Mike tells Sarah that the D.A.R.E. program did not, in fact, keep kids off drugs. But that’s just the beginning of the debunking. Digressions include Martin Scorsese, Iceland and control groups. Neither co-host was cool enough to be offered drugs in high school.
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Mike tells Sarah that the D.A.R.E. program did not, in fact, keep kids off drugs. But that’s just the beginning of the debunking. Digressions include Martin Scorsese, Iceland and control groups. Neither co-host was cool enough to be offered drugs in high school.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
D A R E
Mike: I just remember thinking as a child, that the experience of adult life would be people in leather jackets coming up to you and being like, “Do you want to do bad stuff?”
Sarah: Welcome to You’re Wrong About, the show where we look at things that used to be things and say, “Hey, that's not a thing.”
Mike: That’s a good tagline. Peak tagline.
Sarah: I was unsure of your expression. You had a Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator kind of a face on there.
Mike: It took a second then it hit me.
Sarah: Right. Because so many things aren't things.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I’m Sarah Marshall. And I'm a writer for The Believer, and Buzzfeed, and the New Republic. Although I publish things very infrequently these days.
Mike: Well, so do I, so do we all.
Sarah: But we do an episode of this show nearly every week, which is really quite often to do anything.
Mike: This is the only way my mother knows I'm alive. This is proof of life. And today we're talking about DARE, drug abuse resistance education.
Sarah: Oh that’s what stood for. Which I remember quite well from my youth.
Mike: Do you want to talk about your memories of DARE, and your experience of resisting drugs?
Sarah: My experience of DARE is looped together with my other memories of drug prevention education when I was in elementary school. I remember we had people come and told us about their past drug use and all of their nightmare drug experiences. So I remember learning that if you do too much cocaine, you'll end up with a hole through the middle part of your nose.
Mike: I remember that.
Sarah: Which I thought was very grotesque and the kind of thing that we were taught to feel. Those silly drug users, why would you do that? Why would you do drugs? Why would you worship Satan? None of these things make sense.
What I remember specifically that I think was a DARE day was that we had a lady cop come talk to us, and that she and my PE teacher - who I loathed - had a little moment of commiseration. And I was like, all right, the police are friends with the PE teachers, I don't really think that I can trust at least this lady either.
Mike: Do you think it worked, were you afraid of using drugs?
Sarah: I was. I was. And I sure that it had to do with the fact that this was in like fifth or sixth grade. When a teacher tells you something in school, you're like, well, obviously this is reliable information, because this is the whole paradigm of my existence. So we had that curriculum of, if you try a drug, even once you will get picked off of the path of safety and you will be lost forever. So just don't even turn your head. Nothing good out there.
And I did not do drugs until really late. Also, partly because I didn't have a lot of friends when I was growing up. And also didn't have siblings either, so it didn't really have anyone to receive drugs from.
Mike: So that's the real debunking of this episode. Just make your kids super uncool so that nobody wants to give them drugs.
One of the things I learned in the research for this episode is that Seattle was one of the first cities to abandon DARE. Our chief of police called it an ‘utter failure’. That was the beginning of the wave of cities basically saying, “LOL fuck no”, to DARE in the late nineties. But this explains it actually, because at its peak, 75% of the school districts in America were using DARE. And it was 5.5 million children every year. It was massive, the scope of DARE. And yet, I never got DARE. The closest thing we ever had was in assembly where a cop came and gave us this scared straight lecture. And you could tell, kids can smell this. It was the kind of cop who was probably in his early twenties, probably hadn't done this super many times before, a little nervous being in front of kids. And his opening statement, his Ted Talk, I'm going to grab your attention, thing was ‘be careful out there kids, because Seattle has some of the most potent marijuana in the country’. And he got a standing ovation. The kids were just like, yeah! Even then I was like, this is not the best message to start with. The weed in Seattle is super good, so don't do it.
Sarah: Weed is also maybe the hardest drug to character assassinate, I feel like because it really doesn't have scary consequences. What's going to happen? You know, you really can't tell someone they're going to die. You can tell them that they're going to do badly on the SAT.
Mike: Or that they’re going to eat an entire box of Viannetta at once, which is what I used to do when I got high.
Sarah: So you had a cop, not in a DARE context, that was just another regular school bringing in a cop for fun.
Mike: It was not official DARE, because the curriculum of DARE was 17-hour long lessons delivered to fifth and sixth graders by a police officer. It was a very specific thing. The origins of DARE started in 1983 when Daryl Gates, the famous Daryl Gates, the guy who was the chief of police in LA. Despite this, he went to a fundraiser the night of the LA riots rather than actually dealing with them.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: I have an extremely damning quote from him. “In 1982, Gates attributed several deaths of people held in choke holds to the theory that blacks might be more likely to die from choke holds because their arteries do not open as fast as they do in normal people.” So congratulations Daryl Gates for doing your best, being a great person.
Sarah: Isn't it amazing when we talk about racism a lot and all these little ways that we're all collusive with it as white Americans. All of the nuances and all of that. And then sometimes you just see the radioactive core of American racism and you're just like, right. Normal people.
Mike: Keep in mind, this was 1982 in which he said this in a very public setting. And he was the chief of police in LA for 15 more years. This was not considered a disqualifying statement at the time. And so Daryl Gates is one of these guys that basically was an architect of police departments getting more militarized and police departments cracking down on drugs. This whole idea of the war on drugs, just say, no, all of this stuff in the early eighties is really ramping up, and LA was seen as an exemplar of this new form of policing. At one point, he told the interview that infrequent or casual drug users, “ought to be taken out and shot.” And so this is the guy that invents DARE.
