Kids and Drugs

By Crispin Sartwell

I recently saw my stepson Vince "graduate" from the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program: DARE for short. He sang "1-2-3 F-R-E-E" and "Talk it Out" and took a "solemn vow" to "say no to alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs, and yes to my own self-worth."

But I don't think that he is, at the end, any less likely to use drugs than when he began. What he's learned, if anything, is that the adults involved, well-intentioned though they are, don't understand drugs or children.

Taught by police officers in 75 percent of the nation's school districts, including Baltimore, DARE is the dominant program for anti-drug education or indoctrination in this country . Its red diagonal logo has become ubiquitous in schools, on cars, on t-shirts.

Born in Los Angeles in the era of Nancy Reagan and "just say no," DARE has had to weather a series of studies - including ones by the surgeon general and the National Academy of Sciences - that suggest that it is completely ineffective.

As a recovering drug addict, I didn't need the studies. The DARE program, as indicated by the materials that Vince brought home, the songs he and his classmates sang at the graduation, the web site, and so on, only has one idea of the cause of drug use: "peer pressure." And it only has one approach to dealing with it: screwing up your resolve to say "no." And it only has one sort of person telling you how and why to do this: police officers.

In response to the studies, DARE officials have unveiled a new version of the program. Some of the studies actually seemed to indicate that DARE grads were *more* likely to use drugs than others. Officials attribute this to the supposed fact that DARE's emphasis on peer pressure made drug use seem even more prevalent than it is.

So the new approach focuses on "social norms," and tries to show students that they don't have to buckle under to a norm of drug abuse. Perhaps you are thinking to yourself that this is exactly the "peer pressure" approach in slightly more obscure words, and perhaps you are right.

So what's wrong with this approach? I think that if you have ever been a serious drug abuser, you understand. It's true that "peer pressure" can be the occasion for people to try drugs. Certainly, if no one around you has any drugs, you won't be trying them. And when your friends are doing drugs, it goes very quickly from seeming impossible or worthless to seeming something like normal.

Drug abuse can also create a kind of small-group solidarity in which the cool people who use drugs are opposed to the straights or cowards who do not. But note that even these factors make the whole situation much more complicated than the question of whether you can say no when urged to do drugs: the situation is one of complicated inclusions and exclusions, of membership and identification, of finding a cultural zone in which you feel comfortable.

If you're happy in a cultural zone defined by policemen and what they want you to do, then you don't have to worry about whatever pressure the freaks and rappers may bring to bear on you. But it's not too much to say that few teenagers with guts or creativity are so heavily identified with authority that they aspire to police culture.

Indeed, the cure provided by the DARE program for peer pressure is simply social pressure from non-peers, and even on its own assumptions the strategy would be workable only if "social norms" defined by teachers, administrators, and police officers operated more powerfully in the lives of young people than the norms of the groups to which they actually belong. Any young person for whom that is true is never going to be much of a drug abuser anyway.

One source of the peer pressure that the program tries to deal with is popular culture, and Vince was subjected to a criticism of the various pop icons he loves, such as Eminem. The people who designed the program might think seriously for a moment about how effective a policeman is going to be as a rock critic, and even if he knows what he's talking about, how effective he's going to be persuading fifth-graders not to like their music.

There is implicit in the DARE program a condescending view of young people according to which young people are incredibly easy to manipulate and are constantly doing things they think are wrong because it seems cool or Eminem is telling them to. This accounts both for the program's diagnosis of the causes of drug abuse and for its prescriptions.

The approach is exclusively slogans, posters, songs chanted in unison, pledges of loyalty, and so on. Really what this resembles is not education on any reasonable account but the sort of indoctrination practiced by authoritarian political regimes. Any self-respecting young person ought to rebel against that sort of thing, and indeed Vince's final essay explaining what he'd learned in DARE was entitled "I Do Not Like the DARE program."

As he put it: "I think that some people (me, for example) like making their own choices and don't like being told which way they should go or what choice they should make."

The "peer pressure" approach to the explanation of drug abuse is generated by people who really don't understand what drugs are for: the reason you do drugs is because you like the way the make you feel.

I always felt as though I were burdened by too much consciousness: I could never make myself really relax, could never get a break from the monologue in my head. I enjoyed smoking pot or tripping on LSD immensely because they *changed my mind.* In my job as a college professor, I see a lot of young people who feel too acutely conscious: some of them treat their condition with illegal drugs.

Drugs are not a flight from external reality; they are a fight from oneself; the use of drugs is about altering one's conscious state. If you are happy with an unaltered conscious state and are doing drugs simply because of peer pressure, you will, in all seriousness, never be a drug addict. But if you hate who or what you are, if you hate the noise in your head, then when you discover drugs you will feel like Columbus stumbling over America.

In addition, teenagers try drugs in a spirit of adventure and exploration, as an expression of an urge to explore the boundaries of experience. That's something that leads young people to take all sorts of risks, and in fact is an important function of adolescence. Our role as people trying to raise kids is to help them try to survive the experimentation, not to prohibit it completely.

One attraction of drugs is precisely that they *are* prohibited, which makes their use an adventure indeed, an expression of rebelliousness and thus independence. Standing a uniformed policeman up in front of a classroom and having him teach kids to say no very predictably has the effect of creating considerable enthusiasm for drug abuse.

If you want to save kids who could eventually be addicts, you're going to have to impress upon them that despite their pleasurable effects, drugs can break their lives. In the long run they make the problems they seem to ameliorate worse. And eventually, they kill or maim you.

The people most likely to be able to communicate these ideas effectively are former drug users, adults who can speak honestly, realistically and with knowledge on the subject. As Vince wrote in his essay, explaining why he didn't need the DARE program to choose to stay drug-free, "My dad had very serious problems with drugs before he died and two of my uncles have died from drugs." He knows this because both his mom and me, who survived what so many we loved did not, believe it is our duty to tell our kids what we have seen and what we have been through. It may not, in the long run, stop them. But it is our best shot.

If the DARE program would actually educate in an interchange with kids rather than merely subject them to propaganda, catechisms and loyalty pledges, it would have a better chance at making a difference. If it would recognize that children are capable of making their own choices, and that they will, that would help too. But as it stands now, it seems to have little hope of influencing anyone in any meaningful way.

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