FFAF: The D.A.R.E. Program (and Why it Failed)

Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Do you know how to say no? Are you able to say no? Not to The Counsel of Trent podcast, of course. Our podcast is awesome. Always say yes to new episodes. But saying no to drugs. I dare you to say no to drugs. Because it turns out if I do that, you actually are more likely to say yes to drugs because the whole thing was a giant failure.

Welcome to The Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Monday and Wednesday we talk apologetics and theology, how to explain and defend the Catholic faith. But on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about. Whatever springs into my mind that I feel like talking about, I think you might enjoy me talking about it as well. I think for those of you especially who are around my age bracket, you have very similar nostalgic memories and things that are coming back to you as you start reaching your 30’s, 40’s, and it’s time to look back as you look ahead to the future.

For example, how do I talk to my kids about difficult issues like drugs? You got a lot of people that say drugs should be legal, and you drive by marijuana dispensaries, and it’s a lot different than I was a kid. And I remember back when the federal government was really invested in trying to get me to not do drugs. So if you’re in my age bracket, did you graduate high school the late ’90s, early 2000s? If you did, you probably remember then going to elementary school in the late ’80s and the early ’90s. And you remember D.A.R.E., Drug Abuse Resistance Education. It had the cool red font D.A.R.E., and you could get your own D.A.R.E. T-shirt. And people would come. The guy… People were giving the talks. You could… Black T-shirt with the red D.A.R.E. letters on it. Just say no to drugs.

And I remember D.A.R.E. It was intense, actually. Because the people who came to teach it, they were cops. They were police officers. These weren’t people who were really trained to actually educate children and give them successful strategies and decision-making strategies. I think they were there really to scare us straight. That reminds me of that episode of The Office with Michael Scott. “I’m here to scare you straight.” Either to really scare us or, I’m going to be honest with you, I think a lot of them went there to tell kids, “You can say no to drugs. And by the way, if you know anyone who’s doing drugs, you can tell me. Because I’m a police officer, and that makes my caseload way easier if you rat out your parents or rat out other people who are doing drugs. So why don’t we all sit down in a circle? And the first question is, ‘Do you know anyone doing drugs, and where do they live?'”

But the program, what’s hilarious… Obviously drugs are bad, okay? Drugs are bad. Obviously drugs… It depends, of course, what you mean by drugs. But illegal drugs are often abused. They’re illicit. Legal drugs can be abused, right? The biggest crisis we have in our country now is people abusing legal opioids and the opioid addiction. Whereas back when I was a kid in the ’90s, I think they were telling us the biggest thing is don’t do crack. Me, some suburban kid in the white part of town. “Don’t do crack, kids.” I don’t think in suburbia there’s that much of a crack epidemic going on, but it was all a thing back in the ’80s. So I think that’s what everybody wanted to… You probably should have told us just not to smoke or drink, but I remember it was always about methamphetamines, speed, crack, crack cocaine. I’m thinking, “Wow, I don’t think anybody in this class has come anywhere close to these sorts of hard drugs.” Marijuana, maybe. I’m sure that happened, but not this other stuff.

So I have an article here I want to read to you and just talk about the D.A.R.E. program. “D.A.R.E. began in 1983. The federal government introduced this program. It was developed by Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and started in the LA Unified School District. And so D.A.R.E. workshops were delivered by policemen who would go into classrooms, kindergarten through grade 12, aimed at teaching kids to reject drug use and violent gang culture.”

I remember also being told to not wear gang colors. That was the other one. I remember one day they said, “Gangs are bad, okay? You don’t want to join a gang. You got your family. That’s the gang you need to have.” And being told… I remember being told in class, “Don’t wear gang colors.” But then none of the lecturers ever told us what gang colors there were. What am I actually not allowed to wear? And so you’re living in a state of fright. Or you’re told something generic like, “Don’t wear red because the Bloods wear red.” What is it? Bloods wear red. Crips wear blue. Or Latin Kings, they wear yellow. I don’t know. But it’s don’t wear red because gangs wear red. So if you wear your red Mario Brothers T-shirt, you’re going to get shot outside this…

I don’t mean to make fun of this. Obviously gangs and drugs are bad, and they’re still bad in really bad school districts around. But D.A.R.E. was not a really good… It was not a good program to try to combat gang violence or drug use. What it was trying to do.

So read the article here. It says, “After 10 years of the D.A.R.E. program, the American Psychological Association ran a study of over 1000 people who received D.A.R.E. education in the sixth grade. The study assessed the efficacy of the program by tracking the subsequent drug use of the subjects when they hit their 20s. The results of the study found that the program had no meaningful impact on rates of drug use, attitudes toward drugs, or self-esteem. The National Institute of Justice research found the program has some effect, but on a modest scale. And another study carried out by the University of Illinois concluded that the D.A.R.E. program was counterproductive. Students who participated in D.A.R.E. were more likely to use drugs.”

And that kind of makes sense to where I was at. A bunch of suburban kids, and this cop comes in and tells us, “Don’t do crack cocaine. Don’t do methamphetamines. Don’t smoke marijuana.” Why? You seem really uptight and bent out of shape. You don’t want us to do something? Maybe I do want to do it because it’s really fun, and I’m getting into the years where I’m going to be rebellious soon.

