DARE Program Slows Child Drug Use, Study Shows : Education: The survey of 3,000 Long Beach schoolchildren is the first attempt locally to measure success of the program.

DARE, law enforcement’s highly touted drug resistance program, does not deter children already exposed to beer, wine or the crack pipe, but it appears to dissuade the ones who have yet to give drugs a try, according to a study by two Cal State Long Beach criminologists.

Although the number of Long Beach fifth-graders who discovered cigarettes, beer, wine, hard liquor or glue increased slightly in spite of their DARE instruction, the increase was not nearly as high as among those students who received no drug resistance education, the recently released study of more than 3,000 Long Beach schoolchildren shows.

The seven-month project by criminologists Michael Agopian and Harold K. Becker is the first attempt locally to measure the success of DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), a 5-year-old program that sends police officers to the classroom with an arsenal of just-say-no persuaders.

The research attempts to measure the local impact of an idea that began in Los Angeles in 1983 and has since spread to more than 2,000 cities in 49 states, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and American Samoa. At the same time, the study provides a glimpse of the role drugs play in the lives of Long Beach schoolchildren whose average age is 10.

The study showed that students who already use drugs were not compelled to quit. “What the numbers tell us is that DARE does not reduce usage of almost anything--cigarettes, hard liquor, cocaine. Kids don’t simply stop using,” Agopian said. “They don’t abstain.”

To Cpl. Dale Malec, one of seven Long Beach police DARE instructors, the study still shows progress. “The kid stays off crack, but he drinks a little alcohol. To me, that’s a success,” he said.

At the start of the fall semester last year, written questionnaires were distributed to all fifth-grade classes in Long Beach. Half of the classes were to receive DARE instruction, and half were not. The students were surveyed again at the end of the semester to measure the impact of the instruction.

According to the numbers, 7% of the students reported having used drugs, cigarettes or alcohol. The most popular vice was beer, which as many as 17% of the children said they drank once or twice a month during the previous two-month period. Wine was a close second with as many as 16% of the students reporting having consumed it.

By contrast, only 1% of the children said they had ever used cocaine and only 2% reported experimenting with amphetamines.

At the semester’s end, not a single student said the instruction had persuaded him to stop using a drug, and some who had never used drugs started anyway. The number of students who used cigarettes jumped from 10% to 12%; beer consumption edged from 17% to 18%; wine consumption grew from 16% to 18%; hard liquor consumption went from 6% to 7%; and the use of inhalants grew from 8% to 10%, the study showed.

Although that news was less than uplifting, the reports from the children who had not taken DARE was worse, Agopian said.

While only 2% of DARE students began drinking wine during the semester, a whopping 12% of the children without DARE had taken up the practice, the study showed.

Similarly, 1% of the DARE children began drinking beer while 10% of the non-DARE students fell prey, the study found.

“Even if it doesn’t stop drug abuse, it is extremely valuable in educating kids,” Agopian said. “Drug use among students is developmental--it starts with cigarettes, sniffing glue. It goes on to marijuana and cocaine. If we can maintain or slow that drug-use pattern in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades, it gives us time to provide more education.”

School officials said they were pleased with DARE’s successes and hardly surprised by its limitations.

“It is particularly hard to impact attitudes about alcohol,” said Karla Taylor, drug and gang education coordinator for the Long Beach Unified School District. “I was gratified that it slowed alcohol abuse down.”

The study looked almost solely for immediate shifts in behavior--namely, whether a child stopped or started using a drug during the three-month period. It was not intended to measure the long-term affect of DARE on children who might be deterred from ever using a drug over the years, the surveyors said.

The authors concluded that DARE succeeds in stopping children from experimenting with drugs, but should be reinforced with more education throughout the scholastic career.

“All of society has to join in,” Taylor said. “From the words Hugs Not Drugs on a dumpster, to billboards to DARE, the uniform effort from all directions is finally beginning to make some teeny bit of a difference. Five years ago, that wasn’t happening.”

SUMMARY OF FIFTH-GRADE SUBSTANCE ABUSE

1st Survey 2nd Survey Substance Group Sept.1989 Jan. 1990 Cigarettes DARE 10% 12% Others 11 14 Beer DARE 17 18 Others 16 26 Wine DARE 16 18 Others 13 25 Hard Liquor DARE 6 7 Others 5 11 Marijuana DARE 3 3 Others 2 5 Amphetamines DARE 2 2 Others 2 3 Inhalants DARE 8 10 Others 7 11 Cocaine DARE 1 1 Others 1 2

Source: Cal State Long Beach, Department of Criminal Justice, 1990.