Eisenberg 1 Nate Eisenberg WRIT 340, Professor Pate 10 November, 2015 For submission to Vice D.A.R.E-ing to Change Drug Education Nancy Reagan, stepped in front of a group of Oakland elementary school children in 1982. A young girl raised her hand, and asked the First Lady what she should do when her fellow classmates inevitably turned into pot dealers and offer her drugs. Reagan cleared her throat, and uttered a phrase that would go on to act as a broken record for the decades to come, “Well, you just say ‘no.’” Just a year later in 1983, this statement had made its way down the 5 freeway into Los Angeles County, where it resonated with ex-LAPD chief Daryl Gates. Gates began to work with the Los Angeles Unified School District to enact a …show more content…
The War on Drugs continues to rage on, and D.A.R.E. has reached over 200 million children. So it must be, then, that D.A.R.E. has made concrete strides in its goals to add child soldiers on its side of the War on Drugs, right? Well, not quite. Although D.A.R.E. has the best of intentions, statistics and studies show that its means by which it hopes to achieve those goals only add to the problem. So, instead of keeping loyalty to this kind but failing strategy, middle schools and high schools should enact drug education that teaches teenagers of the science, psychology and sociology of drugs and …show more content…
The weakness in the old DARE program, as several studies suggest, is the simplicity of its message. Its panic-level assertions that "drug abuse is everywhere." Kids, program directors learned, don’t respond well to hyperbole, and both the "Just Say No" message and the hysteria implied in the anti-drug rhetoric is pushing students away. What’s more, students do not respond well to the idea of grouping all drugs together. Tell me that marijuana might deter my success and that heroin will ruin my health and my family, and I’ll probably stay away from heroin, regardless of my experiences with marijuana. Tell me that all drugs are “bad”, regardless of their biological, psychological and sociological differences, and I will follow that grouping. In other words, children taught that marijuana and heroin are on the same playing field may feel positively toward trying heroin if they have not been negatively affected by marijuana.