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Drug education programs should help students make safe and sensible lifestyle decisions.
D.A.R.E.

• Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) is the most widely used school-based drug
prevention program, even though it has been called ineffective by the U.S. Department of
Education, Office of the Surgeon General, National Academy of Sciences, and Government
Accountability Office.

• To help them make safe and sensible lifestyle decisions, students need accurate, sciencebased,
nonjudgmental drug education instead of the scare tactics provided by the 20-year-old
D.A.R.E. program.

• Students should receive drug education from health professionals, not uniformed police
officers.

• D.A.R.E.’s abstinence-only approach fails to effectively reach students who have used or are
at high risk of using drugs. It doesn’t provide a fallback strategy for students who don’t “just
say no.”

• One study revealed that D.A.R.E. may have a “boomerang” effect, actually increasing drug
use among suburban students.

• The fundamentally flawed D.A.R.E. program can’t be improved by making superficial
changes to its curriculum and calling it “New D.A.R.E.”

The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign
• The federal government’s $120 million a year anti-drug ad campaign has repeatedly been
shown to be a failure in encouraging young people to stay away from drugs. One long-term
federally funded evaluation reported that there is “little evidence” the ads reduce drug use
and “some evidence for an increase in use.” The government pulled the study’s funding after
the report was published.

• The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that federal anti-drug officials have
resorted to “covert propaganda” to distribute their anti-drug messages by sending out
prepackaged news stories for TV stations to air.

• The government was caught paying TV networks to incorporate anti-drug messages into the
scripts of sitcoms and other programs