He says later, this is an interview with the LA Times more than a decade later. He says what really began his crusade to do more drug resistance education was that he would send undercover cops into high schools to try to buy drugs and he was really shocked at how easy it was for them to buy drugs. And so DARE comes out of essentially Daryl Gates' crusade.
Sarah: To entrap teenagers.
Mike: Yes. To entrap teenagers, essentially. And so somehow, he gets this idea that it would be good to have cops go into schools and scare kids straight, essentially, and tell them about what drugs really do to the body.
He gets linked up with this woman named, Ruth Rich, who's the health education coordinator for the LA school district. And she has a curriculum called the SMART Curriculum, which we're going to have a lot of acronyms in this episode. SMART stands for something school, must, abuse. I don't know. It stands for something. Anyway, she has this program called SMART. So she and him team up to have police officers deliver this curriculum. So the idea is you want to get police into the schools who have more authority to tell kids what drugs actually do. And then you have this curriculum that also has things like self-esteem and resisting peer pressure built into it.
So there's this scared straight component, but then there's also, this is how we interact with each other kids. And this is how, when somebody offers you drugs, this is how you just say no, et cetera. So they teamed up, they launched it in LA in 1983. In 1986, a study came out showing that it works, showing that the kids have more knowledge of the consequences of drugs, they are more afraid of doing drugs, that this whole scared straight approach has really gotten into these kids and they're like, “I'll never do drugs.”
Sarah: I was one of those kids. Yeah. I talk just like that.
Mike: Yes, exactly. Just pure falsetto. So this study comes out. The whole country is thinking, wow, what a commonsense approach. Just tell kids that drugs are bad. Then Congress passed the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act of 1986. Buried in the small print of this law is a provision that says 10% state grants for drug reduction have to be given to programs that quote, ‘deliver classroom instruction by uniformed law enforcement officials.’
Sarah: I love that they stipulate ‘uniformed’.
Mike: So basically Congress, people read whatever low rent magazine article is profiling DARE, and they decide, oh, this works in LA. This works based on one study that comes out, therefore let's expand it everywhere. So this goes from a $140,000 program to a $10 million program nearly overnight. There are different estimates but DARE eventually costs $700 million to $2 billion every year. It's massive. The amount of resources and time and effort that gets thrown into this program is immense.
Sarah: You know what's amazing is that this seems like the only way that you could get this much money into schools would be by having a cop have to bring it. The idea that the teachers don't have enough authority anymore to keep the kids off of drugs, we have to have it delivered by a police officer in uniform. It feels like they were doing, how can we get funding for schools, which obviously no one thinks they should have. I know, you know what everyone loves? Law and order.
Mike: One of the really gross elements of corruption of this that really didn't get remarked upon until decades later, is first of all, this 1986 study that came out is to this day the only study to find a positive effect of DARE. It's the only one defined, hey, this actually works.
Sarah: But Michael, how can that be when I was a fifth grader in 1998 and ‘99. Why would they continue to use something that had no evidence suggesting the effectiveness of it for an additional 13 years?
Mike: Yeah, no, it always stops working as soon as we know that it isn't helping. So first of all, this 1986 study doesn't have a control group. They're just comparing before and after studies. Secondly, it's only surveying the kids. So these are fifth and sixth grades. He tests them before and then he tests them after. Hey, they know more six months after this program than they did before it. Okay. Did they use fewer drugs? We don't know. Not many fifth and sixth graders are using drugs anyway. And so having 11 year old’s say, oh, I'm never going to do drugs. Okay. Most 11 year old’s probably said that.
Sarah: 11 year old’s say a lot of things.
Mike: Yeah. And also, this is also a time of afterschool specials, ding, ding, ding. And other messages in the culture that drugs are bad. So it's also not clear that this idea of ‘just say no’ only was delivered to the kids through DARE. This is why you have control groups, right. Many kids at that time probably would have been getting these messages anyway.
Third rampant corruption thing about this, is the dude who wrote that study gets a job at DARE, and he authors the manual for teachers. So this guy who ostensibly is a researcher was already angling for a job at DARE when he was doing this “independent study”.
Sarah: Hey guys, big fan, long time listener, first time caller.
Mike: But then what's so amazing about DARE is that based on this one study and mostly all this congressional funding, all these school districts are just getting money thrown at them. They're getting huge federal grants. And so a lot of these schools are like, okay, well, we've got $2 million to spend. What do we do?
Sarah: Can they spend it on, like, hockey?
Mike: No, this is the thing, it's drug money. And the federal government is saying, Hey, spend at least 10% of it on - we're not going to say the name of this program - but a little program that has uniformed officers come into the school. We're not going to preferentially treat any of these programs, one of the ones that has uniformed officers.
Sarah: But the one that has a national umbrella structure, who are going around glad-handing with you already probably. Not necessarily them, but maybe.
Mike: And so all these schools basically have all this money. They have to spend it on drug stuff, and every other school district is doing the same thing. And so of course, principals are subject to peer pressure just like kids are. And so they all decide to start setting up this program. And one of the geniuses actually administratively of DARE, is that most of the fundraising was actually at local levels. So we don't actually know how much money DARE was getting or how big DARE was. Because it's all these franchises around the country where an individual principal will set up there and then he'll have fundraisers and he'll have pizza parties and all this kind of stuff. And there isn't actually all that much top down-ery, it's mostly him doing his own local fundraising.
And so parents and teachers and principals figure out that it's a really easy thing to fundraise for because everybody's seen it. They've seen it on Frontline, they've seen it in magazine articles. The parents are like, “Oh, you know, I'm hearing a lot about this DARE thing, I'll give $50 bucks to this, to my local school to implement it.” The federal funds start coming down and they're getting matched by tons of local donations. It's the easiest thing to fundraise for. And of course we all remember the bumper stickers ,and the t-shirts, and the coffee mugs, and all the merch.
