I hear this a lot, and I can’t relate. My DARE program was very informative, and I had a small class, so we still know each other. Yeah, kids smoked weed and stuff like that, but none of us are addicts and maybe 2 are recreational drug users.
Was it just that my DARE Officer was a good one?? What gives?!
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I don’t know how it worked for anyone else, but the way they described the effects of drugs so clinically, played up the side effects, made me wonder why anyone would do them in the first place. So I had to find out…
But I understand why admitting that drugs can feel great and get into the nuances of how that’s a trap would backfire. I think a lot of people just have to make their own mistakes.
The only thing that really turned me off hard drugs is hearing about how so many of my favorite artists destroyed themselves with them. DARE had nothing to do with it.
Because they showed up to random schools in the middle of nowhere (pre-internet) and explained how to do and what drugs looked and felt like to a bunch of kids who have never heard of most drugs at all.
For me, at least, I had ZERO awareness of drugs before Dare. Not something I was coming into contact with at all. Dare taught me what drugs were, what they do, where you can get them.
Now I personally wasn’t interested, but I was certainly more aware that they were an option. I imagine some kids used that new info to try them out.
The biggest problem, for me looking back, was that they made weed seem the same as heroin. So I can totally see kids getting into some weed and realizing it’s not that bad and actually kind of nice. If that was a clear lie then everything else probably was too. So why not try a little coke or heroin?
People use drugs to feel good and this is how you would use drugs but you shouldn’t because that’s wrong.
Adolescent brain only hears the first two parts.
by exposing them to drugs they hadn’t heard of before, making substances seem more common or intriguing than they actually were. Its zero-tolerance approach and exaggerated claims (e.g., “weed kills”) eroded trust when teens saw peers using drugs without severe consequences. Some studies suggest it created a “forbidden fruit” effect, sparking curiosity.
Additionally, police-led lectures lacked peer engagement, making prevention messages less effective. A few evaluations even found higher drug use in DARE graduates compared to control groups, leading to its decline in favor of evidence-based programs.
My officer was not a good person.
Setting that aside. The dare program introduced people to different drugs. Things I had no idea about.
Now I knew what to look for and how to do things. I was in middle school.
It didn’t present a realistic idea of what drug consumption was like and how one might be introduced to it.
For example, if DARE teaches you that anybody who might try to offer you drugs is an zombie-looking supervillain who hides in dark alleyways, but in real-life, the people most likely to offer you drugs are trusted friends, you might not put 2-and-2 together and think “Oh, these are the drugs DARE was warning me about.”.
Because DARE generally uses an abstinence approach that lacks credibility.
“Drugs are bad, don’t do them. If you do them you can die or get brain damage.”
Ok but when I do them I feel good, and don’t feel brain damaged, so I don’t believe anything else you say.
Society uses all sorts of drugs, some legal, some illegal and most people seems to do fine. The line between legal and illegal drugs seems arbitrary particularly to young people.
In short, like sex education, teaching someone the real information about the subject allows people to make informed decisions and weigh risks, instead of discrediting itself by being alarmist and oversimplifying the risks.
It was a drug menu. I mentally decided which ones I needed to try many years before I had access to them.
I learned about pretty much every drug there is from D.A.R.E.
They pick the wrong time for the program, as they’re getting a bunch of kids who don’t know anything about drugs, and teaching them all about every drug.
So rather than prevention, it’s just introducing kids to drugs.
A few things.
It was presented by policemen, not drug specialists or health educators. They pushed “No” a lot. It’s like advocating abstinence as your “sex health” lectures. Young people are impressionable, and especially during that era, pushing back against authority was a thing. Do the opposite of what officers tell you.
It also was a fact that, again, young people being impressionable, made it ‘cool’ to do edgy things, and the moment an officer goes ‘this isnt cool’, that immediately made it cool. Not only that but being presented by untrained officers was super boring, and uncool. “Dont be like that police officer wearing a DARE shirt, he’s a loser”
It also introduced children to a lot of stuff they didn’t know about, effectively educating them. In my town, most of us didn’t even know of most of these drugs they spoke of, until they told us about it and what to look for.
While unrelated to the effectiveness of drug use, it was also a huge financial failure. Millions (billions?) were dumped into the program and showed no notable effective change in drug use.
