The other day I spotted a kid wearing a D.A.R.E. shirt and realized that was the first time in years that I’d seen any reference at all to the program. Is it even still around in a lot of places?
Anyway I went through it myself in elementary school in the early 1990s. I smoked a little weed in college, but other than that I’ve never been a drug user. I can’t say that’s because of D.A.R.E. or any strong moral objections. I’ve just never felt a pressing need to go out of my way to get high.
I seem to remember years back reading that the program isn’t very effective. Seeing where a lot of the kids who were in my D.A.R.E. class are now, I can believe that.
One of the big problems, at least when I went through it, was that it lumped all illicit substances, including alcohol and tobacco, together and taught that if you did any of them your life would go to hell.
Well, if a typical kid goes home and, like me, sees their dad having a few beers and not appearing to have any serious problems, it won’t be long before they start wondering whether everything else D.A.R.E. taught was complete horseshit.
So what was your experience going through D.A.R.E.? Did it have much of an impact on your attitude toward drugs? Any ideas on how to make it more effective?
They still do it here in Southern California. It served as the anti-drug component required for Boy Scouts for my son. It also led to us having a great conversation regarding the differences between alcohol, coffee and various controlled substances.
So from this parent’s perspective, it gave me a great opening to talk to my kid.
I went through it in 6th grade. It had no effect at all. Throughout the whole thing, I mocked the assignments we were supposed to do and ridiculed the booklet that each of us got (drawing devil’s horns, giant erections, etc, on the illustrations of the kids in the book.) In high school, I smoked, drank, and smoked pot - not all the time or anything, but sometimes. My first two years of college, I smoked pot nearly every day.
Now I’m 23 and I don’t really do anything anymore except drink beer.
I did and I have not touched any drug what-so-ever.
I attritribute my lack of drug use more to having read a book called “Buzzed”. A no nonsense book that descrribes in as much details as possible the effects of drugs, the side-effects and potential health hazards.
Having a true sense of what is out there and what they can do to you goes a lot further than just hearing “Drugs are bad okay?”
I was in school when the whole “Just Say No” and then “DARE” thing came up. We also had Teen Institute in high school, which I was really involved in for a bit but it quickly became a bore.
Plus, I started smoking at age 17, so…yeah.
Honestly, being the child of an alcoholic, I grew up with issues with alcohol and I remember these programs just sort of making me feel worse. It didn’t make me want to drink it just made me feel bad having to think about alcohol so much and the more they pushed the “alcohol is for losers” thing the more I felt worse about my dad being a loser.
I still had those personal problems going into college so I never really became a drinker. I smoked pot, tho, with my Teen Institute friends, even. By the time we were seniors the whole program was just another stupid social political thing, so it we just forgot about it.
We did have a DARE officer at our school. He was a cool guy. He focused on the DARE thing for a while, in the entire district, but ultimately became just the school safety officer for the high school. Keeping kids from blowing each other’s brains out or beating each other to a bloody pulp was more important than “drugs are bad.”
It made me want to try drugs and alchohol. I wasn’t a big drug user or anything but seriously. They show you all these hilareous videos of people getting drunk at parties and stuff. They tell you things like “this has a side effect of making you feel invinvible” and “taking this can result in a sexual situation with someone you might not normally want to have sex with” and “taking that makes you ignore your parents”.
In college they had some program to teach all the fraternities about alchohol abuse. Some lady came to each fraternity house showing some film of some experiment where this dude keeps doing shots to demonstrate the effect. The only effect it had on the fraternities was to encourage 35 houses to recreate the experiment.
I went through it and I don’t think it had much effect. I tried pot a few times in college (and would have tried it more if I’d had the opportunity) but nothing stronger. But that’s not because of DARE, it’s because I had a couple of acquaintances that got heavy into cocaine and heroin, and I saw what it did to their lives and wanted no part of it.
I still remember the damned song they made us sing.
My friends and I were just talking a few weeks ago about how the anti-drug education we got as kids in the 80’s and 90’s was in a way more like “how to buy drugs” education - I can give you, like, twelve street names for heroin, which is really helpful on The Wire at least.
Has anyone here been through it, or had kids go through it, in recent years. I’m wondering if they’re still pushing the “alcohol and tobacco can be just as bad as heroin, cocaine, meth, etc.” meme. Again, a big reason why the program probably hasn’t been very effective.
To me it would have made much more sense if they had just said something like, “When you turn 21, it’s okay to drink in moderation. Just hand the car keys to someone else if you start feeling a little tipsy. It’s these other hard drugs that you need to stay away from.” And then maybe brought it in recovering addicts or people who’d done time in prison to talk about their experiences.