Sarah: I hope that somebody somewhere was like embezzling or siphoning some of the neighborhood DARE money into something else.
Mike: Yeah. One of the reasons, actually, that it was so popular, a lot of the teachers and principals have since said that it came with a lot of ancillary benefits. So one of the things that DARE did was at the end of the program, the kids could get a free pizza party. And this was a time when education funding was being cut. It was in the middle of Reagan austerity. Having a pizza party and having some funding that you could probably fudge and use for some classroom materials or maybe you can buy a computer for your classroom. You can fudge these things a little bit. The teachers loved this because it's like, oh, well we have this not really a slush fund, but some sort of funding that people aren't looking at for all that closely, because it's coming from local sources and we can say, oh, we're using it to teach kids to resist drugs. But really, we can have a pizza party and at the pizza party, it’s not really going to be a ‘don't do drugs’, pizza party, it just going to be a pizza party for the kids and that's good for the kids and so we're going to do that.
And so a lot of the reason for the popularity of DARE was it was just a way to get free money. And the teachers, according to a lot of the teachers afterwards, really liked that they could hand their classroom over to a cop for an hour. And they wouldn’t have to do anything for an hour.
Sarah: And just put their heads down on the desk.
Mike: Or just grade papers.
Sarah: Or go to the car and smoke a doob, or whatever.
Mike: So it was free money and also a lot of them probably believed it was doing some good. It was also building relationships between kids and cops, which is probably in some way a good thing. You're creating some sort of goodwill and some relationships.
Sarah: And I'm sure it was nice for the cops to be able to be like, “Hello children, I protect our community.” And just to not have to do anything violent that day.
Mike: I've been obsessed for the last couple of months with this theory called ‘policy resistance’. That we think of the state as having all these efficient systems, and using evidence and then transferring evidence into policy in this one-to-one, a to b, very direct way. And then there's all these policy areas where we know what we're doing isn't working, but we keep doing it anyway.
And so one of the really striking things about DARE is that as early as 1991, there's already literally more than a dozen studies showing that this doesn't work. So within eight years, we already know that the knowledge and attitude gains that you get for having a cop come and talk to kids, wear off. They last about six months, maybe a year. And after six months or year, the kids have completely forgotten about it, they've forgotten the cop's name, they've forgotten all the information that they've learned. And they aren't any less likely to use drugs than anyone else.
There are a couple studies that even find what's called the ‘boomerang effect’, that kids who have gone through the DARE program are more likely to use drugs. And one of the theories is that by scaring the shit out of them about stuff like cocaine and heroin, it's basically delivering the message that weed and cigarettes and alcohol aren't that bad. So it makes them more likely to do that. Although that's an isolated effect, that gets a lot of headlines in the nineties, that DARE is teaching kids to do drugs rather than not to do drugs. But that's a pretty inconsistent finding.
Whereas an extremely consistent finding is this tapering off effect. Whenever you read an article about DARE, there's always this litany or this list, ‘A 1991 analysis by the government accountability office found no effect’, ‘A 1992 analysis from the department of justice also found…’, ‘A 1994 study’, ‘a 1996 study’. It's just a waterfall of these studies coming out and all finding, it's not like it's inconsistent or who can say, it's really very clear that this is having no effect and yet it persists.
And so the DARE program itself takes three different approaches to this throughout the ‘90s. This is how DARE spends the ‘90s. There’s all of this research coming out that what we're doing, isn't working.
Sarah: This is like the biography of a dying starlet where it's like, and then the ‘90s and the downward spiral, and she was defensive and rarely emerged from her condo.
Mike: I mean, one of the responses is that the program gets really defensive. So in the ‘90s, the National Institute for Justice wanted to do this definitive study on whether DARE works or not. They want to collect all the research that's been done into a big analysis, meta-analysis. And so they hire this think tank to spend two years looking at every single study that's been done and come out with some sort of definitive recommendation.
So this think tank does that, and they send it to the National Institute of Justice. And the National Institute of Justice spikes it, they don't publish. Because they're getting pressure from DARE not to publish it. DARE goes on this NRA-like campaign of terror whenever anybody questions the model, they question the delivery, they question the lack of interactiveness in the lessons. They go into the same defensive crouch. So they start to discredit their critics. They start to accuse them of all kinds of wild stuff.
Sarah: So they're gaslighting.
Mike: They’re basically gaslighting. And so DARE pressures the National Institute of Justice not to publish this report. They decide to spike it. Then the think-tank researcher sent it to the American Journal of Public Health, which looks at it and is like, “Yeah, this is really good research, we're going to publish this.” Then DARE starts threatening the American Journal of Public Health and trying to get them to publish it. And the journal is like, this is not how science works.
Sarah: That’s a nice Journal of Public Health you got here, would be a shame if someone pulled funding.
Mike: Also the DARE program, they’re pretty public about this. They're like, we have some concerns about the methodology of this report. And then the think-tank researchers point out, this is a meta-analysis, we don't have a methodology. We're looking at every single study that's been done and we're describing them. We're collating them, we're putting them in one place. And again, it's not like the findings are inconsistent. It's not like in Kansas City it worked, and then in Oklahoma it didn't. No, it doesn't work anywhere. So it's not like we're making up some methodology to make you look bad. All we're doing is reading the studies that have been published and putting them into one place. So this is essentially what the journal says too, the journal is like, this is how literature reviews. Sorry, you don't get to suppress the publication of something that has already been published. You don't get to do that.
