might have
influenced them to over-use drugs. For
most students, all it takes is a moment’s
reflection to figure out that the people
they know who have hurt themselves
or others because of the misuse of
drugs had a lot going against them to
begin with. Second, I also ask them to
take seriously their own experience in
drug education as
data. Did they be-
lieve what the drug
education curricu-
lum to which they
were exposed tried
to teach them? Did
it change their be-
havior? Were their
peers helped by the
course? Were they
less likely to try
drugs? Were they
more or less cynical about drug edu-
cation after experiencing drugs
firsthand? Such questions quickly lead
them to wonder whether spending bil-
lions of tax dollars to “market” anti-
drug ideology is effective; whether it is
a good idea to use public resources to
define abstinence as normal and any
drug use (other than Ritalin and
Prozac, of course) as pathological. In
general, students do not seem to like
drug education that tries to get them
to think ill of, snitch on, and ostracize
each other — what might be called
disintegrative shaming. Does such an
approach have a solid ethical founda-
tion or a solid theory of human behav-
ior change behind it? Or is it based on
fear? My students often ask in this con-
text whether drug education programs
have been rigorously evaluated. I have
to tell them that the largest program,
D.A.R.E., and the more recent billion-
dollar advertising blitz of former Drug
Czar Barry McCaffrey have both been alarmed by the problems caused by ing alternative to all the negative pro-
evaluated and shown to have no im- drug abuse. But on the course evalua- paganda about drugs. I have been in-
pact on adolescent substance use. Even tion form, where it asks whether they spired to try and promote more com-
if I wanted to, I could not persuade my would “recommend the course to a munity outreach programs, and I will
students to stop questioning what they friend” and whether they would “take recommend this class to all my peers.”
have been taught or avoid thinking the course again,” somewhere between (Endnote — back cover)
critically about received wisdom. 75% and 95% of students check “yes.”
R
Enrollments have grown, year after An earlier version of this essay was
• Perhaps the most difficult and yet presented at the Annual Meeting of the
year. I like to think that this is because, American Society of Criminology in
the most important piece of drug edu-
as one student wrote, “It was a refresh- San Francisco on November 17, 2000.
cation I do in my course is to prevent
the proverbial babies from
being thrown out with the
bath water. By this I mean
that I try to persuade my
students that even though
the drug field is highly po-
liticized and they have of-
ten been systematically mis-
led by the exaggerated and
simplistic scare tactics of
their own government, they
should not, therefore, dis-
miss all warnings. In the
end, if I have succeeded in
getting them to read widely
on the history of drug prob-
lems and drug policy, and to
think critically about what
these have to do with the
structure of our society, I
feel that I have earned the
credibility I need to get them
to listen to me when I tell
them, “All drugs have risks.”
The price of trust is truth.
If students perceive me as
truly leveling with them,
rather than trying to get
them to behave in the ways
I and other adults approve
of, then I feel I have the best
chance of getting them to
accept the evidence I present
on the relative risks of drug
use in all its forms. Being so
distant from the cultural IT’S YOUR SPEAKERS’ BUREAU.
mainstream and the domi-
nant forms of drug educa-
tion, my approach does not
USE IT!
please everyone. Each year, The Speakers’ Bureau promotes ReconsiDer’s shared beliefs
a few students write in their and policies. Our message is powerful. Our messengers are
evaluations that I am too experts in the War on Drugs. Use them!
critical of existing drug Speakers are profiled in this brochure available from ReconsiDer, 205 Onondaga Avenue, Syracuse, NY 13207.
policy or insufficiently

THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 25

A Focus on Safety First
Strikes a Universal Chord
By Marsha Rosenbaum, Ph.D.
T
wo years ago I wrote Safety First:
A Reality-Based Approach to Teens,
Drugs and Drug Education, a 17-page
booklet published by the Lindesmith
Center. Since then, over 30,000 copies
have been distributed to public and
private schools, state and local health
agencies, public policy institutes, treat-
ment facilities, military bases, and in-
dividual parents and educators in all
50 states and 31 countries around the
world. Initially, many were sent at our
initiative, but then we began receiving
thousands of requests for additional
copies from around the world. And of
the many comments I received about
this booklet, almost none were critical
of it.
