Marihuana: just say no again: the old failures of new and improved anti-drug education

Reason, Jan, 2004 by Renee Moilanen

Another problem with many of the new "science-based" prevention programs is that they continue to rely on statistics measuring student attitudes toward drugs. Project ALERT celebrates outcomes such as these: "Anti-drug beliefs were significantly enhanced," among them "intentions not to use within the next six months," "beliefs that one can successfully resist pro-drug pressures," and "beliefs that drug use is harmful and has negative consequences." But whether a student intends to abstain or believes he can resist drugs does not tell us whether he actually will do so.

DARE officials likewise tried to counter bad publicity by falling back on beliefs, trumpeting that 97 percent of teachers rated DARE as good to excellent 93 percent of parents believed DARE teaches children to avoid drugs, and 86 percent of school principals believed students would be less likely to use drugs after DARE. With only beliefs to cite, DARE was left off the federal government's list of "exemplary" and "promising" prevention curricula in 2000. Many schools have dropped it from their anti-drug lineups or scaled it back to the point of irrelevance, a fact that DARE officials concede while refusing to release numbers on the decline.

Desperate to retain its dominance in the prevention market, DARE has embarked on a dramatic retooling of its lessons to keep up with the current emphasis on scientific research, decision-making skills, and resistance techniques. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has given DARE a $13.7 million grant to create a new middle school curriculum, which teachers began testing last fall. DARE officials said the new curriculum was drastically different.

"It's not just say no, it's not Nancy Reagan," says Charlie Parsons, executive director of DARE America. "We're teaching kids how to say no."

It remains to be seen how this revamped DARE curriculum is going to be any different from the old one--or, for that matter, how any of the new prevention programs are different from the old DARE. Many of the DARE tactics now scorned by educators are quite similar to those used in the new, supposedly revised programs. Project ALERT and Life Skills Training have "Ways to Say No" almost identical to the ones taught in DARE.

Drug Education as if Reality Matters

What all of these programs continue to ignore is the most crucial piece in the drug prevention puzzle--the kids, and their stubbornly independent reactions to propaganda. They aren't fooled by "decision making" skills or "healthy choices" They know what the teachers expect: Just say no.

"They make you feel as bad as they can if you do it," says one Los Angeles teenager. Still, he says, "almost every person I know has tried marijuana. Even good people."

At Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, California, a 10th-grade summer health teacher, Guy Gardner, recognizes his difficult position. About one in four Manhattan Beach students are "current" (past-month) marijuana users, according to the district's own studies, which puts them near the national average. "A lot of them know more than I do," Gardner confesses. Yet he plays the game, rattling off a list of warnings--cocaine will rot out your nose, marijuana could kill you, there's no such thing as recreational drug use--even as most of his students know how unlikely or just plain wrong it all is.