Irvine, California just bought a brand new Cybertruck…for it’s D.A.R.E. program. It is all decked out in police gear at over $153,000, but it won’t see much police use: California department spent $153,000 on nation's first Cybertruck for police use
From Wiki: “A series of scientific studies in the 1990s and 2000s cast doubt on the effectiveness of D.A.R.E., with some studies concluding the program was harmful or counterproductive. Years after its effectiveness was cast into doubt, the program remained popular among politicians and many members of the public, in part because of a common intuition that the program ought to work. Eventually, in the early 2000s, funding for the program was greatly reduced.” and " Circa 2004, “[c]hildren [were] asked to submit to D.A.R.E. police officers sensitive written questionnaires that can easily refer to the kids’ homes” and that “a D.A.R.E. lesson [was] called ‘The Three R’s: Recognize, Resist, Report’”, encouraging children to “tell friends, teachers or police if they find drugs at home.”
In addition, “D.A.R.E. officers are encouraged to put a ‘D.A.R.E. Box’ in every classroom, into which students may drop ‘drug information’ or questions under the pretense of anonymity. Officers are instructed that if a student ‘makes a disclosure related to drug use,’ the officer should report the information to further authorities, both school and police. This apparently applies whether the ‘drug use’ was legal or illegal, harmless or harmful. In a number of communities around the country, students have been enlisted by the D.A.R.E. officer as informants against their parents.”
I grew up in San Diego in the '90s and I “graduated” from the DARE program.
IMO, it gets a worse rap than it deserves. I legitimately learned what a lot of illegal drugs actually were from that program and how they affect the body, and I never felt like there was any pressure to snitch on my parents (who both used meth at the time). There was a rather silly play we did in an all-school assembly for the “graduation” in which I got to play the concept of Marijuana and I had a monologue about how addictive I was and ended with the line “after the third hit, you’re MINE” followed by an evil laugh. I’m pretty sure I already knew at that point that marijuana wasn’t habit-forming, but I enjoyed getting the chance to ham it up all the same.
Then again, I was an oddly strait-laced child who didn’t even touch alcohol until my late 20s, so YMMV.
Those two statements appear to contradict each other. If the program was teaching you that marijuana was addictive in that fashion, how do you know that it was telling you the truth about any other drug?
(And did they tell you that nicotine is addictive in that fashion? Because, for a lot of people, it is.)
I had to look up when D.A.R.E. started to see if the drug education I received in 6th grade was courtesy of that program. Apparently not, as D.A.R.E. is about 40 years old and I was in 6th grade over 50 years ago.
But the highly memorable anti-drug propaganda I was exposed to was no doubt the start of the movement that led to D.A.R.E. I will never forget the nice policeman who came to our social studies class, complete with slide show, to tell us the story of “Jimmy,” a promising young high school student. We were treated to all kinds of anecdotes about what a sweet, intelligent kid Jimmy was. But then … [cue music signaling impending doom] … a friend offered Jimmy a toke of marijuana.
Within days, swell Jimmy turned surly, arguing with his parents and neglecting his chores, even forgetting to feed his beloved horses!
Within weeks, Jimmy ran away from home. His heartbroken parents spared no expense to find him, but he appeared to have vanished for good. Then finally, months later … Jimmy was found lying in a gutter, LOOKING LIKE THIS! With no warning, the screen was filled with a horror-movie-worthy face, with open, pus-filled wounds, flies buzzing about, teeth missing, one eye swollen shut and the other filled with red veins.
It was so shocking that I was scared away from drugs all the way to my freshman year of college, when I discovered that many perfectly functional peers were smoking weed occasionally, with nary a pus-filled sore on any of their faces.
It was more the descriptions of what the drugs do that I found to be accurate. They did overhype the addictiveness of marijuana, but they were up front about how it affects the mind. I think there may have been an undertone of “some of you are going to try these things no matter how much we tell you not to, so here’s what to expect”.
I don’t think DARE talked about cigarettes. The legal stuff was addressed in different programs.
I think they waited until 8th grade to start scaring us with pictures of messed-up junkies. That may have been the same program where they showed us pictures of STD-ridden genitals in order to scare us out of unprotected sex.