Why was this publication so popular
among parents and teachers? I believe
its popularity is due to the fact that it
is one of the few publications advocat-
ing a harm reduction perspective re-
garding teenagers and drugs. The mes-
sage seems to have resonated.
Responding to Misinformation
What prompted me to write this book-
let, and the reason for the almost uni-
versal support it has received, goes back
to something that happened back in
1987. That year, my daughter, then in
fifth-grade, returned from school and
proudly declared that she was part of
the D.A.R.E. program, and now knew
about drugs. “When a person smokes
marijuana,” Annie announced, “half of
their brain cells are erased forever.
That’s what the nice police officer told
us, and he knows.” Although the school
had required parental permission for
practically every other non-classroom
26 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
Editor’s Note: Marsha Rosenbaum is a medical sociologist and director of the
San Francisco office of The Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, a drug
policy institute with offices in New York, Washington DC, New Mexico, Oak-
land, Sacramento and San Francisco. She received her doctorate in sociology
from the University of California at San Francisco in 1979. From 1977 to 1995
Rosenbaum was the principal investigator on ten grants funded by the Na-
tional Institute on Drug Abuse, completing studies of female heroin addicts,
methadone maintenance treatment and policy, MDMA (Ecstasy), cocaine, and
drug use during pregnancy. She is the author of the book Women on Heroin
and coauthor of the books Pursuit of Ecstasy: The MDMA Experience and Preg-
nant Women on Drugs: Combating Stereotypes and Stigma, as well as numer-
ous scholarly articles about drug use, drug addiction, and drug policy. She is
also the author of three booklets: Just Say What?: An Alternative View of Solv-
ing America’s Drug Problem; Kids, Drugs, and Drug Education: A Harm Reduc-
tion Approach; and Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teens, Drugs, and
Drug Education. Her opinion pieces have appeared in many national publica-
tions, including Newsday, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times. Dr. Rosenbaum
co-chaired the international conferences “Just Say Know: New Directions in
Drug Education” and “The State of Ecstasy: The Medicine, Science and Culture
of MDMA.”
activity (including sex education), this own daughter went down the same
was the first I had heard of Drug Abuse dangerous road as that nice Jewish
Resistance Education. heroin addict? I became curious about
what D.A.R.E. was teaching my child,
Although I was working at the time as
and so I set out to learn more about
a researcher for the National Institute
America’s drug education programs. In
on Drug Abuse, drug education had not
the course of my research, I discovered
been my focus. But now my daughter’s
that anti-drug messages have been
words made me remember the nice
around for nearly a century, from Tem-
Jewish girl I’d once interviewed, who
perance tales of permanent alcohol-
happened to be an incarcerated heroin
induced brain damage to Reefer Mad-
addict. She’d gotten into hard drugs
ness-style warnings about marijuana.
after taking a high school drug educa-
Then Reagan’s escalation of the War on
tion class in which she was told that
Drugs kicked drug education into high
both marijuana and heroin caused ad-
gear. Since the mid-1980s, preteens
diction. She tried marijuana and real-
and teens have been exposed to a
ized she’d been lied to, so when heroin
plethora of “prevention” messages,
came her way, she tried that, too. Like
from television ads to school-based
many young people, she and her friends
classes to billboards to Red Ribbon pa-
no longer believed anything adults told
rades. Young people have learned how
them about drugs.
to “just say no,” taken drug-free
Now that drug education had become pledges, and been taught to make the
personal, I was worried. What if my
right decision about drugs. Even those
teenagers who were raised to be inde-
pendent, creative thinkers learned that
there was only one correct decision
when it came to drugs. If there was ever
any doubt, escalating zero tolerance
policies insisted that students cultivate
refusal skills.
