In search of the 'anti-drug'

In fact, the number of experts who still embrace the "cutting off supplies" approach to the war on drugs is an ever-increasing minority. But at the same time interest in drug education as a means of battling illegal drug use remains strong. For the past decade, experts and politicians across the political spectrum have been stepping up the argument that education, rather than tough drug laws and border control, will be the most effective means of turning teen drug use in America on its head.

Part 1 In the classroom Part 2 Outside the classroom Reporter's notebook The toughest conversation Resources Programs that hold promise

Related stories 04/30/03 A new weapon in the war on drugs: family 04/17/03 A new window on drug blight 03/06/03 Chemical kids

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A whole lot, then, is riding on the success of existing drug education programs, and the Bush administration knows it. Among the provisions of this year's National Drug Control Strategy: $170 million earmarked for the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and $694 million for the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Program.

And yet, during a summer rife with the results of studies on drugs, anti-drug campaigns, and drug prevention, it became increasingly clear that no one seems to know just what to teach, or how, or when. A few scenarios show that some of the methods adults use to push kids away from drugs may actually be drawing them nearer.

• In June, drug czar John Walters proposed drug testing in schools across the country just weeks after a multiyear study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that students in schools that have drug testing are likelier to use drugs than those in schools that don't.

• In late July, on the same day that Cheech & Chong - long associated with marijuana use - announced work on their first film in 20 years ("They have a whole new generation of fans out there," New Line Cinema's Kent Alterman beamed), the Harvard School of Public Health released its College Alcohol Study. Education programs aimed at reducing drinking at college may encourage it, the study found.

• In August, shortly after participating in an antidrug film, a 15-year-old boy in England was found in his grandfather's garden after overdosing on a fistful of Ecstasy pills. The tablets had been stamped with kangaroos, and three 16- and 17-year-old boys were arrested on suspicion of supplying them. How could a student so involved in drug prevention, the world asked, so completely escape its message?

Experts continue to wonder why it remains so hard to identify the elements of a truly effective drug program. Considerable time, money, and effort have been thrown at the question, and yet the hearts and minds of many young people seem to remain largely resistant to the cautionary messages of adults. Drug education programs may have statistics, case studies, and "just say no" techniques on their side, but drugs have supposed glamour, adventure, and the promise of peer acceptance on theirs. Messages coming from teachers and adult seem only rarely able to compete.

Reefer madness

The history of drug education is short and poorly documented. Many drug experts are as uncomfortable discussing it as they are talking about illegal drug use, in part because it is riddled with failed programs, and in part because of the implicit admission that it is still too early to declare any of the latest ones effective.

One of the first attempts at drug education came in the form of a 1936 pseudodocumentary, "Reefer Madness," which hyped the harmful effects of marijuana, "the killer weed." A cult classic since its rescue from the Library of Congress in the '70s, the film was the first in a wave of scare tactics that would play a pervasive role in drug-education programs for the next 50 years.

In the late '80s, when an egg and a frying pan were used as a metaphor for the brain on drugs, the campaign was shunned into oblivion. Out of the backlash was born the popular slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to confuse with an egg." Kids weren't buying it, and antidrug campaigners admitted that fear and exaggeration don't work.

The burden of being good STEPHEN CHERNIN/SPECIAL TO THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

NEW YORK - HE HOPES THEY'LL NEVER ASK, but if they do he'll shake his head. He'll try not to grip his Alien Workshop skateboard so hard that his knuckles go white, and he'll stare into their faces to show he's not afraid, not the kid who follows orders. Because the truth is, he does follow orders. And to these guys, obedience is the essence of naiveté. Jordan Temple knows how it will all play out because it's happened so many times before. The kids on the corner will mumble throaty refrains as he ambles past, dangling cigarettes from their lips and kicking litter at their feet. It won't be dramatic. Jordan will saunter off toward the 6 train, relief sweeping over his body, and "Wanna smoke?" will echo in his head during the hour-long ride from his school in East Harlem to his apartment in Queens. Jordan knows it's a cliché. He's the kid who's had to snake past dealers to get home every day. What isn't cliché is how easy it's become - but how much harder it will be on the day he has to say 'no' to his friends.

"Kids today are rightly suspicious," says Meredith Maran, author of the recently released "Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic," in which she shadows three adolescent drug users to try to find out why they use and who, if anyone, is helping them stop.

"Teenage disbelief and suspicion of drug prevention programs is rooted in scare tactics," she says. "When I was 16 and started reading stories about drugs I was taking, and compared my reality to that, I said 'that's that.' To this day I don't trust anything from those sources."

Even today, some drug education experts are reluctant to talk about what has become the most widely used prevention program - Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) - since the Los Angeles Police Department founded it in 1983.

Preliminary studies showed a rapid reduction in drug use among the fifth- and sixth-graders who went through the program, and nearly two decades of federal funding followed. But in the late '90s, a new wave of studies deemed the program not only ineffective, but a possible cause of rising drug use among teens. More kids who had been through D.A.R.E. said they were trying drugs than those who hadn't.

Despite these findings, D.A.R.E. remains the program of choice in 80 percent of US public school systems - and the curriculum has yet to be replaced or improved upon.

Herbert Kleber, director of D.A.R.E.'s Scientific Advisory Board, admits the program continues to be used in part because of its monopoly on drug education. It had parents, teachers, and legislators enraptured for 15 years, he says, and there was little room, not to mention money, to develop other programs. "If D.A.R.E. disappeared tomorrow, money wasn't going anywhere else," Dr. Kleber says. "So the way to deal with it was not to kill it, but to fix it."

With a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the board appointed Zili Sloboda at the National Institute for Drug Awareness to develop an improved curriculum.

D.A.R.E. would stay, says Kate Kraft, the foundation's senior program officer, for logistical reasons. "D.A.R.E. has quite an effective distribution network," she says. "The issue was, if you could create a prevention curriculum that followed state-of-the-art evidence about what works, and distribute that through a ready-made distribution center - D.A.R.E. - could it be effective?" They are betting that it can.

Next: Revamping the message | 1 | 2 | 3

THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF TEEN DRUG USE: Despite a sharp decline in drug use between the late 1970s and early 1990s, which the study's executive author, Lloyd Johnston, attributes to "a period of rising concerns about the use of drugs," teen drug experimentation is almost back to its 1975 high.

ADAM WEISKIND - STAFF SOURCE: MONITORING THE FUTURE 2002