Do programs like D.A.R.E. work?

I went through it at school. I never did drugs—etc. But DARE had nothing to do with my choice. I had friends that DID do everything. I strongly suspect that it depends on what enviromen each child is being brought up in.

i.e. Dad does pot in front of kid…kid does pot-etc. A child brought up in the home with one smoking parent has a 50% likelyhood to become a smoker.

I went through the D.A.R.E program when I was in the fifth grade. I ended up using a lot of drugs. So it didn’t work for me.

I went through the DARE program and look at me now lol. I think the DARE program would be MUCH more successful if it actually taught kids the truth about these drugs instead of the BS propaganda the currently teach ie MDMA will take ice cream scoops out of your brain.

It really pisses us off when we find out we’ve been lied to all these years.

Studies indicate they have no effect on teen drug use and may encourage experimentation.

Drugs aren’t bad, just illegal.

I went through the DARE program too.

Funny story. In my DARE class our teacher tried to scare us all away from ever doing drugs by telling us a story about her brother, the drug addict. This story was full of BS lies and other laughable ideas, but the best was how he got hooked on “hard drugs” Evidently he was smoking marijuana with his friend who got it from his uncle, but neither of them knew the that marijuana was secretly laced with LSD. So they smoked it and he was instantly addicted to LSD.

For those of you that dont know, LSD is EXTREMELY sensitive to heat, leaving it out in the sun will destroy it. Yet somehow it was exposed to a flame and administered to him through the marijuana (physically impossible.) And then to top it all off he was instantly addicted to a non addictive substance. Its all just a bunch of bullshit.

You know how they say marijuana is a gateway drug? Its programs like D.A.R.E. that make it a gateway drug. These programs that lie to the youth about drugs and then when they go out and try them (being told not to do something makes most people want to do it more) and they realize that they’ve been lied to, they start to question what else they were lied to about. Im willing to bet if we actually taught about drugs in a truthful unbiased manner drug abuse in this country would go down.

/rant

As a parent of children going through the DARE program, I was appalled at its simplicity and untruthfulness. It blanketed all drugs as addictive and basically the same—the lesson they taught was that if someone used anything once (including alcohol), one would be addicted. Ridiculous. As with so many other things from school, we ended up helping our children decipher what was truth from scare tactics, and encouraged them to think critically about what they were being taught. I am a proponent of public education, but believe parents have an important role to play in making sure that what their children learn (especially when that information comes from federal policy) is actually true. I believe in questioning authority, and that includes the authority of schools.

It seemed to me that the DARE program was more like a program built to dare your children to try drugs than to prevent them from using them. As with so many other things, it is what happens in the home that will make the big difference.

No.

I agree with Uberbatman about how D.A.R.E should provide the truth behind illegal drugs. I am not telling them to tell kids hey go do some Heroine and have a great time. NO, thats just fucked up. What I am saying is give them the true straight facts. Do not give me this ice cream scoops out of your brain bull shit. Erowid for instance is a drug site purely giving you fact on drugs and the effects they have on you. They also provide a full history of drugs, and the experiences people have had on these drugs. It does not encourage you to take or not take drugs. It is purely for facts.

i learned from it, other people i know did drugs as soon as middle school 50% success rate!

DARE, specifically, has been proven to be ineffective.

“DARE is very popular with students, school administrators, police, and the general public. This, in spite of the fact that research over the decades has repeatedly demonstrated that DARE is not only ineffective, but also sometimes counterproductive. That is, students who graduate from DARE are sometimes more likely than others to drink or do drugs.”

DARE…..lmfao! That shit doesn’t work, it’s a waste of time and money….we use to change our wrist bands that said “drug use is life abuse” just to make them say “drug use is life”....and we changed all the posters that said “hugs not drugs” to “hugs on drugs”.....good times, good times.

