I went through the DARE program in 6th grade (so, late 90’s), and I drink very occasionally, don’t smoke, and have tried pot once (and didn’t like it). Like others have said, though, I don’t think any of my actions have been at all influenced by the program. I think the thing that keeps me away from drugs is the mangled, fragmented skull I saw in my forensic anthropology class of a 21-year-old man who dealt meth. He used it as well, which meant that he had crappy teeth, but that wasn’t the reason he died. He died because he’d been kidnapped by other dealers, kept prisoner in someone’s house for a couple days, then taken out in the woods and shot ten times in the head. Drugs are dangerous, yes, but so are the people who are in the business. This is something that the DARE program never, ever mentioned. The closest they ever got was peer pressure, but that’s about it.
Went through DARE in the early 90’s, and the only thing I remember about it was that a kid named Sam Nickel won the essay contest in my class… well, I had read his essay and remember to this day that it had many misspellings, punctuation errors, and run-on sentences (yes, I noticed these things in the 5th grade). I was convinced that the only reason he won was because he said, very specifically, that he wanted to be a cop when he grew up.
My correctly spelled, well-thought-out, grammatically correct, non-brown-nosing essay didn’t count for shit. This helped me learn that life isn’t fair. Seriously.
Didn’t have much of an effect on my future drug use, though. Smoked pot a couple times in high school, smoked cigarettes and cigars and drank most of the way through EOD school, and I still drink a beer with dinner most nights. I had 2 grandparents that smoked, and my dad drank, so I think that showed me that you could still function if you did these things, despite what DARE would have me believe.
I won the essay contest in my school and got to read it at our DARE graduation, too. I don’t remember what I wrote, though…something about wanting to study DNA science in England. WTF was I thinking?
Anyway, I’m drug-free, but I drink some beers and smoke cigarettes. I guess it could be considered “substance abuse” under the most technical of definitions. Either, DARE had nothing to do with any of that, as it didn’t for just about all of you on here.
2 of my old weed dealer’s always made sure to have the D.A.R.E. license plate on any care they’d drive. 
I’m a DARE graduate, probably around 91-92 at 5th grade, which was before the internet took off. A couple of years later, once I’d found out a few friends smoked pot, I went online and looked things up for myself. 4 hours on the computer blew away however many weeks worth of “learning” in the D.A.R.E. program.
Btw, does anyone remember the “America: Drug Free by 2000!” printed in the bottom right of the D.A.R.E. worksheets? For some reason that still sticks in my head. “Partnership for a Drug-Free America” was printed on the bottom left.
Ah yes, I remember a Just Say No contest, I think it was a picture that would be turned in to a book cover, that I totally should have won based on the ‘fact’ that the winner’s picture was clearly inferior to mine. I think it definitely gave me bad feelings about the Just Say No program for quite a while.
I believe all the stats seem to indicate that it doesn’t do diddlysquat, or may even be correlated with higher drug usage. But they still fund it. Pay your taxes, citizen.
That reminds me of that stupid song we had to learn about not smoking:
We are the smoke-free class of 2000
Two triple zero, everyone’s a hero!
(Or a she-ro!)
:dubious: