D.A.R.E. is dead, long live drugs
“Despite, or maybe because of, D.A.R.E.’s role in my life, I smoked weed at the age of 13 (sorry mom).”
I found this ‘Hugs Not Drugs’ pin in a stack of old photos, notebooks, and elementary school art projects late last year. It was buried under decades of forgotten keepsakes that included my first self-published book, “A New Mexico Pig in King Arthur’s Court;” an emotional poem scrawled by miniature hands titled “my felegs”; and a group portrait of Mrs. Magee’s fifth grade class at Park Avenue Elementary in Aztec, New Mexico.
In the photo, 27 awkward prepubescents arranged in graduated rows pose with uniform stiffness in a public school cafeteria, flanked on one side by a principal, who in retrospect resembled the Monopoly man, and on the other by a stone-faced, and no-doubt underpaid fifth grade teacher. The fashions are what you might expect from a group of 10 year olds growing up in small town New Mexico in the early 90s (that’s me in the front row wearing a gold silk shirt from Sam’s Club and a multi-colored “Guatemalan” vest probably made by my grandmother). A poorly hung D.A.R.E. banner looms over the scene, a fitting metaphor for the famously failed drug prevention program that attempted to turn children into tiny agents of the War on Drugs.
A few years after that photo was taken I tried drugs for the first time. Despite, or maybe because of, D.A.R.E.’s role in my life, I smoked weed at the age of 13 (sorry mom). D.A.R.E. was my first introduction to drugs, the primer for a lifetime of discovery and experimentation. It taught me what drugs looked like, how much they cost, and where to get them. Far from scaring me straight, D.A.R.E. lit a fire of curiosity in me that could only be extinguished by experience. Apparently I wasn’t alone.
From its formation in 1983, as a collaboration between the LAPD and the city’s public school system, Drug Abuse Resistance Education blanketed the country in a thick layer of racist, anti-drug bull shit. At its peak, D.A.R.E. was active in 75 percent of US school districts, but by the time my 5th grade class had made it to middle school, the shine of anti-drug education was starting to wear off. Evidence of D.A.R.E.’s ineffectiveness stacked up, painting the project as a potentially counterproductive drain on public funds. Not only had D.A.R.E. failed “to keep kids off drugs,” one study found it may have actually encouraged experimentation.
D.A.R.E. was fucked up, yes, but at least for me it was a glimpse into the future, a sort of ill-conceived blueprint for a life enhanced, not destroyed, by drugs.