So it comes out and this gets some traction. One of the things that shocked me doing the research for this, is how much most of America knew that DARE didn't work. When every one of these studies comes out, it's in USA Today, Frontline did I think two different expos of how it wasn't working. The New York Times wrote stories. It's everywhere. This was not buried in the footnotes of random epidemiological journals. This was out in the bloodstream of the public. When this think-tank study comes out, finally in the American Journal of Public Health, DARE puts out a press release with the title, “Pro-drug groups attack prevention programs.”
Sarah: Oh my God. DARE, get it together.
Mike: The guy that runs DARE, at this point, his name is Glenn Levant, who's a former LA cop. And he takes a very sorry, cop-ish approach to debunking these studies. He basically accuses them of being for drugs and against children. Every single time one of the studies comes out there's a quote from Glen Levant, saying the same shit.
Sarah: Why do you hate children so much?
Mike: Literally, yes. So after this think tank study comes out, Glen Levant, gives an interview to the LA Times where he says, ‘these Bush league tactics are transparent for what they are, attempts to support various individual personal agendas at the expense of our children.’ So essentially you love drugs, you hate children. He keeps doing this thing where as soon as journalists contact him and say, oh, Hey, by the way, there's, you know, 32 studies showing that your program doesn't work. He will send them Gallup polls and this other social survey research, one of the ones that he sends to journalists, 90% of young people said that DARE helped them avoid drugs and alcohol and deal better with peer pressure.
So it's self-report data. He’s got this extremely unscientific, extremely before and after, silly thing of kids saying, “I'll never do drugs because of DARE”, but that's really not real. Real scientists are not like, oh, okay, in that case, never mind.
Sarah: Also, who is asking these children about DARE’s influence on them? Could it be DARE?
Mike: Yeah. Could it be the cop passing out multiple choice tests in the room? And the kids were like, “Officer Jones, I will fill this out the way that you want me to. “
Sarah: So really, we're teaching. That was a very sexy voice, actually.
Mike: Thank you. That's actually my real voice ,and this is my fake one.
Sarah: So I’m at, all the detractors hate children and want them to do drugs. All right.
Mike: So that's the response from DARE to all studies coming out showing that it doesn't work. What's very interesting and this goes into this policy resistance field, is the response of teachers and individual cops and administrators, that again, this is all in the public bloodstream.
And so this woman named Carol Weiss, who essentially started the policy research field, this is someone whose work I've been following for another article that I'm writing. She decides to go to a bunch of these high schools that have decided to keep DARE going, even as they know essentially that it doesn't work. So she interviews dozens of teachers and administrators. Hey, why are you doing this even though you know it doesn't work?
She publishes an article on this called, Good Reasons for Ignoring Good Evaluation: The case of drug abuse resistance. In the article. She quotes lots of individuals basically saying that the program was never trying to get kids to not do drugs. So one of the quotes that she gets is a DARE officer in Massachusetts who expressed the belief that, “No matter what some kids are going to use drugs and no drug prevention program will be able to prevent drug use entirely.” A school board member in the same town agreed. “Expecting DARE to alter student's behavior is a silly goal.” Moreover, she said, “Experimenting with drugs at some point during the teenage years is not a catastrophe for young people. The important thing is to help keep them as safe as possible.” So this is an abstinence only program. So it's not trying to keep kids as safe as possible.
Sarah: It’s not called just saying maybe.
Mike: Yeah. Or let's use drugs responsibly. It's, don't use drugs ever under any circumstances your entire existence. So her whole point of the real point is keeping kids safe is not accurate. That's not what the program is doing. Also, when DARE gets funding from parents and from the federal government, it's promising to reduce drug use. This idea that, oh, well, no programs ever are going to reduce drug use is probably true, but that's not what you're saying to get the money. To get the money you're telling people, oh, we're actually going to keep kids from doing drugs.
There's all kinds of other motivated reasoning things. She goes to another cop saying they can tell me DARE doesn't work, but my question to them is it DARE? Or is it the parents and the community? It's not a curriculum that's going to prevent a kid from drinking or using drugs, it's the community. Which again is true, but what are we spending $2 billion on? Let’s teach some volleyball.
Sarah: Well, and just when you think about how hard it is to get food stamps for people, you know. How we have these filibusters about whether people should be allowed to buy soda. But should we spend possibly billions of dollars on a national program that effectively does nothing? Why not.
Mike: I think this is a very human response. There's a lot of people saying, well, what we're really doing you can't measure. So there's these kids who told the cop in the classroom that his parents were beating him. And then the cop sent heroic officers to come and save the kid. You can't measure that in your studies. Which, you kind of can measure that in your studies.
And then also you can achieve that goal with counselors. If you want to find out what kids are really going through in their home life, you wouldn't send a cop into their classroom to tell them not to do drugs. You'd send someone into their classroom to find out what's going on at home.
So these weird little frosting side benefits are somehow cast as the central reason for the program. It’s actually a great idea to have somebody talking to kids about what's going on at home and finding out if there's some abuse or stress or something that they're experiencing, but why would you have a cop lecturing them about not snorting heroin? That's not a great way to do that.
My favorite one, DARE leadership, this isn't Glenn Levant, but it's somebody else like a vice-president at DARE says, “Look, scientists will tell you that bumblebees can't fly, but we know better.” And you're like, do they say bumblebees can't fly?
Sarah: I've never had that conversation with a scientist.
Mike: It's essentially just, scientists can't spot the nose on their own face. They’re just making shit up, and it doesn't actually matter. And this becomes one of the ways that it gets this institutional momentum and just keeps it for more than a decade. It's 20 more years after these studies come out that anybody starts abandoning DARE.
