Public School Programs : Fighting Drugs: The Big Question Is How to Do It

What do police officers, politicians, puppets, clowns, professional athletes, movie stars and ex-cons have in common?

In recent years, all have been enlisted to help fight drug abuse in the public schools--and there is no solid proof that any of them have been effective. The number of youths who have experimented with or regularly use marijuana and other substances remains alarmingly high, even among students barely into pubescence, surveys show.

With the federal government preparing to pump $700 million into the nation’s elementary and secondary schools for drug education over the next three years, however, school officials are expected to to propose even more prevention schemes.

The crucial question is whether they can create programs that work. After nearly two decades of research, authorities in drug abuse prevention say, that question--what works?--still begs a definitive answer.

“I want to make a clear statement, and it is a hard statement to make,” Jeanne Gibbs, a San Francisco-based school consultant on drug education, said at a recent state Senate hearing on drug prevention in Ventura. “There is no one single program that, on its own, can be proven to prevent drug abuse.”

Roy Pickens, director of clinical research for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, concurred. Because most prevention programs have not been thoroughly evaluated, and because those that have been assessed often produce mixed results, “we can’t come out and recommend a particular strategy,” he said in an interview from the institute’s office in Rockville, Md.

That gives pause to educators and others trying to solve the youth drug problem.

Predicting that school officials will soon be “inundated by folks who’ll want to sell them all kinds of programs,” William Lennox, special assistant to Education Secretary William J. Bennett, acknowledged that the flow of federal dollars could lead to a flowering of programs that don’t work. To help districts get “the best program for the money,” Lennox said, the U.S. Department of Education will release a set of guidelines later this month to advise state and local education officials on the type of prevention programs they should strive to establish with the federal funds.

Legislation signed by President Reagan last October authorizes the federal government to spend $200 million this year and $500 million more over the next two years on drug education, the largest sum ever devoted to fighting drug abuse through the schools.

Bennett has, however, proposed cutting this year’s allocation in half. In Los Angeles Friday to speak to a group of arts educators, Bennett said in an interview that he believes that $100 million is “all we think we need” to spend on drug education efforts this year, particularly because many existing programs are not backed by solid research.

California’s Share

If Congress goes along with the budget cut, California’s share would be about $7.5 million. State officials expect the funds to begin arriving in February. Under the terms of the federal law, 30% will be allocated by the governor and 70% will be distributed by the state superintendent of public instruction. The Los Angeles school district hopes to qualify for up to $1 million.

The pending federal guidelines, Lennox noted, probably will reflect the advice printed in a booklet the department released last September, “Schools Without Drugs.” In that pamphlet, Bennett suggests that the best prevention efforts are comprehensive ones that involve parents, peer counselors and community leaders as well as schools.

The booklet mentions a number of school programs the department considers exemplary, but it stops short of advocating any one approach. Consensus is building among drug-prevention experts that a method that emphasizes the need to make students aware of the social pressures known to lead to drug abuse, and that helps them develop skills to resist such pressures, may produce the most durable results.

At this point, however, it is easier for the experts to agree on what does not work.

Preaching Shunned

Gimmicky one-shot strategies, like anti-drug rallies featuring celebrities and bands, are entertaining but, authorities say, unproductive.

“Kids don’t like to be preached to,” said Ruth Rich, who has overseen health instruction for the Los Angeles Unified School District for more than 20 years.

Scare tactics, popular several years ago, also fizzled, she said. This approach ranged from showing youngsters where drug use might lead--prison--to inviting recovering addicts to campuses to deliver grim warnings based on firsthand experience.

Of the latter tactic, Rich said: “We know that is not the approach to take. . . . Recovering addicts come in looking like nothing happened to them. Kids look at them and think, ‘You look fine.’ ”

The cocaine-related death last year of University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, however, “started it all over again,” she said. “Everyone wanted to come into the schools and tell their story.”

The most widespread approach to drug education, researchers say, has been to give students information about the types, uses and effects of drugs, in the hope that if youngsters receive enough information, they will make the rational choice to stay drug-free.

According to Phyllis Ellickson, a senior behavioral scientist for the Rand Corp., many drug education programs over the years have undermined their own credibility, however, by giving students inaccurate information, warning them, for example, that smoking marijuana is fatal. Moreover, Ellickson said, greater knowledge about drugs has not translated into behavioral change; that is, merely giving students information does not prevent drug use. In some cases, it encourages it.

For instance, showing students samples of harmful drugs in the course of explaining their hazards--common in the 1970s--”was like handing them a menu,” said Sgt. George Villalobos of the Los Angeles Police Department’s DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program. “It incited their interest . . . telling them that the little red one will put you to sleep, the little white one will jack you up.”

UCLA psychology Prof. Rodney Skager, who directed a survey last year of drug and alcohol use among 7,500 California junior and senior high school students for the state attorney general’s office, said there is considerable evidence that in the 1960s and 1970s, drug use increased in proportion to prevention activities in the schools.