I was in the DARE program in 6th grade and I don’t remember a single thing about it except the t-shirt design. I never once did drugs and I have had alcohol maybe 5 times in my life. This has nothing to do with DARE and everything to do with the fact that my grandmother was always boozed up and stole from us to buy alcohol. Knowing that this kind of thing can be hereditary I decided long ago not to go down that road at all. Now my dad is at a point where he can’t function without a constant stream of alcohol from morning til night, reminding me of why I decided never to try that kind of thing in the first place.
I did DARE in 6th grade in the mid 90s and it was totally worthless. We did nothing but mock it. When I was in high school they asked for volunteers and most of the people who volunteered were huge druggies. The only thing I got out of it was I signed up to be part of sting operations to bust people selling tobacco to minors and they paid me $20 to sign up and I never heard from them again.
For the record I use tobacco and alcohol semi regularly and would smoke pot if not for random drug testing at work.
I did it in the 5th grade and had to do it again in the 6th or 7th for some health education class I had to take for a semester. I remember that the material was dull but that wasn’t very different from anything else in the 5th grade.
Looking back on it, it wasn’t effective. Of course all the kids took the “pledge” but who’s really going to take that to heart when they’re 10 or 11?
For the record, I’m 23 and never smoked or used drugs but drink occasionally and did while underage. DARE neither turned me away from nor provoked me to use drugs, although I did hear of other people who did just to “spite the program” (:rolleyes:) and others found it useful that the program detailed in the materials what taking the drugs and their side effects are like and actually made them more curious. By the fifth grade I personally knew that I had no interest in drugs or smoking but that was due to influences and experiences outside of the program.
He did D.A.R.E.
I only know people with (ironic) D.A.R.E. shirts.
I was in DARE and thought it was a complete waste. I didn’t do drugs in school because I was a generally well behaved kid, not because some stupid program told me doing pot would result in me living in a gutter with no friends. I thought it was a waste of time then, and I think it’s a waste of time now.
I was also part of a similar program called GREAT. It stood for Gang Resistance Education and Training (or somesuch). It was even more useless. It was clearly modeled after the DARE program only directed at keeping kids out of gangs.
I was in the DARE program and like pbbth I don’t remember anything about it. I didn’t do drugs and have never been drunk, but that was more of a natural inclination - drugs never interested me, I’m practically naturally high. And alcohol takes too long to get drunk, and is boring.
Another mid-90s DARE grad here. The most outstanding memory of that class was when they brought in the bag of pot so we could all smell it so we would know to run away if we have caught a wiff in the real world.
I remember thinking it smelled pretty good & most of my friends agreed with me.
Guess what we were doing a few years later.
DARE is bullshit. I did go through it when I was in 5th grade, and while I’ve never used drugs except I used to smoke weed occasionally, it had nothing to do with DARE. The thing about DARE is it’s before most kids are really faced with the temptation anyway, so they don’t know what they’re “agreeing” to.
Plus there’s the fact that it’s nothing but silly scare tactics that kids can see right through as soon as they’re of the age to want to use drugs in the first place. And that’s what’s so ineffective about it: you tell kids all drugs are sooo bad, and they invariably find out at some point that all kinds of people smoke weed recreationally and it’s no big deal, or whatever, and then they don’t believe any of what they were told by that nice police officer, even the part that IS true. They just think that if drugs are really so bad, why did they have to resort to such propaganda?
To make DARE more (which is to say, at all) effective, they would need to tell the truth, and I think the kids should be a bit older too (which they probably sometimes are, but like I said I was in 5th grade). They could try to convince the kids that it’s okay to say no, but NOT that anyone who offers you drugs or uses drugs is not your friend and is a loser and a junkie, and shit like that.
We didn’t have DARE here, but we did have a principal who told us that he can’t stop us from doing drugs, but he can give us information about said drugs and how to safely use them. And that, my friends, is where I learned to tap all the air out of the syringe before injecting!
We also studied drugs more academically - this was Grade 7, so it wasn’t too advanced, but we went into categories of drugs like hallucinogens, studied side effects, etc. It was like Sex Ed. for drugs.
AFAIK, no one in that class kicked it from a drug overdose, so that’s gotta count for something.
I smoke pot damn near every single day. It’s not an addiction, really; just a habit. All my friends do it. My parents and aunts and uncles and cousins do it. I grew up with marijuana as a social drug, just something fun that brings people together. Or a way to relax before bed after a long day. It isn’t a big deal and not nearly as dangerous as alcohol. However, I also partake in alcohol, although more like weekly instead of daily. That shit scares me sometimes, as I have lots of dead alcohol victims haunting my family tree.
DrCube,
DARE graduate, '94
My 25-year old son went through DARE…he has alcohol and drug issues. My daughter has kicked her drug issues, but still uses alcohol more than I think is wise, and she went through DARE.