Sarah: It’s a little bit like waiting out a lawsuit, like when we talk about with Exxon Valdez. We’re like, obviously the plaintiffs are right, but we cannot acknowledge that. And so we're just gonna keep fending everybody off through character assassinations and frivolous motions. And it's what you do when you just can't acknowledge failure, you just deny, deny, deny. And so it is like this entity that fell apart psychically.
Mike: Totally. The only useful response that DARE amounted to any of these results, and this is one of the ways that it fended off these criticisms, is that every time one of these studies came out, it would do some cosmetic work. In the early nineties, it says, okay, it's not going to be 17 weeks anymore, it's going to be 10 weeks. And later on when all this trailing off research starts to show up, they say, well, maybe it's not for fifth and sixth graders anymore, maybe it's for seventh and eighth graders. And these aren’t major reforms, but it's a way for people to give themselves the excuse to say, “Oh, well, they're reforming, they’re fixing it.”
Sarah: We're doing the thing that doesn't work, but we're doing it less intensively.
Mike: Exactly, this is actually the less intensive thing. This reminds me of one of my favorite responses to this, that one of the principals of the interview says, “If I had my druthers, it would be taught from fifth through 12th grade, that would be the opportunity to address addictive behavior.”
So basically this thing isn't working, so instead of doing it for 10 weeks, let's do it for seven years. That will really help kids do it. Can you imagine just more and harder, basically, this thing that doesn't work?
Sarah: Yeah. It's the bad sex principle of legislation.
Mike: And this is the policy resistance thing. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is actually this great foundation that does a lot of really interesting work on childhood obesity now, they funded DARE to the tune of, I think it was like $15 or $40 million, some huge grant in the nineties as all this bad research was coming out. And they were very clear about the fact that, we know this doesn't work, but DARE has an unparalleled structure. They're in 75% of the school districts around the country, the districts are already convinced. If you started a program from scratch, you'd have to go district to district trying to get it rolled out. And the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was like, they have the infrastructure, they just don't have the content. And so we want to work with them to give them much better content under this distribution model that they have.
Sarah: It’s also a corporate Raider approach. It's well, you have name recognition and all of these franchises and we're going to sell our product and your storefront.
Mike: Right? Another reason why it was such a behemoth and why you really couldn't get rid of it, parents loved it. So parents loved to go to these parties, loved to go to the fundraisers. One of the reasons why it remained so popular for so long - and I find this really interesting - is this thing of human psychology where you explain something that you are going to do anyway.
So a lot of kids, when you ask them, why did you never do drugs? They'll say, oh, I had this DARE curriculum, and it scared the shit out of me, and I never did drugs. Well, it turns out most of those kids that they didn't do DARE, they would have said, oh, my aunt was addicted to drugs and that convinced me never to do drugs. Or, I saw an after-school special and that convinced me never to do drugs. They would have found some narrative, but they're parents are like, “Oh, our Jessica says she didn't do drugs because of DARE.” They become crusaders and DARE dispatches them to write letters to the editor and to fight back against all this media stuff with these anecdotes. When actually come on, you're rich, you live in the suburbs, you're white. She's not getting offered drugs, particularly. As parents, you don't actually know if Jessica is doing drugs. My parents didn't know that I was doing drugs. So parents, as ambassadors for this program, when you think about it, they're not operating from remotely complete information.
Sarah: Right. It allows you to do something that feels like an act of good. You sell the mugs or the bumper stickers, you do the fundraising, you feel like you're combating drugs in your community and making it safer. I'm sure that there's some measurable, psychic benefit to feeling like you're doing something that has a tangible effect on your child's welfare. And even if that's not true, that you would want to continue doing it because it gives you a feeling of effectualness in your own life and this kind of respite from the human condition.
Mike: I also think humans are really bad at this idea of control groups. One of the things that was not remarked upon at the time and is really the big lie behind all of these programs in the eighties, is that drug use was falling very steadily from 1975 until 1992. It was falling among DARE schools and non-DARE schools and rural states and urban states. The general drug use of teenagers in the country was falling really steadily. And so it was actually the case that after two years these kids were less likely to do drugs. But not because of DARE, just because the whole country was not doing as many drugs. And people don't know exactly why that is. It could have been the price of drugs, it could have been the availability of drugs.
But you can't draw this before and after causal link just because Jessica got a lecture from a police officer that's why she's not doing drugs. When most of her peers who didn't get that lecture are also not doing drugs. One of the things, a lot of the studies after the fact point out is that not that many teenagers do drugs, drinking and smoking fine, but cocaine use and heroin use and even weed among teenagers, it's a really small percentage of teenagers. So the fact that your kid didn't do any of those drugs, doesn't have very much to do with DARE, it's just 96% of teenagers don't do fucking cocaine and heroin. Those are super hardcore drugs. The vast majority of people don't do them.
Sarah: Yeah. The DARE premise, too, is based on this idea of autonomy that I don't think really exists, that you actually get to decide whether you're exposed to addictive substances in a way that I think in many cases we aren't.
Mike: Well, this brings us to the downfall of DARE.
Sarah: The wearing an ill-fitting wig in public years, making frivolous calls to the Neighborhood Watch Association years. Yeah.
