Tag: dare

DARE Didn’t Make Kids ‘Say No’ to Drugs. It Normalized Police in Schools.

There’s no such thing as a universal millennial experience, but DARE comes 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, as Nancy Reagan famously put it, to “just say no.” DARE embraced an abstinence-only model in which any use of alcohol or drugs qualified as abuse and the only acceptable tactic was to abstain. Upon completing the 17-week program, students received a certificate and a T-shirt.

At its height, over 75 percent of American schools participated in the program, costing taxpayers as much as $750 million per year. Historian Max Felker-Kantor revisits DARE and its legacy in DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools, a new history of the program.

As a DARE graduate myself who wore the T-shirt long after it was fashionable (look, I liked the austere black-and-red color scheme), I vaguely recall presentations given by someone from the local police department. On one occasion, he told a student to act drunk and pretend to offer the class beer, while the rest of us screamed at her in reply. Another time, our officer-instructor went 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 entreaties to shoot up heroin in our rural Georgia schoolyard. I recently learned to my horror that my wife won a poetry contest in her DARE program in Alaska—a poem that she then, mortified, had to read aloud during the DARE graduation ceremony.

In hindsight, DARE is primarily remembered as a joke, a bunch of cops acting out hokey anti-drug skits. By 1994, a decade after the program’s founding, studies clearly indicated that the DARE curriculum had little to no effect on rates of youth drug use. By the 2010s, it had become a popular source of irony and parody: When then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the program’s effectiveness in 2017, DARE graduates noted on social media how they still smoke pot in their black-and-red shirts.

But while DARE didn’t “work” in the sense of keeping many kids from using drugs, Felker-Kantor argues the program was wildly successful at normalizing the presence of police, and the war on drugs, in people’s everyday lives.

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D.A.R.E. Officer Dies of Overdose While Raiding Evidence Locker and Gets a Parade the Next Day

In June of this year, a police officer with over two decades on the job was found dead in the Winnemucca Police Department’s evidence locker. He had a bag of fentanyl in his pocket, yet when his death was announced, it was reported that officer Matt Morgan died of “natural causes.” The very next day, dozens of police departments from around the area put together a procession parade two hours long in his honor as people stood along the route to pay their respects. But Morgan didn’t die of natural causes and he had no business being in the department’s evidence locker that day.

“A procession honored Winnemucca Police Department Detective and community hero Matt Morgan, 47, who passed away unexpectedly while at work on Thursday, June 25, 2020, of apparent natural causes,” the report read after Morgan passed away.

But his death was not natural. Weeks later, an investigation would reveal that Morgan overdosed on fentanyl and methamphetamine in that evidence locker. What’s more, Morgan was not supposed to be in the locker that day and the investigation revealed that the evidence (seized drugs) had been tampered with by this “hero cop.”

According to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, who is conducting the investigation, it is still ongoing.

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