Not one bit.
My close friend won the DARE essay contest in the 5th grade. He now smokes weed all the time, does shrooms, lsd, x, and more.
DARE might work if they actually told the truth. Instead they say, heroin is bad and it will kill you. Marijuana is bad and it will kill you. Crack is bad and it will kill you. So kids grow up and try marijuana, realize it’s not so bad, and think, hey, maybe they were wrong about heroin too.
It is the worst approach to drugs in the entire world. They need to be honest, list the pros and cons and let the dumb kids decide for themselves if meth really sounds like fun. As I mentioned in another thread, www.erowid.org desperately needs to make a program for kids. This DARE stuff is just straight up bullshit, and hasn’t worked for any kid I’ve ever known.
What I want to know is why we keep pushing this useless war on drugs and spending billions of dollars on it, when it is absolutely clear that our efforts have been fruitless and no matter what kind of laws they have, kids WILL smoke weed. Because it’s just not that bad.
Why put so much effort into DARE? Just put on Reefer Madness for a bunch of fifth graders.
That way they’ll learn exactly what DARE wants them to: Marijuana will make you insane and will make you murder innocent people.

I don’t think it’s a horrible program just because it at least gets SOME information into the hands of kids who’s parents do not or will not provide any.

For parents who have kids going through it, I’d just take the opportunity to open up your own conversation.

I went through it in elementary school, and then we had a little follow up in middle school at some point. I came home and at some point mentioned it to my parents, shortly after that my dad took me out for sandwiches (a big deal) and had a long talk with me about drugs.

He was completely honest. He told me what he’d tried/done, what he liked, what he didn’t like, what he recommended staying completely away from and why. Asked what I knew and if I was comfortable not participating if the situation wasn’t right. He explained realistically what kind of trouble you could get in both with regards to the law and yourself and then, probably most importantly, listened to me and answered questions. Then he told me he trusted me and I could call him if I ever got into a situation I was uncomfortable with. It was probably a 45 minute conversation, I never got the feeling he was advocating or discouraging it was more like he just wanted me to make informed decisions and understood information was scarce.

I hope I’m as good with my kids.

God, DARE is effing awful. It makes my blood run cold.

I cannot believe I still see people with the DARE version of their state’s license plate!

I always wonder if the person actually loves drugs and got the license plate as a joke because I can’t imagine any other reason someone would have that nonsense.

Yea I went through that in I think the 3rd or 4th grade.

No effect whatsoever. I resented it from day one. You had to recite this little “pledge” every Friday and sign these little pledge cards and carry them around in your wallet. The councilors for this program would actually ask you to produce your pledge card periodically so they could see that you still had it.
You got in trouble if you didn’t.

Naturally I needed a lot more drugs than the other kids in high school to show those pricks they couldn’t tell me what to do.

I went through DARE.

In fifth grade they showed us how to make a crack pipe out of a coke can to make sure that if we ever saw one, like, on the playground, we’d tell an adult.

…

I came home complaining about the program and how it was enabling kids to get on drugs which my mom found amusing until I told her what they’d done. I didn’t do drugs, but it sure as hell wasn’t because I went through DARE.

How do you make a crack pipe out of a soda can? Do you mean a weed pipe?

It was fifth grade, so I don’t really remember how to do it, but no, I mean it had to do with cocaine. He was supposed to have brought one, but forgot it so he ended up just making it quickly at the front of the class. Which means the lesson went from “look: this bad” to “how to make drug paraphernalia in your spare time!”

that’s too funny! I’m always impressed with the creativity of motivated drug addicts…..

@cheeb you can make one out of a coke can, but its really inefficient, as youd lose most of the vapors. Making one out of a lightbulb would be much more effective.
That being said FUCK CRACK

It’s funny what works and what doesn’t work.

The Dare style of campaign has been around as long as we have had schools. I can remember a series of classes on chastity when I was 11 or 12 and in the end we took an oath not to have premarital sex. That was even less effective than DARE.

The anti-smoking campaigns seem to work though. They don’t stop the kids from smoking but it turns them into antitobacco-fascists who guilt, whine and nag their adults into quitting.

All I know is when we wear those red wristbands all week, on friday we get a cookie :)

@generalspecific Haha I won that 5th grade essay! And just like your friend I now smoke my weed, and use hallucinogens. Yup DARE is GREAT!