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In search of the 'anti-drug'
Revamping the message
Dr. Sloboda has been working on the new curriculum for four years, and the conclusion she has reached - that a 10- or 17-lesson antidrug program in fifth or sixth grade isn't enough - is one that ninth-grader Isabel Maremont grasped long ago, baffled that it took a task force of experts four years and thousands of dollars to understand this.
"I don't really remember anything from D.A.R.E.," Isabel says with a shrug. "We only had it in sixth grade, and I threw away my binder a long time ago. But now is the time we start wondering whether we'll ever try anything."
Which is why Sloboda is testing her D.A.R.E. revamp, "Take Charge of Your Life," in seventh and ninth grades, when students are reputedly at the highest risk of experimenting with drugs. The study is being implemented over a 10-lesson period in 88 school districts throughout Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Newark, NJ.
As for the curriculum itself, Sloboda rattles off a six-pronged formula for success that includes understanding the risks of drugs, developing assertiveness and refusal skills, and avoiding potentially violent situations. Last on the list: "Make positive quality-of-life decisions."
What students don't learn is how the drugs work, what effects they have on the brain, and why they are harmful. "You've seen the pictures of the lungs and all that stuff," Sloboda says. "It goes right over their heads."
That isn't the kind of credit Isabel thinks she and her peers deserve. "I think they're almost scared to tell us the truth," she says. Isabel learned nothing about the club drug Ecstasy, for example - which has doubled in use among eighth graders in the past 10 years - when she went through D.A.R.E. two years ago.
She does know, however, that cocaine and heroin are harmful "because you can overdose on them." Nicotine "is just bad." And alcohol? "If you have a glass of wine at dinner or a beer or something, if you're an adult," she says, "it doesn't matter."
But Sloboda is uncomfortable with teachers focusing in the classroom on the specific characteristics of each drug. It is much more effective to teach kids the skills to say "no." "The kids," she says, "need resistance skills to be able to say 'no' when they want to."
The wrong messengers?
But what happens when they don't want to say no? What happens when the reason isn't peer pressure or what they have or haven't learned, but curiosity?
In May, less than 10 percent of high school students surveyed about drugs and drinking named peer pressure a "major problem," according to "The State of Our Nation's Youth," while 27 percent reported that it is a "minor problem," and 65 percent "not a problem."
Just when many children are beginning to wonder what drugs feel like, they are learning little more than how to avoid them. And that kids hear this message from teachers or police officers in programs such as D.A.R.E. has sometimes been the source of public ridicule. While there is no hard evidence that using police officers to teach kids about drugs doesn't work (no studies have yet been done to determine this), most experts suggest that law enforcement may not be the most effective mouthpiece.
"We're looking at that now," Sloboda says. "Things have changed. Since Sept. 11, there's a renewed respect for firemen and police officers and the military."
Others argue that students learn best from people who can impart some sort of wisdom based on experience. And yet it is a rare program that allows students to hear from current, or former, drug users.
Ron Clark, the 2001 Disney Teacher of the Year and author of the best-seller, "The Essential 55," says the message itself is muffled if kids cannot relate to the messenger. "A lot of people in these programs just aren't the right individuals," he says. "They don't bring a real passion to the subject, and the kids get bored to tears. Whoever is doing the awareness program has to be someone the kids like and trust."
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The lure of the unknown
MELANIE STETSON FREEMAN - STAFF
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NEEDHAM, MASS. - WHAT KEEPS HER UP AT NIGHT is the possibility of failure. Here in her room, where the evening silence is broken only by the electric hum of crickets and her radio, she's built a private sanctuary that only her thoughts can penetrate.
Isabel Maremont gets A's. Perched on a half-made bed just days before high school begins, her blue eyes animated and darting across the room as she speaks, Isabel is the first to admit little has stood in her way. Doing well is, well, routine.
Her mind rarely wanders to the kids who have already tried drugs, the ones who seek out trouble in place of some nagging boredom. She doesn't understand what it is they're looking for, what it is they lack. But every so often the thoughts that keep her up at night drift from exams to drugs, and she wonders what it would be like to try one.
Today, saying "no" is easy. "But that might change in high school," Isabel says with a shrug. "And I have to admit that."
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And then there is the issue of time. How is D.A.R.E., over the period of 10 or 17 brief lessons, supposed to influence kids who receive informal education about drugs - from friends, family, and a drug-saturated culture - their whole lives? Is it any different from teaching about sex? Or guns? Or algebra? These are hard lessons, and they require more than a quick-fix formula or punchy sound bites.
"The best programs that are science- or evidence-based can't just be in schools," says Roberta Leis, program director at Join Together, a drug-awareness resource center in Boston. "But a lot of the parents just grabbed onto D.A.R.E. and those pins and buttons and thought that was all they needed to do."
Kids who are curious about drugs will figure out a way to learn about them, insists Ms. Maran, whose own children reacted very differently to drugs when they were teens. "Kids are so smart," she says. "They're much more Internet-savvy and can go to sources that give them real information. One psychiatrist I interviewed was saying that half of her job was just scrambling to keep up."
Jordan, whose aunt has struggled with an addiction to crack cocaine for as long as he can remember, vows to stay away from drugs. But, when asked how likely that is, he grows quiet, leaning over a chessboard in his former middle school library and fingering a bishop, his Far Side T-shirt hanging loosely on a sinewy frame. "I don't know," he murmurs. "Maybe."
Jordan is spending many of the last days of summer hanging out at his old middle school in East Harlem, excited but nervous about the coming years at a prestigious, wealthy, mostly white school in upstate New York.
"I think about what it would be like to take drugs," he admits slowly, throwing a furtive glance over his shoulder. "But I can't just think about myself. I have a brother and a sister who think the world of me, and I'm trying to be a role model for them."
Still, Jordan cannot help but feel conflicted when he's taught to fear or loathe drug addicts. "I know it's a bad thing, doing drugs," he says, his gaze lingering on the bishop.
"But I also think it's bad to [label] someone as a crack head or a drug addict. They're hurting themselves."
Jordan may not have textbook knowledge about what drugs do to the brain, but he knows far more about drug use and what it does to the people you love than any of his teachers do.
Formal, school-based messages about the dangers of illegal drugs have long rung hollow to him. He certainly knows that drugs are dangerous, but he also sees a difference between casual experimentation - such as his relatives drinking wine - and addictive behavior, and he knows the lessons about drugs aren't necessarily as black and white as the rhetoric used in class.
By now, Jordan no longer takes such messages too seriously. These are decisions he's had to learn to make for himself. For the moment, at least, he hopes he's strong enough to continue making them.
Next:
Talking about drugs: The toughest conversation |
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AS DRUG USE FLUCTUATES, PROGRAMS RARELY ADAPT:
Patterns of drug use shift regularly - and sometimes dramatically - often without apparent explanation, yet drug-education curricula generally fail to adapt to such changes. "The perpetual introduction of new drugs," the study finds, "helps to keep the country's 'drug problem' alive."
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ADAM WEISKIND - STAFF
SOURCE: MONITORING THE FUTURE 2002
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