DARE’s Results Prove Difficult to Measure : Substance abuse: There is much anecdotal evidence that the anti-drug program works, but there is no proof.

More than 100 Los Angeles police officers are assigned full time to DARE, a much-acclaimed program intended to teach schoolchildren how to say “no” to drugs.

But there is disagreement over how well DARE works in deterring children from using drugs and whether it is necessary to use police officers for the program.

DARE began in Los Angeles with 10 officers in 1983 and is now used by police in all 50 states. About 11,000 officers in 4,000 police agencies nationwide teach a standard curriculum.

There is much anecdotal evidence that the program works. But there is no statistical proof that it has a major impact.

“Generally, evaluators have reported that DARE has a positive influence on students’ knowledge regarding drugs,” said a study last year of nearly 2,000 Illinois students by the Center for Research in Law and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“However, the effectiveness of DARE in altering students’ drug use behavior has yet to be established,” said the study, which cited more than a dozen evaluations of the program, including one in Los Angeles. “The available findings indicate that DARE either had no behavioral effects or had a significant effect for only a few substances.”

An attempt to quantify DARE’s success in Los Angeles showed little difference in drug use among seventh- and eighth-grade students who had the 17-week curriculum and those who did not.

During the 1987-88 school year, the private Evaluation and Training Institute of Los Angeles surveyed 661 students and found that non-DARE students were much more likely to use alcohol and cigarettes but only slightly more likely to have tried cocaine, marijuana, LSD, PCP, stimulants or tranquilizers at least once.

“The numbers appear very close,” acknowledged Capt. Patrick C. Froehle, head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s DARE division.

But Froehle said he believes that the program is effective in stopping drug use by some children and delaying drug use by others.

Froehle said that DARE deserves substantial credit for a reported reduction in drug use on Los Angeles high school campuses. He cited a decline from more than 500 drug arrests in 1983 to 290 in 1990.

Some critics within the department, who asked not to be named, said they thought schoolteachers could be used instead of police to teach the DARE curriculum.

Police Commissioner Jesse A. Brewer, a former assistant chief, said it is time to “look at that very carefully.”

“You won’t find any officer in a black-and-white who will support (use of police in) the DARE program,” Brewer said. “They think it takes away from their ability to handle their workload.”

But Froehle said that police have greater credibility and commitment than schoolteachers as instructors for DARE. He cited an experiment in DARE’s first year, in which police split the work with educators who he said were not as dedicated to the program.

Whether police have more impact than schoolteachers is “the $64,000 question,” said Christopher Ringwalt of the Center for Social Research and Policy Analysis in North Carolina.

Ringwalt, who has studied DARE, said there is no statistical evidence that police do a better job. He said he asked the Los Angeles Unified School District more recently if it would be willing to assign some educators to teach DARE so he could compare their performance with that of officers, but district officials declined.

Johanna Goldberg, the district’s DARE coordinator, acknowledged that it is hard to measure the program’s impact, but added: “If you observe a classroom--and this is not very scientific--there’s something magical that goes on in the rapport . . .between the officer and the student.”

Ringwalt said his studies in North Carolina and Illinois have shown “modest differences” between DARE and non-DARE students, indicating that the program has had some beneficial effects.

Is DARE Worth It?

The Los Angeles Police Department assigns 104 officers full time to teach schoolchildren to “say no” to drugs. The only study on whether DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) has made a difference in Los Angeles was done for the LAPD. It found that pupils who did not have the DARE curriculum were only slightly more likely to use illegal drugs, although they were significantly more likely to use tobacco, beer and wine.

Figures represent the percentage of seventh- and eighth-graders in 1987-88 who said they had never used a particular substance. Two groups were compared: those students who had DARE, and those who did not.

DARE NON-DARE SUBSTANCE GROUP GROUP *Downers 99.5 99.1 *Uppers 98.8 98.1 *Cocaine 99.4 98.7 *Inhalants 85.6 73.0 *LSD 99.2 99.5 *Marijuana 95.5 95.6 *PCP 99.7 99.1 *Beer 69.2 54.7 *Liquor 89.8 86.4 *Wine 67.2 60.6 *Tobacco 81.3 73.5

SOURCE: Education and Treatment Institute.