Still, after spending billions of govern-
ment dollars on prevention, govern-
ment surveys indicate that 80 percent
of today’s teenagers will have con-
sumed alcohol, and over half will have
tried marijuana by the time they gradu-
ate from high school. Obviously, many
teenagers have not heeded admoni-
tions to be “drug free.”
Is teenage drug use the fault of drug
education programs such as D.A.R.E.?
I doubt it. In the context of current
American culture, prevention pro-
grams don’t stand a chance of prevent-
ing drug use.
From Coffee to Booze,
Drugs Are Everywhere
First, American teenagers (by defini-
tion) live in America and America is not
drug free. Drugs (defined broadly) are
everywhere: we medicate with pharma-
ceuticals and over-the-counter meds
(often introducing our children to
Ritalin as their first drug of choice, or
non-choice, as it were, as it is foisted
upon them by parents and teachers);
as teens and adults, we line up for our
java fixes at the ever-proliferating
Starbucks cafés; and, of course, few of
us can recreate or celebrate without
imbibing alcohol. Even Mormon kids
in Utah and Bible-carrying kids in the
Deep South are not immune to
America’s drug culture. The very no-
tion of being “drug free” in America
strikes most thinking teenagers as lu-
dicrous.
Second, adolescence itself is a time of
great risk-taking. Teenagers often be-
lieve themselves invincible. How else
could they learn to drive or surf or
skateboard? Prevention messages that
stress risk as a drug-use deterrent are
barking up the wrong tree.
Finally, in our zeal to get teens to ab-
stain, we have promoted anti-drug
messages that misstate and exaggerate
the dangers of (illegal) drugs so con-
sistently that they have become noth-
ing more than a joke to many teenag-
ers. In short, young people have lost
confidence in adults’ ability to say any-
thing but “no” about the complex is-
sue of drugs.
Drug education may not be able to pre-
vent drug use, but I do believe such
programs could be useful in prevent-
ing drug abuse. While we’ve got teen-
agers’ attention, we could weave the
subject of drugs into solid courses such
as physiology, biology, chemistry, psy-
chology, political science, history, etc.
While we stress the value of abstinence,
students could actually learn some-
thing about drugs that, now and later
in life, might help them avoid problems
(eg: the importance of dose and the
dangers of combining drugs). And of
course, we need to beef-up extracur-
ricular and after-school programs so
that teens have engaging activities dur-
ing the hours between the end of the
school day and dinner.
For those teenagers who still say
“maybe” or “sometimes” or “yes” to
drugs, we need a fall back strategy that
embraces safety as its bottom line. A
voluntary, drop-in informational pro-
gram should be offered for at least an
hour or two per week in every middle
and high school in America. If teenag-
ers won’t abstain completely, at least
they can learn enough honest, science-
based information about alcohol and
other drugs to avoid serious problems.
Parents Are
Worried and Confused
Recently the government launched a
campaign aimed at the parents of teen-
agers. On billboards and Web sites and
in newspaper ads (www.theantidrug.
org), parents are told that they have not
only the responsibility but also the
power to prevent drug use among teen-
agers.
Since launching my own research into
drug education, I’ve spoken with hun-
dreds of parents about teens and drugs.
I find that they, like me, are worried,
confused, and in a bind. We baby
boomers learned early on that authori-
tarian child-rearing, often complete
with corporal punishment, was not
okay. We negotiated with our kids,
sometimes even as they behaved hor-
ribly. We eschewed violence and en-
couraged them to “use your words.” We
tried to send our kids to schools that
placed a premium on fostering creativ-
ity and bolstering self-esteem. We
wanted our children to feel as though
they had volition (even if they really
didn’t). We gave them choices (even if
sometimes those choices were bogus).
And then came adolescence and “the
drug thing.” All of a sudden volition,
decision-making and creativity went
out the window. The vast majority of
us hoped for abstinent teenagers. We
wanted to talk with our teenagers about
drugs, but were terrified. Most of us
didn’t know enough; some of us knew
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 27
too much. We wanted a sustained dia-
logue, but were told that we needed to
impart a clear “no use” message and
not budge from that position under any
circumstances. Many parents won-
dered how they could sustain a dia-
logue and convince their kids they
would be there for them if they first
drew a line in the sand about drug use.
