DARE Is Ineffective

12 Pages 2993 Words

DARE Is Ineffective

DARE is a costly sugar pill that lulls parents, police and educators into a dangerous, false confidence that their kids won’t do drugs. The fact of the matter is that forty three percent of DARE graduates said DARE had no affect on their decision to do drugs. Bottom line, DARE is a costly and ineffective way of keeping kids off drugs. The tragic truth is that the nation is spending $700 million a year on a program that doesn’t work and it hasn’t sunk in on the local or the national levels. (DRCNet-what’s wrong with DARE 3) A large DARE bureaucracy has grown up that feeds on itself. The public raises no uproar because it needs the comfort of its delusion that something is being done to protect children from drugs. If DARE is really working, why then at the age of eighteen, fifty five percent of students have tried some illicit drug? (Sager 1)
For years, school based drug education programs have been our first line of defense against drugs. However, research shows that the “just say no” programs provided in most schools are doing little to prevent drug abuse among America’s teens.



(Safety First 1)
Forty three percent of students stated that their decisions to use drugs were not affected by DARE. Keep in mind that teenagers in the 90’s have had more drug education than any generation in history. The majority of them were exposed to DARE in school and all had been exposed to “just say no” public education messages for more then a decade. Yet, American teens in the 90’s used more drugs than teens a decade earlier. (Gorman 1) According to a female teen, “When I was little, you know, I saw ‘just say no’ on the candy box, or at the supermarket, wherever. It’s a catchy phrase, but it doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t make me think about drugs. It doesn’t really make me reflect.” While we all hope that teens will choose abstinence, statistics show ...