We had a DARE speaker in High School. Had the whole school in to listen to him. He went on and on with very dry and boring standard DARE material. To liven his speech up he drew on personal anecdotes about his experience working with teen drug users. Those parts of the speech were way more entertaining and interesting. I distinctly recall one kid who liked to drop acid in the bathroom because he liked to watch the grout lines intersect. We all walked out of that speech with a single minded determination to get some drugs.
Zeroing in on “abstinence only” is largely ineffective. This is true for sex education as well as drug programs. As someone else has already said, part of this tactic is exaggerating the negative side effects (or straight up lying). So when That One Kid™️ actually does get ahold of some marijuana and absolutely none of those crazy scenarios happen like DARE said they would, the credibility of any of the program crumbles.
I’m personally not aware of any statistic for INCREASING drug use, but plenty of stuff out there about the general ineffectiveness of “abstinence only” as a sex education tool or regarding substance use
They showed up and were like “Weed will turn you psychotic and make you kill your family!”
Then I tried weed and realized they were lying. So I figured they were probably lying about Cocaine and Heroin too.
“Look kids, whatever you do, don’t jump off this cliff. I mean, I know it looks hella fun, and it IS hella fun, but you know you could hurt yourself. But it is super-hella fun, and millions of Americans do it every day. But don’t do it. You don’t want to wind up rich and famous like a lot of other people who jump off cliffs.
Let’s take a look at various cliffs and talk about how relatively safe they are. See, this is a small cliff, you’ll be fine. But you’ll probably enjoy jumping off cliffs so much you’ll spend all of your money looking for more cliffs to jump off of. Yes, it really IS super-duper-hella fun. Some even say better than sex. But don’t try it.
Now, let’s talk about why you shouldn’t have sex.”
It taught me there were better options for downtime than playing with legos
Simply put, by lying. They equivocated things like alcohol, THC, MDMA, mushrooms with hard drugs like crack cocaine, meth and heroin. As kids got older and began to experiment with lighter drugs subsequently discovering they’d been misinformed, adolescent brains made the logical conclusion that they’d been lied to about the more harmful substances.
*My experience as not a cool kid:
“Hey kids, have you heard of drugs?”
“No..?”
“Well, watch this video of cool kids doing drugs, and some losers telling them no.”
“wait, so if I do drugs, I’ll be one of the cool kids?”
“No, it’s cool to say no”
“Oh well, I’m not even cool enough to get asked the question 🙃”
I didn’t even know drugs were a thing until DARE. They taught us all of the drugs, what they looked like, the street names, what they felt like, and the side effects. It did steer me clear of hard drugs. But taught me which ones are relatively harmless and safe for recreational use. And what they are called and what they look like, so that made it easier to get them.
Hey kids. Here’s a list of all the drugs and the different words you can use to ask for them.
Jesus yall.
My parents love the story of how I came home from school in 5th grade, and I told them you possession of weed was the real crime so if you ever got caught you could just eat it 😂
For me it was the absolute demonizing of weed and talking about it alongside all the other hard shit…. Turns out the real gateway drug is alcohol
I was lucky to not grow up around drug use and I have a very clear memory of being in the fourth grade during a DARE presentation and thinking I’m never fucking with heroin or crack, but I def gotta get my hands on weed and shrooms.
The kids were better at identifying the lies that the program promoted than was expected. Which in turn strengthened the distrust / rebellious aspect.
When we learned about LSD in 4th grade, I thought, “WHAT?? THAT SOUNDS AWESOME.” The rest is history.
I never went down that path (of drugs)
But Dare was my first exposure to hearing about hard drugs like Heroin, Cocaine and Weed.
Also learned that drug dealers drive really cool cars that sometimes the cops will take for themselves.
Later I learned that the authorities were lying about weed.
Even much later I learned that cops pretty much lie 100% of the time that they are talking.
DARE was a inadvertently a good introduction to how official corruption happens.
You ever tell a kid to NOT do something and it just makes them want to do it more? Same thing applies, kids are curious.
DARE was the gateway to drugs they warned us about. It oriented us when we got a bit older and helped us navigate through that world a little easier. Im not complaining.
When I realized a lot of what they told us was overblown, worst case scenarios presented as the norm, I felt it was the right move to do research. Led to experimenting and realizing through real world experience that the worst case scenario happens to very few people that use. Doesn’t mean it can’t get bad, just that it’s blown out of proportion.