How do I talk with my own children
about drugs? The day before he entered
high school in 1998, I published a let-
ter to my son in the San Francisco
Chronicle. This letter is included in
Safety First and, as such, has been use-
ful to thousands of parents in helping
them and their teens through these
difficult issues. I am republishing it
here, in the hope that it might help
some of you talk to your own children
about drugs and drug use.
Dear Johnny,
This fall you will be entering high
school, and like most American
teenagers, you’ll have to navigate
drugs. Like most parents, I would
prefer that you not use drugs.
However, I realize that, despite my
wishes, you might experiment.
I will not use scare tactics to deter
you. Instead, having spent the past
25 years researching drug use, abuse
and policy, I will tell you a little
about what I have learned, hoping
this will lead you to make wise
choices. My only concern is your
health and safety.
When people talk about “drugs,” they
are generally referring to illegal
substances such as marijuana,
cocaine, methamphetamine (speed),
psychedelic drugs (LSD, Ecstasy,
“Schrooms”) and heroin.
These are not the only drugs that
make you high. Alcohol, cigarettes
and many other substances (like
glue) cause intoxication of some
sort. The fact that one drug or
another is illegal does not mean one
is better or worse for you. All of them
temporarily change the way you
28 THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY
perceive things and the way you
think.
Some people will tell you that drugs
feel good, and that’s why they use
them. But drugs are not always fun.
Cocaine and methamphetamine
speed up your heart; LSD can make
you feel disoriented; alcohol intoxi-
cation impairs driving; cigarette
smoking leads to addiction and
sometimes lung cancer; and people
sometimes die suddenly from taking
heroin. Marijuana does not often
lead to physical dependence or
overdose, but it does alter the way
people think, behave and react.
I have tried to give you a short
description of the drugs you might
encounter. I choose not to try to
scare you by distorting information
because I want you to have confi-
dence in what I tell you. Although I
won’t lie to you about their effects,
there are many reasons for a person
your age to not use drugs or alcohol.
First, being high on marijuana or
any other drug often interferes with
normal life. It is difficult to retain
information while high, so using it,
especially daily, affects your ability
to learn.
Second, if you think you might try
marijuana, please wait until you are
older. Adults with drug problems
often started using at a very early
age.
Finally, your father and I don’t want
you to get into trouble. Drug and
alcohol use is illegal for you, and the
consequences of being caught are
huge. Here in the United States, the
number of arrests for possession of
marijuana has more than doubled in
the past six years. Adults are serious
about “zero tolerance.” If caught,
you could be arrested, expelled from
school, barred from playing sports,
lose your driver’s license, denied a
college loan, and/or rejected for
college.
Despite my advice to abstain, you
may one day choose to experiment. I
will say again that this is not a good
idea, but if you do, I urge you to
learn as much as you can, and use
common sense. There are many
excellent books and references,
including the Internet, that give you
credible information about drugs.
You can, of course, always talk to
me. If I don’t know the answers to
your questions, I will try to help you
find them.
If you are offered drugs, be cautious.
Watch how people behave, but
understand that everyone responds
differently even to the same sub-
stance. If you do decide to experi-
ment, be sure that you are sur-
rounded by people you can count
upon. Plan your transportation and
under no circumstances drive or get
into a car with anyone else who has
been using alcohol or other drugs.
Call us or any of our close friends
any time, day or night, and we will
pick you up, no questions asked and
no consequences.
And please, Johnny, use moderation.
It is impossible to know what is
contained in illegal drugs because
they are not regulated. The majority
of fatal overdoses occur because
young people do not know the
strength of the drugs they consume,
or how they combine with other
drugs. Please do not participate in
drinking contests, which have killed
too many young people. Whereas
marijuana by itself is not fatal, too
much can cause you to become
disoriented and sometimes paranoid.
And of course, smoking can hurt
your lungs, later in life and now.
