OPINION: Ridding schools of D.A.R.E. cops
El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa may eliminate the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) program because voters rejected a requested 1-cent countywide sales tax increase. The demise of the county program would be a prime example of low taxes, limited government and spending cuts helping the public. The elimination of D.A.R.E. stands to benefit the county. Sheriff's deputies should be fighting crime, not teaching drugs in the classroom. Public schools, furthermore, have no business introducing the subject of drugs to our kids without conclusive proof that these efforts help.
Parents in the Widefield School District 3 have already organized to oppose elimination of D.A.R.E., which serves 21 local schools and costs the county $150,000 a year. More opposition is likely.
It's easy to understand why some parents and educators wish to preserve D.A.R.E., a program that was developed and introduced into schools with the best of intentions. Parents support the program because they love their children and they hate drugs. D.A.R.E. aims to keep our children off drugs, and some parents and educators swear it works. Anecdotal evidence can be found to show that it works for some. There's no proof, however, that shows it works for all students, or even most.
Keeping children off of drugs, unfortunately, is a dark science. Each child is a unique individual who responds in a different way to information and authority. Some children, told to avoid the cookie jar, do as they're told. Others interpret the order as a message that warm cookies have been placed in the jar, and cookies are for eating. Keeping kids out of cookie jars is tough; keeping them off drugs can be tougher.
Each child has his or her own set of unique circumstances and character traits. Therefore, a one-size-fits-all curriculum doesn't serve all children well. If the subject is math, a student who responds poorly suffers from poor math skills. That's unfortunate. If the subject is drugs, however, failure can be fatal. A child who responds the wrong way to the efforts of a D.A.R.E. officer may experiment with drugs and end up addicted.
D.A.R.E. has come under scrutiny since it was started by the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1980s. Studies have consistently called the program's value into question, and some highly credible critics have called D.A.R.E. a menace. Adjustments have been made over the years, but parents still lack credible evidence that tells them the program does more good than harm. Common sense tells us a few D.A.R.E. officers, for a county of a half million-plus residents, may do more harm than good. A little knowledge, after all, can be dangerous. D.A.R.E., at best, imparts a little knowledge about a dangerous topic in public institutions that should stick with basic subjects.
A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report in 1996 showed a rise in teen drug use of 78 percent, and the rise coincided directly with D.A.R.E.'s introduction into public schools. Ten years ago, a researcher who serves today on The Gazette's editorial board, interviewed the scientists who provided the theories that former Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates used to develop D.A.R.E., after his own child became addicted to drugs.
William Hansen, a psychology professor at the University of Southern California when Gates started D.A.R.E., complained that Gates, eager to resolve drug abuse, took an early-stages anti-drug education model and ran with it. Hansen said the material Gates used was experimental, later scrapped by scientists as a major failure.
"D.A.R.E. was misguided as soon as they adopted our material, because we were off base," Hansen said.
Hansen's research, the foundation for D.A.R.E., was based on the work of world-renowned psychologist Bill Colson, who helped psychologists Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow develop practices known as "experimental education," "humanistic psychology" and "self-actualization." Colson, Rogers and Maslow all eventually trashed the experimental approaches, writing them off as mistakes.
"D.A.R.E. is rooted in trash psychology," Colson said. "We developed the theories that D.A.R.E. was founded on, and we were wrong. Even Abe Maslow wrote about these theories being wrong before he died."
Pychologist Richard H. Blum, a Stanford School of Medicine psychology professor who once headed the single largest study of drug education in the United States, said: "We have found again and again that drug education in schools causes kids to take on drugs and alcohol sooner than they would without the education."
It doesn't take a genius to understand how small amounts of drug education in a public institutional setting might lead children to drugs. Math lessons lead children to math. Reading lessons lead children to books. Piano lessons cause children to play music. And children taught about drugs often choose to try them, despite any "just say no" message from a rare visitor.
Peer pressure and the allure of drugs present themselves in countless ways. Keeping children off drugs is too complex to be handled effectively by cops offering a one-size-fits-all program in public schools.
Drugs are a menace, and children should be kept off them by any reasonable means. But a poor attempt by schools and law enforcement, which likely poses harm, isn't a reasonable means. Only parents, grandparents, friends and private organizations should counsel kids about drugs. For some families, this means drug testing in the home. For others it means stern warnings, and a constant awareness of a child's activities. Workable options vary greatly, and depend upon countless combinations of circumstances unique to each family, neighborhood and child. But no parent, under any circumstance, should indulge a false sense of security provided by D.A.R.E. in public schools. With the failure of one massive tax proposal, it appears our community may finally be free from this costly and questionable experiment.
