There is no universal millennial experience, but DARE comes pretty 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 to, as Nancy Reagan put it, “just say no.” DARE embraced an abstinence-only model in which any use of alcohol or drugs was characterized as abuse and the only acceptable tactic was abstention. After completing the 17-week program, students received a certificate and t-shirt.
At its peak, more than 75 percent of American schools participated in the program, costing taxpayers up to $750 million a year. Historian Max Felker-Kantor revisits DARE and its legacy DARE to say no: the police and the war on drugs in schoolsa new history of the program.
As a DARE grad myself who wore the shirt long after it became fashionable (look, I liked the austere black and red color scheme), I vaguely remember introductions made by someone from the local police department. On one occasion, he told a student to act drunk and pretend to offer beer to the class, while the rest of us yelled at her in response. Another time, our training officer went off 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 begs to inject heroin in the house. our rural Georgia schoolyard. I recently learned to my horror that my wife had won a poetry contest in her DARE program in Alaska, a poem that she then, mortified, had to read aloud at her DARE graduation ceremony.
In hindsight, DARE is remembered mostly as a joke, a bunch of cops acting out senseless anti-drug skits. By 1994, a decade after the program was founded, studies clearly indicated that the DARE curriculum had little to no effect on youth drug use rates. By the 2010s, it had become a popular source of irony and parody: When then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions lauded the program’s effectiveness in 2017, DARE graduates noted on social media how they were still smoking weed in their red and black T-shirts .
But while DARE hasn’t “worked” in the sense of stopping many kids from using drugs, Felker-Kantor says the program has been enormously successful in normalizing police presence and the war on drugs into people’s daily lives.
DARE is 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, most of them minors, but drug use among students had actually increased. “After years of arrests of drug dealers doing little to reduce drug demand, police leadership has all but admitted the impossibility of reducing drug use through law enforcement alone,” Felker-Kantor writes. With DARE, Gates’ department would target demand instead of supply. “But instead of delegating the task to another agency, LAPD officials expanded the police mandate to include working directly with children, creating an education program that required officers to be in schools as teachers.”
This was DARE’s differentiating factor and its fundamental flaw. The undercover program may have been overly aggressive and ineffective, but it also clearly delineated the roles of officer and teacher; DARE has blurred those lines. DARE officers were explicitly trained to act as educators, not law enforcement, and were billed to students as “trusted confidants.” But they didn’t check their badges at the school door; they showed up in uniform (sometimes with their service weapon, even though this was against the rules), and officials like Gates defined their role within a law enforcement framework.
DARE to say no postulates that improving the public’s perception of the police was at least as important to DARE’s mission as keeping kids away from drugs. Police departments had to carefully consider who among their ranks could participate, as “a qualified DARE officer was the linchpin not only to reducing drug use but also to transforming public perceptions of the police and reshaping the relationship between police and community”.
Much of the program was therefore driven by politics rather than proven methods for reducing drug use. As crack dominated the headlines, the DARE curriculum adapted its narrative, preaching the dangers of “crack kids” in “inner cities” even though, as Felker-Kantor writes, “many children and adolescents, according to Los Angeles police, they had experimented with alcohol or marijuana, not crack cocaine.” In the 1990s, when the public was concerned about gang violence and “superpredators,” DARE changed its iconic slogan “DARE To Keep Kids Off Drugs” to the more awkward “DARE To Resist Drugs and Violence.”
This disconnect between the program’s stated goals and its actions was most evident in low-income communities of color, which tended to have more antagonistic relationships with the police. DARE provided a blueprint to present police officers as role models for kids as they continue to aggressively wage the war on drugs against their parents.
And they prosecuted parents: DARE’s history is filled with stories in which students told an officer about a parent’s drug use only to later find that parent in handcuffs. In one egregious example, a school counselor asked 11-year-old Crystal Grendell if her parents used drugs; Assuring herself, as she later recalled, that “nothing would happen,” Crystal admitted that her parents smoked marijuana. Days later, Felker-Kantor writes, “three DARE agents questioned Crystal about her parents’ drug habits and asked her to report the number of marijuana plants in her home.” An officer told her that her parents would be arrested if she did not cooperate and that she should not tell her parents about the interrogation because “parents often beat their children after they spoke to the police.” . When Crystal cooperated, Felker-Kantor says, the police “broke into her house, arrested her parents, and took Crystal and her younger sister to the home of a distant relative because the police had been unable to find accommodation for the girls before the raid.”
Grendell’s family later successfully sued the department — with a court finding the officers’ “coercive” actions “shocking to the conscience and unworthy of constitutional protection” — but program officials were undeterred. “In such environments, there are usually no morals, values or training for the child,” a DARE administrator was quoted as saying. “My personal opinion is that arrest is the best thing that can happen to that parent.”
In the 1990s, groups like Parents Against DARE arose to oppose the curriculum. “Although skeptical of the effectiveness of DARE,” Felker-Kantor writes, “Parents Against DARE was more concerned with the loss of parental control and potential surveillance of the family by the state through their children as informants.” DARE, which enjoyed widespread public support in its first decade, gradually lost its prestige, and schools began abandoning the program in the mid-1990s.
The class of congressional Republicans elected in 1994 talked about cutting social programs, and DARE was one possible goal. But by this point, DARE was too ingrained in American culture to kill directly, and most politicians were too afraid of appearing “soft” on child drug abuse to try. The National Institute of Justice lists 2009 as the end date of the program, but in reality it still exists, albeit on a smaller scale. The officer-instructor is still the central figure. This, in fact, has been the program’s lasting legacy: When schools began adopting resource officers after the 1999 Columbine school shooting, the DARE cop proved the perfect role model. When DARE officers gave way to permanent school resource officers, or SROs, the integration of schools and police was complete.
Felker-Kantor sometimes goes off on ideological tangents, blaming “neoliberalism” for both DARE and the war on drugs. But his book mostly steers clear of broad political statements. Instead, it provides a comprehensive history of a program whose glory days may be behind it, but which has left an indelible mark on America, and not just as a target of ridicule.
DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, by Max Felker-Kantor, The University of North Carolina Press, 288 pages, $27.95