The best way to make sure a kid does something is to tell them not to do it.
The DARE program would say that all drugs are equally bad basically, like weed is as bad as heroin because they’re both drugs. So people would end up trying weed or something else minor and then would say “If that wasn’t as bad as they said, maybe the other drugs aren’t bad either”.
You might find a better answer on r/AskHistorians. They have trained historians there in a lot of disciplines and really high bars for answers. So you’d probably get a detailed answer with sources if you asked there.
A few things.
One, is that DARE explained the drugs, how they effect you, and their effects. So when they explain drugs that make one “feel good, euphoria” it peaks a kids interest. Of course they wanted to emphasize the horrific side effects, but as a kid those kind of just fly over your head. Most kids probably didn’t even know such drugs existed before DARE (keep in mind DARE was pre-internet to early internet days, so information was limited).
Second, it’s quite a contradiction but it’s documented that when you tell a population to NOT do something, they tend to actually do it, out of curiosity. Essentially those who are told not to do something, will be curious as to WHY they shouldn’t do it, and decide to test the waters and understand themselves why, and this is the beginning of drug use for many.
Third, the DARE program had a huge infatuation for weed (or pot as they called it). Weed was the drug they mentioned time and time again, they spewed 90% bullshit about it, and acted like it was the devils drug that would turn you into a a homeless bum. Well, kids grow into teens, and many teens try weed or habitually use it, and they realize it’s NOTHING like DARE had made it out to be, and then DARE loses a lot of it’s credibility. This is a massive failure because if that was untrue, then people start to wonder what else was untrue about DARE, and the credibility crumbles. Like almost half the states have legalized weed in some sort of way (medical or/and recreational), when not even 10-20 years ago DARE was spewing about it’s terrible effects.
The problem is, it was designed to be a scare and not truly educational.
They basically just explained if you do drugs all this awful stuff will happen to you, and you’ll die.
So that made it into a situation where, of course some kids did it anyway, and when they didn’t immediately get addicted and die, the whole setup falls into question.
I did this one and didn’t die like they said, maybe coke and heroin aren’t as bad as they said either.
It was also the first exposure some kids even had to the idea of drugs… so it just made them curious to find out instead of avoiding.
Personally, I remember them talking about what being high on weed was like and thinking “wow that sounds nice” and wound up starting smoking weed as soon as my brain was done developing. I think the biggest thing that stuck with me through the years is that starting a drug while your brain is still cooking is a bad idea because you are more likely to become addicted, and it will prevent your brain from growing to its fullest potential
I don’t know the answer to this, but I’d want to see hard data to prove this. However, I want to chime in with the “they taught us what drugs are so now we were more likely to use” that I’m seeing a bunch in this thread is a bullshit argument, and is essentially the same argument as “we shouldn’t teach kids sex ed or they’ll have sex.” argument.
I see a lot of people agreeing with OP but not a single source on the claim given. I thought consensus was at best it just wasn’t effective at deterring youth from drugs not that it had an inverse affect.
Can anyone share where OP Claim is coming from?
They made pencils that turned from reading “don’t do drugs” to read “do drugs” after being sharpened, so kids saw through this and tried the drugs for themselves.
It’s entirely possible correlation is not causation.
In a word, Reverse psychology.
There’s always going to be people will do something because you told them not to or that it’s bad for you or will lead to severe consequence. They can’t be helped.
The current dare program tells kids to chose cigarettes instead of vapes so that’s cool
So for my area, where drug and marijuana use was common, it was just a “yeah tell us something we don’t know”. Type of attitude. Were were watching the most productive people around us come home and smoke a blunt and still take care of their families. We saw the crackheads on the streets and was like “yeah we can see how that’s bad” but never touched on the reasons why people go down these roads. There was no understanding of loneliness, depression, escapism from trauma., just “drugs are bad don’t do them”. Not to mention having a bunch of cops, who we had little trust in in the first place, show up and try to lecture us on things was not the best idea.
For much of the same reason that abstinence-only sex education is a failure: “just say no” isn’t an effective message.
kids are stupid. if you tell them not to do something there’s a high chance they’re going to do it. they also aren’t mature enough to truly understand life and consequences
The DARE program at my school made drug use seem cool.