Johnny, as your father and I have
always told you about a range of
activities (including sex), think about
the consequences of your actions
before you act. Drugs are no differ-
ent. Be skeptical and, most of all, be
safe.
Love,
Mom
R

Article Endnotes
…Are We Doing Enough?
1
For details, see page 186 of Richard Lawrence
Miller’s Drug Warriors and Their Prey: From Po-
lice Power to Police State published in 1996 by
Praeger Publishers of Westport, CT.
2
Ennett, S. T., Rosenbaum, D. P., Flewelling, R.
L., Bieler, G. S., Ringwalt, C. R., & Bailey, S. L.
(1994). Long-term evaluation of Drug Abuse Re-
sistance Education. Addictive Behaviors, 19(2),
113-125.
3 lion. The Digest of Education Statistics, 1999, of
Clayton, R., Cattarello, A., & Johnstone, B.
(1996). The effectiveness of Drug Abuse Resistance
Education (Project D.A.R.E.): 5-year follow-up re-
sults. Preventive Medicine, 25, 307-318.
4 number of 5th or 6th grade private school stu-
Ringwalt, C., Ennett, S., and Holt, K. (1991). An
outcome evaluation of Project D.A.R.E. (Drug
Abuse Resistance Education). Health Education
Research, 6(3), 327-337.
5
Harmon, M. A. (1993). Reducing the risk of drug
involvement among early adolescents: An evalu-
ation of Drug Abuse Resistance Education
(D.A.R.E.). Evaluation Review, 17(2), 221-239.
6 lations), and D.A.R.E. programs reportedly are in
Walker, S. G. (1990). The Victoria Police Depart-
ment — Drug Abuse Resistance Education
Programme (D.A.R.E.): Programme Evaluation
Report #2. Victoria, Br. Columbia, Canada :
Educon: Marketing & Research Systems.
7
Ennett, S., Tobler, N., Ringwalt, C., & Flewelling,
R. (1994). How effective is drug abuse resistance
education ? A meta-analysis of project DARE out-
come evaluations. Journal of Public Health, 84(9),
1394-1401.
…Costs of D.A.R.E.
1
Helpful suggestions for this research were re-
ceived from Paul Blackley and Cliff Donn of
LeMoyne College, Nick Eyle and Alexandra Eyle
of ReconsiDer, Mike Roona, Joel Brown, and
Rodney Skager. D.A.R.E. officers and state coordi-
nators in several states and staff of D.A.R.E.
America provided valuable information used in
this study. William Modzeleski and David Quinlin
of the U.S. Department of Education, and Don
MacKay of Common Sense for Drug Policy were
also helpful in identifying information sources for
this research.
2
Information about D.A.R.E. is from the D.A.R.E.
America information packet entitled D.A.R.E. At-
A-Glance, revised 08-25-99, and a D.A.R.E. Fact
Sheet containing projections for 1999, prepared
for the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Depart-
ment of Justice. These reports were provided by
D.A.R.E. America.
3
For example, see Project D.A.R.E.: No effects at
10-year follow-up, Lynam, Milich, et al., Journal
of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, August
1999, Vol. 67, No. 4, 590-93. The authors exam-
ine the existing long- term studies and find that
“the preponderance of evidence suggests that
D.A.R.E. has no long-term effect on drug use.”
4
Newspaper accounts have often reported costs
closer to $200 million. These estimates appear to
be based on D.A.R.E. America’s estimate for the
value of officer services alone.
5
D.A.R.E. information reports provided by D.A.R.E.
America.
6
The U.S. Census, Census 2000, Table DP-1, shows
that the total number of children in the 10–14
age group is about 20,500,000, which suggests that
the number of school-age children in the 5th or
6th grade age group is probably close to 4 mil-
the National Center for Education Statistics indi-
cates that as of fall 1997 there were about 3.5
million in the 5th or 6th grade. The estimated
dents is close to 500,000, bringing the total num-
ber, in 1997, to around 4 million. Enrollments in-
creased by about 3 percent between 1997 and
2001, bringing the total to slightly over 4 million
in the 5th or the 6th grades. Enrollments are ex-
pected to grow slightly over the next five years.
