Anti-Drug Education: Smarts Vs. Dope Seems to Work

It took a long time for Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates to persuade people that his department needed to fight drug abuse as hard in classrooms as on the streets. There were many doubters.

So when President Reagan and Congress presented their recent “drug war” packages containing millions of dollars for drug education programs, Gates felt vindicated.

“I was only one of many in law enforcement who recognized that we needed the schools, parents, employers and health institutions to join us in the fight. We no longer were deluded into thinking the police could do it alone,” Gates said. Still, he said, it is important to remember that any efforts will take years--”maybe a decade or a generation.”

Still, the doubt remains.

Dr. Brian R. Flay, deputy director of USC’s Health Behavior Research Institute, suggested that government “must be very careful in these programs because there is the other side of the coin that there are certain risk-takers who may be encouraged to take a given drug after hearing about it. The best programs seem to be those that help kids make informed decisions.”

And Catherine S. Bell-Block, director of preventive research at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said she believes that there was “ineffectiveness in the scare tactics” of some programs but that newer programs “have shown positive results.”

Many in law enforcement believe that the attack on the demand for drugs--through education, employee testing and increased treatment for addiction--will provide the best hope of solving what they acknowledge has become a problem beyond their ability to control. Among the voices:

- Michael Kelly, a veteran agent with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement: “We win a lot of little battles, and even some big battles, but we are definitely losing the war on drugs, which we will never win until we get the rest of society as our ally.”

- Broward County Sheriff Nick Navarro of Florida: “The enemy is within--within the souls of our citizens using the substance.”

- Ted Hunter, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s top official in Los Angeles: “The most encouraging thing to me on the civilian side is the recognition of the need for widespread drug testing. It shows somebody really has paid attention in industry . . . instead of leaving us to fight the supply side alone.”

There have been recent developments that show society seems ready to join the battle:

- For the first time in the 18 years that the Gallup Poll has been asking about education, adult respondents this year identified drugs as the biggest problem confronting schools, said they favor expelling students caught using drugs and allowing teachers to search lockers for narcotics, and narrowly approved urinalysis drug testing for students.

- Among employers, 30% of Fortune 500 companies have instituted narcotics programs for employees, coupled with mandatory drug testing as an integral part of the effort.

- The military services have instituted a program linking education and random drug testing. These tests have resulted in more than 65,000 discharges over five years.

- Most private treatment centers, which previously specialized in alcoholism treatment, have opened cocaine abuse units and turned them into a multimillion-dollar businesses. The fastest-growing medical support group is Cocaine Anonymous.

- Groups including Pharmacists Against Drug Abuse and Kiwanis International are making cocaine and drug information programs a priority, and the response to First Lady Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” movement has been large.

Health experts say that the massive national anti-smoking education programs have helped produce a dramatic drop in young smokers, and the Rand Corp. of Santa Monica has received a $2-million private grant to study whether the same methods might work on drug abuse.

Education Programs

Law enforcement has created several drug education programs.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration has sponsored Sports Awareness, which aims eventually to train 48,000 high school coaches to recognize drug problems and organize anti-drug programs in their schools.

In Los Angeles, one of the first school efforts to gain national attention was DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) developed by Gates and jointly sponsored by the Police Department and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

DARE, which began in 1983, has been described as a program “where cops leave their guns at home and arm themselves with chalk, balloons and an unrivaled knowledge of the streets.” It costs $750,000 a year--much of it from Coca-Cola, the Rotary Club and other private donors--to support sending 52 officer-instructors into all 347 elementary and 58 junior high schools in the district.

‘Non-Scare’ Course

The approach is a realistic, “non-scare tactic” course, in which children up to age 11 are taught the street jargon for drugs and instructed on how to resist peer pressure. Pupils act out street scenarios with street-wise cops.

The program has received high marks from the Evaluation and Training Institute, an independent training institute based in Westwood. “It really works in changing kids’ attitudes about drugs, and principals and teachers were very laudatory about the program,” said Dr. Glen F. Nyre, who prepared the DARE evaluation.

Nyre said student questionnaires showed that the pupils over time became increasingly negative about drugs, believing that drugs would harm their health, school work, family relationships and future job opportunities. They also developed increasingly strong arguments against those who would urge them to start using drugs. No effort was made to measure how many students used drugs at the beginning of the class and subsequently quit.

Another local anti-drug program is SANE (Substance Abuse Narcotics Education), recently started by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. This year, 21 deputies will be sent into 105 schools in 38 county school districts not covered by DARE. The program, which began last year, has been financed by department funds and $80,000 in donations.

Both DARE and SANE focus on fifth- and sixth-grade students on the theory that they are more receptive to this type of instruction than junior high and high school students. The older students get follow-up instruction.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, noting that enforcement only interrupts the drug trafficking process, said he believes that drug education on a limited basis should start as early as kindergarten, with more detailed information to be presented to students in elementary grades.

‘They . . . Are Important’

“That’s how you fight drug abuse, not by telling horror stories about drugs, but by developing in these youngsters an ability to resist the pressures to use drugs. You do that by instilling in them a sense of self-esteem, a feeling of self-worth, a recognition that they, as individuals, are important.”

The SANE program provides teacher training programs, community education programs and drug education in the classroom.

Still, there are concerns about the effectiveness of classroom training.

“We’ve seen encouraging results over the past three years in DARE, and we are convinced it works,” Gates said, “but the truth is that no one knows how well education programs will work in the long run. I’ll tell you, if they don’t, God help America in the 21st Century.”