Mike: People start to realize that this whole criminal framing of drug use is really not useful. And one of the things that lights the fuse of DARE’s downfall is Glen Levant, the head of DARE. One of these interviewers is asking him about how the research shows that it doesn’t work, duh, duh, duh. And he says, oh no, it does work because when we're in the schools, we're cracking down on drug dealers, because the officer's undercover are finding out who's dealing them drugs. And then the interviewer was like, wait, so you're pretending to be educating the kids, but you're actually getting them to snitch on their classmates? And in some cases, their parents? The officers are actually trying to get kids to snitch on their parents for using drugs. And there's a bunch of cases, well publicized cases, where kids are turning in their parents because officers are coercing them into giving them up. And people start to see that it's maybe not a great idea to have this criminalized. These people that want arrests In the schools and lurking around, that's not the tone you want to strike. You want to create a safe place for kids, and that's not safe if there's a cop there.
Sarah: Can you imagine also being a police officer, talking to some fifth grader who mentions or implies that their parents are partaking in illegal drug use, and you're like, “Oh yes, this is gonna beef up my numbers”, or something.
Mike: There's also a really humiliating incident where DARE prints a bunch of pencils with the phrase, ‘too cool to do drugs’ on them in comic sans, obviously. And they don't realize that as kids sharpen the pencil, they say ‘cool to do drugs’ and then eventually ‘do drugs’.
Sarah: Why didn't they just have the lettering go the other way?
Mike: Behind the scenes, the real thing that kills DARE is the No Child Left Behind Act.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: Yeah. Deep in this law there's this footnote where it says any drug prevention efforts that schools are doing have to be evidence-based. And these two words ‘evidence-based’, is what kills DARE, because no child left behind sets up this panel that essentially reviews all the evidence. All of a sudden, all these federal bureaucrats have to justify all of the spending that they're giving to these various drug programs, and really everything that schools are doing, and they just cannot justify any money to DARE anymore.
So in 2001, the budget of DARE started to shrink, and they're not getting any federal funding anymore. And eventually without the free money, the schools just can't justify keeping it. And so school by school, it starts to deflate. And so by 2010, their revenue is down to $3.7 million from $700 million.
What's really interesting is that in 2010, DARE obviously is panicking. Their budget is 1/100th of what it used to be. And so DARE completely overhauls and essentially relaunches itself, it's now called Keeping it REAL. And R E A L stands for something, resistance, education and action.
Sarah: Lingering.
Mike: What's funny, is that in all of the reviews that you've read about current DARE Keeping it REAL, it actually works really well. One of the most effective drug resistance education programs. It's actually good now, they got a bunch of really good behavioral scientists. They drew upon all the evidence there was, and they completely overhauled their team.
Sarah: They tried trying.
Mike: I don't know if it's even delivered by cops anymore, but it's actually one of the best ones. But because it changed its name and because this whole paradigm has soured in the public imagination, none of us really know about it and it doesn't have any of the cache or any of the merch.
Sarah: So it’s like a Scorsese movie, where you have all these ill-gotten gains and big adventures and all the cash you want, and then you're humbled and then you start your life over. And you're like, I got away with it, but I have to live in Seattle now.
Mike: So this is a three layer debunking. Level one debunking is DARE didn't work, fine. But while I was researching this, I got super obsessed with why DARE didn't work. And basically level two debunking is that fucking none of these programs worked. Teaching kids to resist drugs, this whole idea of resistance education, basically doesn't work. So there's all this literature about this that essentially DARE is an abstinence only program and all of these programs, all this ‘just say no’ stuff. And so DARE tries to dress it up, once ‘just say no’ becomes not cool anymore, they changed the slogan to ‘use your refusal skills’. But it's still just say no. If you're using your refusal skills, you're saying no. So the instructions have not actually changed.
So this whole idea of scaring kids straight and having an authority figure come in and lecture them, just really doesn't work anywhere. And one of the biggest reasons why is that you have to exaggerate things to scare people. You have to tell them that, like you said, if you use drugs once, you're going to fucking die. You'll be hooked immediately. If you use weed, it's going to cause schizophrenia. And one of the things that they find in these studies is that that just doesn't hold up when kids are exposed to reality. That a lot of kids, their friend's older brother smokes weed, the quarterback smoked weed, and they're fine. And so these kids are looking at that and they're saying, well, he doesn't have schizophrenia, he's not foaming at the mouth. So maybe nothing I learned in DARE was true. Right? Once you plant that little lie, the whole program becomes a lie.
Sarah: The walls start falling down.
Mike: Yeah, and you're like, well, this is fine. And so in the late ‘90s they started to come out with these studies that really try to define what makes a successful drug prevention program. And so I found one of these, and she has 11 reasons for what makes these programs successful or unsuccessful. And first of all, they have to be appropriate to the age of the kids, which DARE wasn't really, except for fifth and sixth graders and that’s just a pretty intense thing to be talking to fifth and sixth graders about.
The biggest thing is interactiveness, essentially any lecturing, regardless of who the authority figure is, any lecture based program is just not going to stick with kids. They don't remember it if they haven't been doing it themselves. These programs have to have parents and teachers involved. They have to have tons of sessions and tons of follow-ups. And importantly, they have to be culturally sensitive. One of the things that's interesting about DARE is that it wasn't targeting high risk populations at all.
Sarah: Really?
Mike: It was the same thing. It was the same handbook for every single city in America and every type of kid, it wasn't really talking about kids who were living in poverty, Hey, somebody might offer you the opportunity to start selling drugs as a form of making money, because maybe your parents don't make so much money and you want to help out around the house. Here's how to resist that. No, it's just, oh, you're going to be at a party with your friends and they're going to ask you to do drugs. That’s not everybody’s experience.
Sarah: So it doesn't get at any of the implicit pressures that living in an unjust society creates.
