- Hey, y'all, Myles Bess here, journalist, host and proud plant daddy.

Even if you, yourself, didn't have D.A.R.E.

at your school, I'm sure you know what D.A.R.E.

is.

For decades, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education Program was the program that brought cops into schools so they could tell students how scary drugs were, and how they'll ruin your life.

And we all know what happened next.

Students got the message and avoided drugs for the rest of their lives and happily ever after.

No, it got dunked on by study after study, showing the program did not make students less likely to use drugs.

As a result, many schools started cutting ties with D.A.R.E.

and I assumed it stopped being a thing years ago.

So I was shocked to find out D.A.R.E.

is back with what they say is a totally new, reimagined program.

So now I'm genuinely curious if it's really some new and improved 2.0 version or if it's just the same thing repackaged to look different and modern.

So today we're asking, why is D.A.R.E.

back in schools?

(gentle upbeat music) D.A.R.E.

got its start in Los Angeles in the early '80s.

Daryl Gates was the chief of police at the time and he wasn't happy with what he was seeing.

Drug busts on school campuses were going up.

This dude was not a fan of drugs or drug users.

He'd later go on to say that, "Casual drug users ought to be taken out in shot."

Yikes.

It's safe to say he had zero tolerance for drugs, meaning any amount of drug use, no matter how small, was harmful to the individual and society.

Gates wanted a new program focused on drug prevention.

And who would be the face of this new program?

This guy.

Wait, no, sorry, cops.

Gates wanted cops in classrooms to deliver his anti-drug message, and the health education specialist for the LA School District agreed with him.

She believed that when it came to drugs, a police officer was more credible than a teacher.

- All right, little Billy, time to put what you learned into action, you ready?

- Sure.

- Hey, Billy, you wanna get high with us after class?

- I can't, I got basketball practice.

- What?

Man, I thought you were cool.

- Well, I mean, I guess one hit wouldn't.

You know, no, not doing drugs is cool.

(gentle upbeat music) - One more child saved from the evils of doing drugs.

God, I love my job.

- D.A.R.E.

started as a local program in LA elementary schools, but by 1989 it had a K through 12 curriculum and had gone national, and it's not hard to see why.

President Ronald Reagan had made the war on drugs a centerpiece of his presidency throughout the '80s.

First Lady Nancy Reagan started a Just Say No to Drugs campaign and federal dollars started to flow into D.A.R.E.

to expand to more and more schools across the country.

And the support was pretty much bipartisan, both Democrats and Republicans loved it.

(heavenly music) I mean, supporting cops and kids with one program?

Muah.

Starting in 1988, there was an annual National D.A.R.E.

Day that continued into the Obama presidency.

And by the end of the '90s, D.A.R.E.

was in 75% of US schools with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

But then science had to come and ruin everything.

Stupid science.

See a bunch of scientists used a bunch of science to analyze how well D.A.R.E.

was doing in keeping kids off drugs.

And the science was clear, just saying no wasn't working.

"The effectiveness of D.A.R.E.

in altering students' drug use behavior has yet to be established."

"No significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received D.A.R.E.

and those who didn't."

"D.A.R.E.

's limited influence on adolescent drug use behavior contrasts with the program's popularity and prevalence."

The just Say No to Drugs message, at best, worked in the short term, but wore off within a year or two.

And if that wasn't bad enough, one study from 1998 grabbed headlines and really freaked out a lot of people.

Over a six year period, this study tracked 1,800 urban, suburban, and rural sixth graders who went through D.A.R.E.

And the researchers didn't just find that the program was ineffective, for suburban kids, D.A.R.E.

was associated with an increased level of drug use, about three to five percentage points.

At the end of the day, having students say no just doesn't leave a lasting impact on most of them because they're parroting back a message to an adult.

It doesn't mimic real-life situations where they're gonna need to say no to friends or to other students, and most teens aren't just gonna not do something because a cop or a teacher tells them it's a bad idea.

For a while, D.A.R.E.

resisted and pushed back against these criticisms hard.

But all the bad press eventually reached Congress which ended up officially asking D.A.R.E.

to revise its program, and to their credit, D.A.R.E.

did.