‘Piqued Curiosity’

Giving information “took some of the mystique of drugs away,” Skager said. “It piqued curiosity and made drug use seem safer.”

As a result, educators have tended to shy away from drug education through much of the last decade, Skager said.

Now, he noted, drug experimentation among the young is so common that “we can’t expect more in the way of a rise. So no one can resist drug education anymore.”

In fact, a national survey of high school seniors conducted annually by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan indicates that use of marijuana is declining, from a high of 37% in 1978 to 26% in 1985. In addition, cigarette smoking, which experts say often leads to experimentation with drugs, appears to be leveling off at about 30%, and the number of seniors who drink regularly has declined slightly, from 72% in 1978 to 66% in 1985.

The only substance that is gaining ground, the survey showed, is cocaine. Use among high school seniors has risen slightly, from 5.7% in 1979 to 6.7% in 1985.

According to Ellickson, telling youngsters that marijuana, the most widely used drug among students, is slipping in popularity should be an important part of any prevention program. Most youngsters, she said, overestimate the prevalence of drug use among their peers. “It’s important for kids to know it is going down, because the message there is that they’re not going to be out of it if they’re not doing drugs.”

The one anti-drug strategy that a number of leading researchers agree holds out considerable promise is called the “social influences” or “social pressures” approach. Unlike earlier theories about the causes of drug use among teen-agers that blame psychological deficiencies in the individual for the problem, this strategy focuses on societal pressures and how to resist them.

First used in the late 1970s to discourage junior high school students from smoking cigarettes, it is now being applied to anti-drug efforts. The preliminary findings are promising, although not yet conclusive.

According to USC researcher C. Anderson Johnson, who participated in some early studies, a program based on the social influences theory produced a 50% reduction in the prevalence of cigarette smoking among thousands of seventh graders involved in about 25 studies around the country.

Project Expanded

In two studies involving 16,000 seventh graders in Los Angeles, Johnson, who directs USC’s Institute for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Research, expanded the project to include alcohol and marijuana.

The program consists of 12 weekly lessons designed to make the students aware of the variety of external pressures that may influence a person to smoke, drink or use drugs, he said. Those pressures include the messages contained in television commercials, for instance, or the presence of friends or family members who abuse substances.

Moreover, Johnson said, the program provides training in specific techniques to refuse drugs, alcohol or cigarettes. The techniques range from just saying no to making an excuse: “I have to get up early tomorrow” or “I hear my mother calling me.”

Johnson found that the lessons reduced the onset of cigarette smoking by 50% among students exposed to the program.

The study provided less persuasive evidence that the social influences approach works against the other substances, however. Among students exposed to the program, Johnson found that the prevalence of drinking and marijuana usage was reduced by about 30%.

“The results are in the right direction,” he said, adding that it will not be possible to say unequivocally that the social pressures approach works as an anti-drug strategy until the study is replicated several more times with similar or better results.

‘Empirical Question’

“We need a critical mass of studies to say anything, quote, definitive about the effect of this approach on alcohol and marijuana,” Johnson said. “It’s an empirical question that needs verification. I think we’re two or three years away from that.”

The Rand Corp.’s Ellickson has been conducting a similar study involving 7,000 junior high school students in eight districts in California and Oregon. Although she is still analyzing some preliminary data, she described the results as “extremely favorable.” The social influences approach, she said, “looks promising for a specific age group at a specific point in time.”

Pickens, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said programs that focus on building resistance skills are “not going to take care of all our problems” because there are factors in addition to peer pressure that make youngsters susceptible to trying drugs.

“We need to know more about what causes drug abuse,” he said, “and the problem now is trying to apply a strategy to prevent drug abuse when we don’t completely understand what causes it. . . . If you think I’m beating the drums for research, you’re absolutely right. But don’t get me wrong. We can’t just wait until we understand the phenomenon to do something about it. We have to take our best shot now.”

One local offshoot of the social influences model that school officials say appears to be working is the DARE program, which operates in all 347 elementary and 58 junior high schools in the Los Angeles school district. Although some observers are skeptical of the program because it relies on uniformed officers as teachers, it was one of several programs cited by the U.S. Department of Education in its anti-drug booklet.

Active Role Playing

The keystone of the program, which began three years ago, is a 17-week course that focuses on building students’ drug refusal skills through active role playing. It also offers information on the harmful effects of drugs, media influences, alternatives to drug use and building self-esteem. The program culminates in each student’s making a public pledge to stay away from drugs.

Although a study to determine the long-range effect of the DARE program on students’ drug use will not produce results for several years, school and police officials believe that it is doing the job it was designed to accomplish. But the evidence at this stage is anecdotal, as in this comment from a recent graduate of the program:

“I had a friend who offered me drugs,” said LaNeisia Green, 11, a sixth-grade student at 66th Street School in South-Central Los Angeles. “I told her no. I just said no. I said we had to quit being friends.”