Mike: Right. And who are the kids that are the most likely to do drugs? It is the kids that are maybe struggling with mental illness and trying to self-medicate, it's kids whose parents are smoking and drinking. It wasn't really dealing with how to resist that when it's available in your house and your parents are normalizing it. The kids that actually need it help with resisting, it's not necessarily peer pressure. That's a white kid, suburban white kid thing. It's more, it's normal and if your mom is smoking your whole childhood, you're very likely to smoke. And so it's very difficult to reach those kids and DARE never really tried.
And the main deficiency of DARE and what actually works in these programs is that they have to be comprehensive. So it's not just that you have the confidence to resist peer pressure for drugs, it's that you have competence to resist peer pressure for everything, and you have confidence to make friends without having to do drugs and lubricating those social experiences and doing something desperate to fit in. You need a lot of confidence to not do anything to fit in, right. To not make negative comments about people to fit in. There's all kinds of shit that we all do to try to fit in and one of them is using drugs, but to resist that you need confidence just generally in your life. And this idea that you can compartmentalize peer pressure for drugs.
One of the things that really stuck with me from one of these articles I read was that they were actually in one of the classrooms. This was an article in I think Rolling Stone, they were in one of the classrooms where the DARE curriculum was being delivered and the cop asked one of the kids, have you ever experienced peer pressure? And the kid says, no, but come the fuck on. Peer pressure isn't just drugs. Peer pressure is how you dress and how you talk and what you do on weekends and all kinds of stuff. And DARE never dealt with that. I looked at some of the successful drug resistance programs. One of the most successful programs was in Iceland.
Sarah: Those fuckers are good at so many things.
Mike: And they're good at it in the way that you would expect them to be good at it, right. They look at the evidence, they talk, they do all these focus groups of kids and parents and stuff. And instead of doing this punitive approach, they basically ask, what do you need? And what they find out is that Iceland is fucking dark and cold all the time, and there's nothing fucking else to do.
So what they do is they set up all these afterschool programs. They give parents parenting classes, very crucially, they give parents money so they can enroll their kids in piano lessons, and they start running shuttles to drive kids to and from school after hours so they can stay late if their parents are working and can't pick them up. So it's essentially, how can we help you do other things with your life? And they set up all these things. They also set up a curfew, which I'm not wild about. Between 13 and 15 years old you have to be home by 10:00 PM in the winter and midnight in the summer, which is I don’t know, punitive and bad and whatever, but it's also 13 to 15 year old’s are pretty young, and those curfews are pretty late, so it's not as bad as it could be. So that's the sick part of it. Of course after five years, predictably, drug use goes way down. The amount of time that they're spending with their parents doubles, which is really interesting to me. The amount of time they're spending with their friends also goes up and smoking goes way down. Drug use goes from 42% to 24%. They did the same thing in Lithuania, and they found essentially the same thing, that running shuttles, they open all the high schools on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to run after school programs, which is like a really obvious awesome idea.
Sarah: And doesn't cost that much money. The American mindset and the mindset that created there that, you know, well, everything basically works. Our communities work, our schools where kids are fine, it's just that there's this foreign thing called drugs that's infiltrated their lives. And we're going to tell them to say, no.
Mike: It’s actually weird that if a politician were to propose something. I want to make my constituents happier, it would seem so weird and up in the air. And doing a national happiness project.
Sarah: Oh, it's stoner thinking right there.
Mike: It sounds like shower thoughts, right. But that's essentially what Iceland was doing. If you’re into piano, we're going to give you an opportunity to play the piano. If you want to spend time with your friends in a book club, we're going to give you a place where you can meet on Tuesdays and do that. It's just basically ways of giving your life meaning, you're not forced to do any of these things, right, they're just available.
And what's interesting is we actually have models for this in the United States. So one of the studies I came across compares DARE with the boys and girls clubs and the boys and girls clubs are pretty cool. They are set up in poor neighborhoods, especially in public housing complexes. And so they were targeting these populations that were at higher risk and they just gave them something to do. That's basically what a boys and girls club is: it's a place to play basketball. It's a place to play cards, a place to meet other people, it's a place to talk about mental health stuff, or just get away from home or do some homework or whatever. It's basically just a community center. And these studies of Boys and Girls Clubs, in contrast to the studies of day or find that they reduced juvenile crime by 13%, they reduce crack use by 25%, and overall drug use by 22%. So when you have this model that really works, and then we have this model that doesn't work. And which one did we give $2 billion a year to?
But one of the things that was in the study that I found really interesting was this distinction between DARE tells you what to do whereas the boys and girls club actually gives you an opportunity to practice being around other kids, especially other kids that you don't know is difficult and stressful and something that every human just has to learn to navigate. How to deal with people that you don't know. And the Boys and Girls Club creates a space where you're meeting kids from different schools, you're meeting kids of different ages, who you don't know, and you have to actually do this. You have to actually navigate peer pressure. And how do you start a conversation with somebody and how do you deal with people that maybe you don't like very much, but you have to spend time with, but there's all these adults there and there's all these counselors that sort of help coaches those relationships along.
And they do things like conflict mediation, and just teaching kids the skills of, if you don't know somebody, how do you walk up to them and shake their hand and say, hi, my name is John. These are things that you have to do, whereas DARE is just tick boxes. It's do this and then do this, but they're not giving kids any actual practice at it because they already know each other, they're in school together, and DARE isn't particularly interactive. They're not doing a whole lot of role-playing and stuff, although they did do that in the later years, but boys and girls clubs, it's well, you have to actually do this shit. And it turns out with driver's ed, you can't tell people how to drive a car, you have to actually have them practice driving a car. We had this opportunity to do something cool and something that actually worked, but just again and again, we decided to do this thing that sounded good, but never really was good.