D.A.R.E. programs are over-represented in urban
and suburban areas (with larger school-age popu-
over 80 percent of school districts nationwide.
Therefore, 4 million appears to be the maximum
number of children that D.A.R.E. programs can
be expected to reach, assuming information on
program growth provided by D.A.R.E. America is
accurate. For extensive information on school-
age populations and projections, see the Digest of
Education Statistics at http://nces.ed.gov/
pubs2000/digest99.
7
Information about D.A.R.E. training programs
was provided by D.A.R.E. America and by staff at
the regional training centers.
8
Information on funding sources for local D.A.R.E.
programs is from a report by the Research Tri-
angle Institute, Past and Future Directions of the
D.A.R.E. Program: An Evaluation Review, Draft
Final Report, September 1994, for the U.S. De-
partment of Justice, and from numerous newspa-
per reports identified through a search of the Me-
dia Awareness Project on-line archives
(mapinc.org).
9
Remarks of Barry R. McCaffrey, Director, Office
of National Drug Control Policy, at the 13th An-
nual National D.A.R.E. Officers Association Din-
ner, July 7, 2000.
10
States apply for federal funds for D.A.R.E. pro-
grams through the Edward Byrne Memorial State
and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Formula
Grant Program. According to D.A.R.E. America,
D.A.R.E. programs qualify for support because one
of the authorized areas for funding is “demand
reduction education programs in which law en-
forcement officers participate.” The Bush Admin-
istration, however, recently discontinued this pro-
gram.
11
Conversations with officials in the U.S. Depart-
ment of Education.
12
Research Triangle Institute, Past and Future
Directions of the D.A.R.E. Program: An Evaluation
Review, Draft Final Report, Sept. 1994.
13
The U.S. Department of Education adopted the
“Principles of Effectiveness” that set standards
governing the use of Department grants for drug
education programs for 1998 and future years.
Among other things, grant recipients are required
to use the funds only for programs that have been
found to be effective based on research and
scientific evaluations. D.A.R.E. is not included
among the programs found to be effective. For
more information about the “Principles of Effec-
tiveness”, see Reconsidering D.A.R.E., A Report for
School Superintendents by Dr. Gene Tinelli at
www.reconsider.org.
14
School-Based Drug Prevention Programs, A
Longitudinal Study in Selected School Districts,
Executive Summary, Final Report, page e-25,
Research Triangle Institute, February 1997, pre-
pared for the U.S. Department of Education.
15
Newspaper reports identified through a search
of the Media Awareness Project on-line archives
(mapinc.org).
16
Accounts of D.A.R.E. costs have been reported
in U.S.A. Today, Reason Magazine, Rolling Stone,
The National Review, and other publications.
17
Conversations with staff at D.A.R.E. America.
18
LeMoyne College Institute of Industrial Rela-
tions Research Paper, No.22, September 2001, The
Economic Costs of D.A.R.E. For a copy of the com-
plete report, visit www.reconsider.org, or e-mail
the author at shepard@mail.lemoyne.edu.
19
Occupational Employment Statistics, Bureau
of Labor Statistics, 1999 National Occupational
Employment and Wage Estimates, Protective Ser-
vice Occupations, SOC Code 33-3051, Police and
Sheriffs Patrol Officers. The estimated mean an-
nual estimated wages for 1999 was about $39,000.
Therefore $40,000 is a reasonable estimate for
2001.
20
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of
Labor, Employment Cost Trends, Table 4, State
and Local Government, by occupational and in-
dustry group, March 2000.
21
LeMoyne College Institute of Industrial Rela-
tions Research Paper, No.22, September 2001, The
Economic Costs of D.A.R.E.
22
D.A.R.E. America reports that approximately
3000 D.A.R.E. officers are trained each year.
23
Conversation with staff at D.A.R.E. America.
24
Information from tax returns for D.A.R.E. and
other tax-exempt organizations is available at
Guidestar.org. The 1998 tax returns are the most
recent currently available.