Now they stumbled around a bit in the early 2000s trying to figure out different strategies, but by 2008, they landed on one.

It goes by the super cool, super hip, not cringey at all name, keepin' it REAL.

(air horns blaring) (Myles laughing) And this is the new D.A.R.E.

that's being taught to kids in schools.

According to their website, there are currently more than 6,000 law enforcement agencies delivering the D.A.R.E.

program to 1.2 million K through 12 students.

Keepin' it REAL was developed at a university by researchers that study and understand drugs and addiction and how that stuff affects the adolescent brain.

And it's different from the old zero tolerance D.A.R.E.

in that it's not about Just Say No, and, instead, it's more focused on helping students with their decision-making skills.

Cops have been retrained, so it's more interactive and less based on lectures, and students can have discussions with other students.

Aw, basically it's like D.A.R.E.

with a softer side.

Studies conducted by the two researchers who created the program show it's effective at reducing drug use and helping students resist peer pressure.

But not everyone in the public health community is convinced that the new D.A.R.E.

is much better than the old D.A.R.E.

One peer review study came to the conclusion that the evidence is weak and it may not be suited for nationwide implementation.

Turns out drug prevention is no easy task.

Huh, who knew?

There are so many different drugs and so many different reasons for why people abuse substances that it almost seems unfair to expect one drug education program to single-handedly stop a huge number of students from using them.

But one thing is clear, adolescence is a critical period for risk taking and experimentation.

Students' brains are still developing which makes them especially vulnerable to the effects of drugs and alcohol.

And that's not just in the short term, exposure to those substances can lead to long-term behavioral and cognitive problems, and depending on the drug, that can lead to addiction later in life.

So if we're gonna have drug education programs in school, they should probably be as good as they possibly can.

Is the new D.A.R.E.

that program?

To be honest, I don't know.

But I do know that the new D.A.R.E.

is at odds with the new breed of drug education that focuses on harm reduction.

It's kind of like what happened in health classes when talking about sex, where there was a shift from discussing abstinence as the only option to openly discussing safe sex.

Harm reduction, when it comes to drugs, goes beyond just saying no.

So like if you do say yes, how do you keep yourself as safe as you can?

You don't get that kind of information with D.A.R.E., old or new.

To learn more about harm reduction, I talked to Sasha Simon.

She managed the development and evaluation of the country's first harm reduction education program for ninth and 10th grade students.

- There's the reality that people do do drugs that is not accounted for in Just Say No programming.

Even most young people by the time they graduate from high school have tried at least alcohol.

So even if you're abstaining as a teen, which I think is ideal for most adults, it's our ideal, it's not actually happening and life changes.

- Sasha told me harm reduction programs, like hers, are all about giving students information.

- So if all you give to young people are a million different ways that they can say no, how are they gonna have the skills and information to be able to deal when they inevitably say yes to drugs?

Because the data shows that they will inevitably say yes to some drug at some point in their lives.

- With harm reduction, how you measure success is different.

It's not, are students doing drugs less?

Instead, it's how safe are they being if they do drugs or are around drugs?

So like knowing how edible cannabis affects you versus smoking it, or how to recognize the symptoms of an overdose and how best to respond to it.

When harm reduction is taught well, it's been proven to prevent death, injury, disease, overdose, and substance misuse.

And one thing you won't find in harm reduction programs, the cops, because you can't really have cops saying, "Hey, drugs are bad," and then a sentence later be like, "But this is how you can be safe if you do use them."

It's kind of like a conflict of interest.

- Well, what I think it says about a law enforcement officer delivering drug education is that you want a young person to be more concerned about the criminality of drug use versus what the health consequences might be.

And, especially, as they have had such a key role in the proliferation of the war on drugs that especially targets young Black and Brown people, it's I think people really underestimate what that trauma could be to have the very person, or the very people, the very entity that may have criminalized you, or your family, or people in your community, saying to you what you should be doing with your body and what health decisions you should be making.

- Harm reduction doesn't have anywhere near the foothold in schools that prevention programs like D.A.R.E.

have, but drugs aren't disappearing from society anytime soon, so that means drug ed programs are sticking around.

But what do you think?

Did you have any drug ed programs in your school?

If so, do you think it was effective?