From: Jim Rosenfield <[j n r] at [igc.apc.org]>
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs
Date: 19 Feb 94 17:54 PST
Subject: DARE: Children into Informants

		 DARE Scare: Turning Children Into Informants?

WP   1/29/94 9:00 PM

By James Bovard

     DRUG ABUSE Resistance Education (DARE) is currently being
taught by police  officers to more than 5 million children in more
than 250,000 classrooms each year. The brainchild of former Los
Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, the DARE program is directed
mostly at fifth and sixth graders, though its activities can span
kindergarten through 12th grade. Gates made headlines in 1989 with
his suggestion that drug users be taken out and shot, and his
brand of philosophical moderation permeates the DARE approach to
drug abuse.
    On its face, DARE seems unobjectionable. It seeks to maximize
youngsters' hostility to drugs by teaching them perils of drugs
and reinforcing the message with DARE frisbees, DARE wristwatches
and an official DARE song ("Dare to keep a kid off dope/ Dare to
give a kid some hope"). Students are also able to win or purchase
DARE pencils, erasers, workbooks and certificates of achievement.
But along with the anti-drug paraphernalia may come a more ominous
effect: children informing on their drug-using parents.
    The program was created partly as a result of Gates's
frustrations with police sting operations in the schools. Until
the late 1980s, Los Angeles police officers routinely went
undercover as high school students in order to implore real
students to buy drugs from them. In 1987, the American Civil
Liberties Union complained, "When other adults try to get young
people involved with drugs, we call it contributing to the
delinquency of a minor. When the LAPD does it, we call it the
school-buy program." Finding young people who would buy drugs
proved quite easy. Unfortunately, it had little effect on drug use
by students. As Gates told the Los Angeles Times last September,
"We kept buying more and more.  It was appalling, depressing. I
finally said: `This is crazy. We've got to do something.' "
  The result was DARE. Winning the trust of youngsters is an
essential feature of DARE. Policemen sit and talk with children
during lunch hour and play games with them during recess. The
federal Bureau of Justice Assistance noted in a 1988 report that
DARE "students have an opportunity to become acquainted with the
(police) officer as a trusted friend who is interested in their
happiness and welfare.  Students occasionally tell the officer
about problems such as abuse, neglect, alcoholic parents, or
relatives who use drugs."
    One of the first lessons found in DARE teaching materials
stresses the "Three R's": "Recognize, Resist and Report." The
official DARE Officer's Guide for Grades K-4 contains a worksheet
that instructs children to "Circle the names of the people you
could tell if  . . . a friend finds some pills"; the "Police" are
listed along with "Mother or Father," "Teacher" or "Friend." The
next exercise instructs children to check boxes for whom they
should inform if they "are asked to keep a secret" - the police
are again listed as an option.
    Roberta Silverman, a spokeswoman for national DARE
headquarters in Los Angeles, rejects the idea that DARE teaches or
encourages informing. "When students begin the DARE program they
are specifically advised not talk about their parents or friends.
We are very clear that when DARE instructors are in the classroom,
they are there as teachers, not law enforcement officers."
    Silverman says that the DARE Officer's Guide for Grades K-4 is
    not part of the DARE core curriculum.  "It lays the groundwork
    for what the officers do later. It's more like generic safety
    instruction, teaching
kids about personal safety. The part about keeping a secret is to
get kids talking about molestation. It has nothing to do with
drugs or with getting them to turn their parents in." Silverman
also says that "any time a child makes a disclosure (of parental
drug use) to an officer, the DARE officer would be required like
any other teacher to report that to the proper authorities or
agencies."
    Not surprisingly, children sometimes confide the names of
people they suspect are illegally using drugs. A mother and father
in Caroline County, Md., were jailed for 30 days after their
daughter informed a police DARE instructor that her parents had
marijuana plants in their home, according to a story in The
Washington Post in January 1993. The Wall Street Journal reported
in 1992 that "In two recent cases in Boston, children who had
tipped police stepped out of their homes carrying DARE diplomas as
police arrived to arrest their parents." In 1991, 10-year-old
Joaquin Herrera of Englewood, Colo., phoned 911, announced, "I'm a
DARE kid" and summoned police to his house to discover a couple of
ounces of marijuana hidden in a bookshelf, according to the Rocky
Mountain News. The boy sat outside his parents' home in a police
patrol car while the police searched the home and arrested the
parents. The policeman assigned to the boy's school commended the
boy's action.
     Police and DARE officials keep no statistics on how many drug
busts result from the program. And DARE officials say that reports
of kids informing on their parents cannot fairly be attributed to
DARE.
   "I think to focus on these few incidents is to do a disservice
to people who are at the forefront of prevention efforts in this
country," DARE's Silverman said. "There are 25 million kids who
have been exposed to DARE and a handful of cases of informing that
may or may not be related to DARE at all."
    Nine-year-old Darrin Davis of Douglasville, Ga., called 911
after he found a small amount of speed hidden in his parent's
bedroom because, as he told the Dallas Morning News, "At school,
they told us that if we ever see drugs, call 911 because people
who use drugs need help . . . . I thought the police would come
get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong. They never said
they would arrest them. . .
.  But in court, I heard them tell the judge that I wanted my mom
and dad arrested. That is a lie. I did not tell them that." The
arrest wrecked his parents' lives, said the Dallas newspaper; both
parents lost their jobs, a bank threatened to foreclose on their
homes and his father was kept in jail for three months.
    Silverman says that the details of the case prove how murky
such cases are. While Darrin Davis had been in a DARE program, she
says that he did not report his parents to the DARE officer and
that there was evidence that the parents were also involved in
drug trafficking, thus putting their child at risk.
    "It's making a mountain out of a molehill," she says.
   Whatever DARE's effect on families, its record at discouraging
   drug use is the subject of some
controversy. A study financed by the National Institute on Drug
Abuse on the effect of DARE on Kentucky students between 1987 and
1992 reported "no statistically significant differences between
experimental groups and control groups in the percentage of new
users of  . . . cigarettes, smokeless tobacco, alcohol and
marijuana." More recently, the National Institute of Justice hired
Research Triangle Institute (RTI) to survey and evaluate all the
published research on DARE, and RTI's preliminary conclusions were
largely negative.
    The RTI's evaluation concluded that only eight published
studies of DARE's effectiveness were statistically valid. Susan
Ennett, one of the lead researchers on the RTI project, concluded
that these eight studies found that DARE's effects on drug use by
children ranged from "limited to nonexistent." DARE says that
other experts have criticized the methodology of the RTI study and
notes that it has not yet completed the peer review process. DARE
claims that of 23 studies of DARE, 20 found the program effective
in shaping anti-drug attitudes and behavior.
    At a March 1993 conference about drug education at the
University of California at San Diego, social science researchers
agreed that after 10 years of operation there is little evidence
that DARE actually reduces drug use among the young. William
Hanson, one of the early advisers to DARE and currently a
professor at Wake Forest University, said, "I think the program
should be entirely scrapped and redeveloped anew."
     Many Americans, numbed by politicians' harsh rhetoric
regarding drug use, may feel that policemen should be able to use
any means available to detect drug users. Many DARE instructors
have the best of intentions. But is that an excuse for government
programs that endanger the bonds between children and parents?

      James Bovard is the author of the forthcoming book, "Lost
Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty" (St. Martin's Press).
  Copyright 1994 The Washington Post