DARE Didn’t Make Kids ‘Say No’ to Drugs. It Normalized Police in Schools.
There’s no such thing as a universal millennial experience, but DARE comes close.
Starting in 1983, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program sent police officers into classrooms to teach fifth- and sixth-graders about the dangers of drugs and the need, as Nancy Reagan famously put it, to “just say no.” DARE embraced an abstinence-only model in which any use of alcohol or drugs qualified as abuse and the only acceptable tactic was to abstain. Upon completing the 17-week program, students received a certificate and a T-shirt.
At its height, over 75 percent of American schools participated in the program, costing taxpayers as much as $750 million per year. Historian Max Felker-Kantor revisits DARE and its legacy in DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, a new history of the program.
As a DARE graduate myself who wore the T-shirt long after it was fashionable (look, I liked the austere black-and-red color scheme), I vaguely recall presentations given by someone from the local police department. On one occasion, he told a student to act drunk and pretend to offer the class beer, while the rest of us screamed at her in reply. Another time, our officer-instructor went on a tangent about how “girls are just tougher these days,” before presumably tying it back to why it was imperative that we 10- and 11-year-olds resist any entreaties to shoot up heroin in our rural Georgia schoolyard. I recently learned to my horror that my wife won a poetry contest in her DARE program in Alaska—a poem that she then, mortified, had to read aloud during the DARE graduation ceremony.
In hindsight, DARE is primarily remembered as a joke, a bunch of cops acting out hokey anti-drug skits. By 1994, a decade after the program’s founding, studies clearly indicated that the DARE curriculum had little to no effect on rates of youth drug use. By the 2010s, it had become a popular source of irony and parody: When then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the program’s effectiveness in 2017, DARE graduates noted on social media how they still smoke pot in their black-and-red shirts.
But while DARE didn’t “work” in the sense of keeping many kids from using drugs, Felker-Kantor argues the program was wildly successful at normalizing the presence of police, and the war on drugs, in people’s everyday lives.
DARE was the brainchild of Daryl Gates, the same police chief who gave us SWAT teams. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had spent a decade sending undercover officers into schools, arresting thousands of dealers—the majority of them minors—but drug use among students actually increased. “After years of dealer arrests did little to reduce the demand for drugs, police leadership all but admitte
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