The issue was that DARE turned weed into the gateway drug. (at least from my perspective)
They put every drug in the same tier of “THE DEVILS HAND THAT WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE”, but when a teen trys weed and just has a chill time thats nice and harmless, all they see is that they were lied to about what drugs are.
Things like meth and heroin absolutely are the devils hand that will ruin your life, but the lie was already told and subsequently proven false. So who’s to say a little crack isn’t just a chill time as well right? Well, no. Now you’re addicted
It’s like the “you wouldn’t download a car” ads.
It told people drugs were bad but also that they exist and what they did.
I’m a researcher. This isn’t my focus area, but we’ve talked about this topic in basic research design classes.
The answer is, there is no data that shows a causal increase in drug use due to DARE. There’s no data to show anything because from a program evaluation standpoint, they didn’t collect that data.
the correlation is mostly due to the fact that drug use was on the rise anyway when DARE was happening. When they’ve gone back and surveyed folks who participated in DARE, the program was basically ineffective, it did not cause a significant increase or decrease in drug use.
I had no idea about drugs at all, until I had DARE classes at school. I would never see even weed in person until I was almost through high school. DARE taught me everything I knew about drugs, at least until I was in my early 20s and tried weed for the first time, and then late 20s when I tried shrooms.
Born in 83 here. I remember straight up being taught how to make an amazing shotgun device for a joint using a diner style ketchup bottle. This was during a DARE presentation. I thought it was a great idea and my friends and I used it for years.
Is there evidence of this?
I know kids said this. It was like “haha they showed me how to use a pipe, so they actually made me do drugs more!”
I don’t doubt drug use increased. I don’t even necessarily doubt that DARE could’ve helped it increase. I just haven’t personally seen any data/evidence for this.
A 5th grader with no drug exposure at all (aside from DARE) should not have such an interest in LSD as I did after the program. I wrote a few papers on Timothy Leary, Woodstock, Pink Floyd…yeah – counterproductive. Anyway, I had a great first year at college!
because kids are smart and recognize propaganda/disinformation from adults when they see it.
They whipped that suitcase open that looked like something from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and I knew I needed to try em all.
Not every student or class or school is going to have one identical experience – what they’re talking about are the results of DARE overall. The people who made DARE thought it would make kids likely to be drug-free (yes, including “weed and stuff like that”), so they did research on the classes and signing drug-free pledges. As you know, they didn’t get the big win that they expected. That doesn’t mean DARE flipped one big druggie/straight-edge switch in every student’s head; it means that when adding up the results, DARE nudged kids in the opposite direction of what’s expected.
When I was 5, they had videos with kids that looked high, and some of the kids they had on there were SUPPOSED to look uncool for using drugs, but kids on these were not exactly the best actors: some looked like they were having fun smoking weed and doing drugs. It led kids to seek it out because they were curious if the child actors were actually acting.
If the D.A.R.E program never existed, many of these kids wouldn’t even know drugs existed until age 16: we didn’t have the Internet in our pocket, so the only source of information we had at that age was literally these poorly acted videos.
Humans, tell us not to do something makes us want to do it. Our maybe I’m just wierd.
Part of the problem, at least in the case of our school, was that it introduced a group of basically innocent/clueless middle-class kids to a bunch of stuff that we didn’t even know existed. It always felt like, “Here are all these things that can make you feel amazing, but don’t use them because they’re bad for you.”
because the contrast of what they showed us, vs how we saw it being used around us was so night and day.
I remember they showed a guy who had an open wound in his leg that he would “drop” the drugs into for his high. Obviously as kids, this was off the charts in terms of shock. But then, when we’d find out a guy we knew had some green, well thats just tommy, and tommy is cool. He’s not like that guy with a hole in his leg.
So who’s word would we take? The DARE people we saw once a year or the guy we knew who was more familiar (tommy), who reassured us hey im just like you and I do it, nothing is wrong with me.
I mean ffs, the stuff they would shock and awe us with in DARE. They could apply the same formula to car crashes and encourage us to never learn to drive a car. But then we find out tommy drives, and hes ok. You get my point.
This thread made me have a flashback that I had completely forgotten, does anybody else remember mcgruff the crime dog?
DARE taught me I could get high on things around my house and in my garage. The cartoon they showed us made it look more fun than scary
What DARE taught me was that heroin is something you can probably never recover from, but you can try everything else and be ok if it gets out of control.