Sarah: Yeah. The American assumption would be like, well, if you pay for people to have social programs and chess club and basketball and outings and shuttle services, If you give people stuff, they won't try and they won't do anything. And they won't work because people don't work because they like what they're doing and they found something where they're motivated by enjoyment and a sense of community, the only way you can get people to work is by depriving them of resources. We really don't believe that people want to work. I think we're more motivated to get involved with our community, to do things for the people around us, if we're not coming from a basic place of anxiety and fear. And this idea that giving things to people is dangerous or that teaching people things affirmatively, as opposed to teaching them how to say no.
Mike: Right. So level three, debunking.
Sarah: Level three. Oh my God. This really is like Inception.
Mike: Maybe DARE did work. Well, one of the things I got was this great study, like my favorite study in years about statistical methods by which they were assessing DARE and these other programs.
This researcher, named David Gordon, goes back and he looks at the data from this study on DARE in Kansas that looked at kids over 10 years. It was 10 year longitudinal data, and it was published. It showed no effect. There was no effect on these kids over 10 years. He looks into what they're actually measuring and what they're measuring is you survey the kids at the beginning of the study of how many times have you done drugs in the last year? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or more than seven. And then you give them exactly the same study over time. The researchers noticed no difference in the average of the control kids versus the DARE kids. So the control kids did drugs 2.2 times last year, and the DARE kids did drugs 2.1 times. You don't find these big statistical differences.
However, what he does is he starts slicing up the data. So he starts looking at how many kids did drugs less than two times last year versus how many kids did drugs more than two times last year. So he comes up with 67 different ways of separating out the data. So he started looking at different groups, he separates kids who had done drugs before the study versus kids who had never done drugs before the study, he separates seventh and eighth graders. He separates boys and girls. So he draws all these arbitrary lines through the data and then starts comparing them. So he gets 67 different comparisons just from different ways of looking at the data, breaking it up and putting it back together again. 24 of those ways actually showed a difference. So if you phrase the results in very careful ways, then you can find differences.
So what he uses is in the all participant analysis, stay with me, the male DARE participants were 67% less likely than controls to report weekly use of alcohol in 7th grade. So you can see in there, there's a lot of very subtle caveats that he's got male DARE participants and seventh grade DARE participants. But if you release that, if you put that in a press release and release it, no one would notice those little caveats. They wouldn't notice that you've sliced the data in 50 different ways, they would just go, oh, male DARE participants in seventh grade are less likely to use drugs. They're not going to see all of the variables that didn't show a difference. So he starts using the same methods that he says are used by researchers now, this is the way the federal government decides which programs get funding and don't, and which programs are evidence-based and not, it’s from self-reported data from project managers on these actual programs.
So he looks at one of these other drug resistance education programs called, Lion's Quest, which does not stand for anything for the first time ever. So it's a study of 700 6th graders, data was collected pertaining to nine separate measures of drug users. Two of those measures show differences between the control and the treatment group. So out of nine variables, they've got two significant results. They phrased them extremely carefully. So they say, “this curriculum can help reduce the prevalence of lifetime and monthly marijuana use through the end of the eighth grade.” See all the caveats?
Sarah: Lifetime through the end of the eighth grade, it's the kind of language you use when you're lying to your parents. Did he use the car over the weekend while we were away? And you're like, I did not use the car over the weekend. I might've used it on Friday night, but you didn't not ask me that.
Mike: Another one was, “The program was successful in reducing the prevalence of binge drinking among students who had initiated regular binge drinking by the end of the sixth grade.” So specific. Among kids who binge drink in the sixth grade, it reduces that, but, okay, 7th, 8th, 9th, 5th. What are you actually looking at?
Sarah: Good for them because I am worried about the 11 year old binge drinkers of America. But again, it's a very small slice of the pie.
Mike: And he says, “The fact that no effects were found for the other six measures of substance use was not mentioned in the discussion section of the article.” He notes that there's this thing called the national registry of evidence-based programs and practices. And this program Lions Quest is listed on there as an evidence-based program. Even though they're not showing, I guess, real effects, or they are showing extremely limited effects, that still counts. And the super bleak thing about this is that if you rerun the DARE data now, it would be an evidence-based program. It's not necessarily that DARE didn't work.
This is, what's so fucked up. One way to look at it is that DARE didn't work, and I think that's probably true, but another way to look at it is that like none of these programs worked, right? If all you're able to show is that binge drinking among 11 year old’s who were already binge drinking is reduced, cool. Congratulations. That's not what anybody meant by this. And if only two of your nine variables are showing any difference, then you're really not any better than DARE.
It's not clear that any of these programs are actually doing anything meaningful, it's just, we're better at picking up the data now and also, DARE because it was so prominent and it was so visible publicly, it was independently reviewed. So people were going there, and they would say, okay, at the outset, we are looking for drug use among seventh graders, boom. And then they would measure that. Whereas now, if it's being done by the people that are running their own programs, you can just make it up. Any big set of data, if you collect enough data, just by coincidence, a couple variables are going to show a correlation. And so the more data you collect, if you're collecting age and race and do they play volleyball and do they binge drink and have they ever used drugs? And what do they think about drugs? And what's their favorite TV show? Eventually you're going to have connections that, okay, sixth graders, who've never played volleyball and love the Simpsons never use drugs anymore. It's not that hard because when you have these large datasets, it's easy to find significant results, not large results, but significant ones, which has a very technical statistical meaning. So essentially the entire endeavor and the way that we're assessing these programs might be bad.
Sarah: Trust no one.
Mike: So basically, you're wrong about numbers. Boom.
Sarah: Oh yeah, we should try trying.
Mike: That's all we can really expect now. You can try trying.