DARE Programme an Epic Failure

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Although the intentions were to prevent children from becoming drug addicts, it increased the use of drugs.

Remember Nancy Raegan in the 1980s, going to school to school telling children to say “no” to drugs?

The Ragen administration spent billions of dollars every year for decades on their say “no” program, but it didn’t decrease drug use.

How The D.A.R.E. Programme Failed

An extension of the say “no” program was called the Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.).

DARE Programme was implemented in elementary school classrooms in 1983 throughout North America.

I remember being in grade 5 when the DARE Programme came to my small elementary school in a town with about a thousand people.

The grade 5 and 6 classes met in the gym, and a couple of police officers and some W.H.L. players would lecture the students about not doing drugs.

I have vague memories of the DARE Programme lecture. I remember most though the police officers showed off their exceptional cases full of different illegal street drugs.

The cases consisted of a wooden foundation with small square plots inside the box, the top of the box was covered with a layer of plexiglass, and in each property was a different street drug.

The drug case display was passed around to all the kids in the audience.

I remember seeing drugs like black tar heroin and P.C.P. That was the best show and told ever.

That was the only time I had ever seen those hard drugs in real life.

So, perhaps, it wasn’t the best idea to expose young children too hard drugs that young of an age.

A direct approach like this may work for adults and older teens.

But it doesn’t work so well for children.

DARE Programme Exposed Kids to Drugs

Many kids would have happily gone through life without seeing most of those drugs the police officer showed off. DARE.

It was beyond an epic failure as it is ineffective at preventing the use of drugs—the first study to prove the inability of DARE happened in 1992.

The study at Indiana University showed that alumni of the DARE Programme had much higher rates of hallucinogenic drug use than those not exposed to the program.

Since the study in 1992, many studies on D.A.R.E.’s helpfulness, involving a 10-year analysis by the American Psychology Association (A.P.A.), showed that the DARE Programme was entirely useless.

To add insult to injury, the A.P.A. found it was essentially counterproductive.

The DARE Programme increased drug use in high school students who completed the DARE Programme compared to those teenagers who did not.

In 1998, due to these studies, the DARE programme would lose its federal funding.

The study at Indiana University, the reason that D.A.R.E.’s failure was that it boosted drug awareness so that “as the kid’s age, [students] become more curious about the drugs they’ve learned about from the nice police officers.”

DARE Scientific Research

Throughout the 1990s, leaders of the D.A.R.E. ignored the scientific research and findings, and on some occasions, they would try and bribe academic journals not to publish the studies.

Instead, the program leaders would tell the press that solid public support for DARE was a better gauge for its success than any natural science. They also would falsely claim the DARE Programme increases relationships between law enforcement and the youth.

DARE program redid its curriculum in 2001.

One of the new program’s now-deleted “fact sheets” claimed that weed had zero medical value, falsely claiming it weakens the immune system and causes lung disease and insanity — claims disproven by many health experts.

During its heyday in the ’90s, the DARE Programme was found in over 75% of schools, and to this day, it costs taxpayers an estimated $750 million a year.

If you want a kid to try something, tell them never to try it.

Sources:

https://www.livescience.com/33795-effective.html

https://www.vox.com/2014/9/1/5998571/why-anti-drug-campaigns-like-dare-fail