“Psychologist William Coulson said, ‘D.A.R.E. gives kids the confidence to say no to drugs and to say yes to drugs. It gives them more confidence than they should have.’ By this, Coulson implies that the program educated students about drugs they were otherwise not aware of. One theory is that the D.A.R.E. program educates children on drugs, but approaches it from a non-educational standpoint by telling kids to say no instead of telling them what happens if they take the drug. This can lead to children participating in risky, ignorant behavior.” And I remember this. I remember it would tell you about drugs, say no to drugs, and there would be videos telling you what happens when you’re on drugs. But they weren’t graphic enough to scare us.

Honestly, you know what the scariest thing was to scare me away from drugs as a kid? There were these… The commercials. Public service announcements online. I think I was in junior high, so that would’ve been ’98, ’99. And it was smoking, and it had people vomiting up maggots into a sink. And there was actually a warning on the PSA saying, “Graphic. Caution advised,” to say this is what smoking is doing to you. At least that was graphic and would scare you. I don’t want to smoke or do something like that.

But I remember once watching a D.A.R.E. video. And they’re like, “What are methamphetamines? Methamphetamines are also called speed. People who take methamphetamines have hyperactive energy.” And I remember the clip was of this woman running around her kitchen, but she wasn’t running. She was just walking and they sped up the video. She wasn’t even trying to act frantic. She was probably walking normally and they just sped up the video to three times the speed. And she’s walking super fast around the kitchen, and she takes the milk. And instead of putting the milk in the refrigerator, she puts the milk in the oven. Crazy high jinks when we’re on meth. We’re on methamphetamines, we might forget to put the milk away. Getting more animated for this one maybe… Could be the methamphetamines.

But I remember that you would watch these, and it made drugs… Say no to drugs. Drugs are bad. But it wasn’t really encouraging you that much to not do drugs. Or gangs seemed cool. There was a whole… That we can go out and do stuff together, and they’ll accept me, and you can have a gun, and own an area of town.

When I was a kid, there was only one gang I wanted to join, and that was the Foot Clan. So you had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out. I think that was what, 1990? Live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it was actually kind of dark and gritty for a kid’s movie. The sequel Secrets of the Ooze is… Parents complained so the Turtles could not use their ninja weapons anymore. Super lame. But I remember in there the Foot Clan. One of the… The teenager in the movie gets tempted to join the Foot Clan and work for Shredder, and it was awesome. They were a gang, right? But it was an awesome gang. They had a half pipe where you could skateboard, they had arcade games, they had ninja weapons. I’m like, “Forget what this D.A.R.E. guy told me. If the Foot Clan tells me to join their gang, I want to be in. Shredder, sign me up.”

Anyway, it goes on to say here. “The D.A.R.E. program lost funding in 1998, and has since been replaced by the keepin’ it REAL program.” REAL is all in caps. But the program is KIR, keepin’ it REAL. “This program is more interactive based on the criticism that D.A.R.E. workshops just consisted of police officers standing up and talking. In keepin’ it REAL workshops, students work together and practice saying no to each other through role playing. The keepin’ it REAL website suggests that the program reduces rates of alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco use by 45%. Other people recommend things like cognitive behavioral therapy to help young people develop proper thinking habits, the ability to assess situations.”

And honestly, if I’m going to tell my kids about drugs, I’m not going to scare them to death. If you touch a marijuana joint, you’re going to die. You’re going to go crazy and get reefer madness. You go crazy, reefer madness. It’s just like anything. You don’t want to oversell the risk. I’m just going to tell my kids, “Look. Drugs, like a lot of things in life, are bad for you. They can be addictive. They’re unhealthy. And even if the worst things don’t happen, they’ll probably just make you lazy, and waste your time, and make you somebody you don’t really want to be. When you could be spending your time, energy, and your money on stuff that’s going to make you way happier in life.”

And I think that’s important. When you give people a message, you don’t want to overdramatize. “This is so bad. I’m not even going to say any more. Just say no.” You don’t want to act like it’s not a big deal either. You just want to be sober and realistic when you’re telling people, especially young people, about dangers. And then encourage them to say, “Look, you’re smart. You can think through a situation. How do you make the right decision in these different cases?”

And it’s important to be able to overcome peer pressure, not just to be some kind of weirdo. Don’t just say no. You can tell your friends, “I’m not interested in that. It’s not really my thing. I don’t really like smoking. I don’t like drinking. I’m okay. Why are you pressuring me? Why are you being weird? That’s kind of weird. You’re only going to be happy if I do this with you? Why do you care what I do?” I’m one of the cool kids. I know how to say no in a cool way. Not really. I’m still trying to figure that out.

All righty. Well, thank you guys so much. I hope this was a helpful retreat back into the nostalgia laden past of D.A.R.E., and all the things they told us as kids that may or may not have been true. Or at least may or may not have been effective. But thank you guys so much, and I hope you have a very blessed weekend.

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