(Continued on back cover)
THE RECONSIDER QUARTERLY 29

Endnotes (Continued from page 29)
25
US Anti-drug Program Says It Will Adopt a New
Strategy, The New York Times, Feb. 15, 2001.
26
Research Triangle Institute, Past and Future
Directions of the D.A.R.E. Program: An Evalua-
tion Review. Draft Final Report, Sept. 1994.
27
Conversations with local D.A.R.E. coordinators
and officers in New York City and other commu-
nities in Maryland and upstate New York.
28
Conversations with licensed D.A.R.E. vendors.
29
Information from tax returns for D.A.R.E. and
other tax-exempt organizations is available at
Guidestar.org. The 1998 tax returns are the most
recent currently available.
30
Newspaper reports identified through the Me-
dia Awareness Project and conversations with
D.A.R.E. officers and coordinators.
31
Newspaper reports identified through the Me-
dia Awareness Project and conversations with
D.A.R.E. officers and coordinators.
32
Ibid. Table 70 states that the average class size
for elementary school teachers is 24.
33
The D.A.R.E. elementary school program con-
sists of 17 one-hour lessons, including the gradu-
ation ceremony. The D.A.R.E. officer meets with
the classroom instructor before classes begin, and
Visit www.reconsider.org to receive ReconsiDer Tidbits and for more about the Drug Wars.
RECONSIDER:
FORUM ON DRUG POLICY
205 Onondaga Avenue
Syracuse, NY 13207
The War on Drugs has failed. We must make peace, heal our wounds and change our laws.
the regular classroom instructor often spends time
during and after the D.A.R.E. program to reinforce
the lessons. Thus 18 hours is probably a reason-
able estimate of the amount of class hours for the
D.A.R.E. program.
…Especially for Adolescents
1
Shepard, T. (2001). The economic costs of
D.A.R.E.. LeMoyne Institute of Industrial Rela-
tions. Syracuse, New York. Paper Number 22.
2
Johnson, L. D., O’Malley, P.M.., & Bachman, J.
G. (2001). Monitoring the Future. National re-
sults on adolescent drug use: Overview of key find-
ings, 2000. University of Michigan Institute for
Social Research.
3
Austin, G. and Shager, R. (1999). Seventh Bien-
nial Statewide Survey of Drug and Alcohol Use
Among California Students in Grades 7, 9, and
11. Sacramento, CA: Office of the Attorney Gen-
eral, Crime Prevention Center.
4
Golub, A. W. (2001) & Johnson, B. D. (2001).
Variation in youthful risks of progression from
alcohol/tobacco to marijuana and to hard drugs
across generations. American Journal of Public
Health, 93(2), 225-232.
4
Moshman, David. (1999). Adolescent Psychologi-
cal Development: Rationality, Morality, and Iden-
tity. New Jersey: Erlbaum & Associates.
5
Schaps, E., Moskowitz, Malvin, J., & Schaeffer,
B. (1986). Evaluation of seven school-based pre-
vention programs: A final report on the Napa
project. International Journal of the Addictions,
21, 1081-1112.
6
Gorman, D. (1996). Etiological theories and the
primary prevention of drug use. Journal of Drug
Issues, 26(2), 505-520.
7
Coggans, N., & McKellar, S. (1994). Drug Use
Amongst Peers: Peer Pressure or Peer Preference?
Drugs: Education, Prevention, and Policy. 1(1), 15-
26.
8
Hersch, P. (1998). A Tribe Apart: A Journey into
the Heart of American Adolescence. New York:
Fawcett-Columbine.
9
I am indebted to my colleague, Ralph Cantor, a
truly wise prevention practitioner, for his formu-
lation of these principles.
10
Brown, D. H., D’Emidio-Caston, M., and Pol-
lard, J. (1997). Students and substances: Social
power in drug education. Educational Evaluation
and Policy Analysis, 19(1), 65-82.
…Notes on Drug Education
1
The author is grateful to Dr. Marsha Rosenbaum
for this phrase.
R