----------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: AMMA: U.S. Web: Even The Prohibitionists Are Attacking DARE. What Is the Definition of Fraud? Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2001 06:54:15 GMT ******************************************************** THE AMERICAN MEDICAL MARIJUANA ASSOCIATION 15 Monarch Bay Plaza, Box 375, Dana Point, Ca 92629 Web site: http://americanmarijuana.org/ E-mail: amma@americanmarijuana.org Join our List: http://americanmarijuana.org/ ******************************************************** Published 2001-02-27 Source: www.marijuananews.com Author: Richard Cowan EVEN THE PROHIBITIONISTS ARE ATTACKING DARE. WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF FRAUD? Analysis By Richard Cowan Recently, DARE finally admitted that its "program" was not working. In a truly bizarre statement, Glenn Levant, president and founding director of DARE America, said "I'm not saying it was effective, but it was state of the art when we launched it. Now it's time for science to improve upon what we're doing." In other words, he admitted that the programıs critics had been right all along. This admission came in the context of announcing that DARE would be trying out a new program that has been more than two years in development at a cost of over $13 million. He has known for more than two years that the program was not working. Similarly, last December, the Mormon Church-owned Deseret News reported that then Drug Czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey visited Salt Lake City and assailed the cityıs mayor for opposing the continuation of the local DARE program. It quoted the mayor, Rocky Anderson, who is a prohibitionist, as saying, "All the peer-reviewed research shows that DARE is a complete waste of money and, even worse, fritters away the opportunity to implement a good drug-prevention program in schools." Anderson has also said that DARE is "a fraud on the people of America." On the other hand, McCaffrey was quoted as calling DARE "the premier drug-prevention program." Is it plausible that the Czar did not know about all of the studies showing that DARE didnıt work? Is it plausible that he did not know that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was paying for it? The Foundation is the chief backer of the Partnership for A Drug-Free America, his partner in the massive prohibitionist propaganda campaign? As recently as July 4th of last year, in an Op-ed in the Deseret News, Levant attacked, Andersonıs criticism of DARE saying, "Aside from being inappropriate and misleading, the Mayor's comments unfortunately show a lack of understanding of drug education. Worse yet, the mayor's actions have the potential to put politics in front of the very important issue of drug abuse prevention provided to Salt Lake City's children. We are more than willing to debate the efficacy of DARE, but the mayor's language is neither helpful nor conservative. DARE has become the most successful drug abuse and violence reduction program in the nation by applying the skills of law enforcement, schools, parents and the community, with a regularly updated curriculum based on the latest drug prevention research. The latest national measures of drug abuse show a statistically significant decline of 13 percent in teen drug abuse. We do not claim to be solely responsible for this encouraging decline, but DARE is a vital component of a comprehensive solution for the multifaceted epidemic of drug abuse." He was taking credit for a small drop in reported teen marijuana use, but he was lying, and he knew it. Last year a court even dismissed DAREıs libel suit against Rolling Stone Magazine over an article critical of DARE that contained some admittedly false statements by a now disgraced journalist. The court ruled that there was "substantial truth" to the charges that DARE had sought to "suppress scientific research" critical of DARE and had "attempted to silence researchers at the Research Triangle Institute, editors at the American Journal of Public Health, and producers at 'Dateline.NBC' In the October 1999 edition of American Teacher, Levant wrote that, "In the battle against illicit drugs, Owe've turned the corner.ı These were the words voiced this summer by Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala as she and the national drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, released the results of the annual HHS National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. The survey, which is one of the very few credible national measures of drug abuse, reports a statistically significant decline of 13 percent in teen drug abuse during 1998. Now it's time to set the record straight. D.A.R.E., the prevention education program that teaches children to avoid drugs alcohol, tobacco and violence, has played a key role in the overall national strategy that has helped enable America to reach this important milestone." Notice that Levant was citing the results of the annual HHS National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Lloyd Johnson, the prohibitionist academic in charge of the survey, is quoted in a recent interview with the Detroit News, as follows: Q. Is DARE ( Drug Abuse Resistance Education ) considered an effective program against drug use? A. Not by anybody in the drug use field except DARE. Q. Would you suggest that DARE be dropped or reformed? A. There is an effort to reformulate what DARE is, to change the content and so forth. All that is fine. Individual school districts decide what they are going to have in their curriculum, so they can choose. It seems to me that when there are programs out there that are proven effective, it doesn't make much sense to pick up one that isn't proven effective. One of the fundamental problems with DARE is that it's premised on the notion that a police officer is the best change agent in dealing with kids on this subject. A police officer is an authority figure. These kids are at an age when they are anti-authority. That may be the Achilles heel. Are we to believe that Lloyd Johnson was keeping this a secret until DARE admitted that it was not working? And did McCaffrey not have access to this data? A recent editorial shows that even The Deseret News has seen the light: "After months of criticism, the people who head the nationwide DARE program have admitted their program is a failure. Officials of the program, whose acronym stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, said they are coming up with a revamped program - one they have been working on for two years. This raises several question, not the least of which is why DARE's leaders strongly defended it against recent criticisms when they apparently knew at least some of the complaints were true. For two years they have been working quietly on changes based on evidence that DARE wasn't working, yet they were happy to continue accepting taxpayer money from school districts. Not only that, they often impugned the motives of their critics, attacking them as hiding an agenda to legalize drugs. Recently, studies by the National Academy of Sciences and the surgeon general have shown the program to be flawed. Now the program's critics have gained a good measure of credibility." Let us be very blunt about this. The DARE program - like marijuana prohibition itself - is not merely a failure, but a counterproductive fraud. Never mind the studies that show that DARE programs may even encourage drug use. Any program that wastes billions of dollars of taxpayer money and preempts effective drug education programs is by definition counterproductive. This is about much more than wasting money. This is about wasting lives. If DARE were a business, its managers would be prosecuted for fraud. DARE has been taking money for programs that they knew were not working for at least two years. Now they are trying to keep their near-monopoly on school "drug education" programs - testing their new scam in a few schools while continuing to run the old programs that they have acknowledged to be a failure in all the rest. Indeed, they are continuing to try to spread the old program around the world. This is a global fraud. We are not likely to see any investigation of this massive fraud. The fact is that the Robert Wood Johnson foundation funded the research on the new DARE program precisely because they recognized that DARE has a lock on the "drug education" franchise in most schools for political reasons. Few politicians have the courage to stand up to the narks. In short, the children of America, and other countries, are being sacrificed to keep the police constituency for the Drug War happy. If sacrificing children - and the sick and dying - and farmers - and the environment -- to keep police happy is not the definition of a police state, what does it take? ******************************** Mark "COSMOS" Renfro u tsi s da lu gi s gi = (Brilliant) u tsi s da lu gi s gv = (Shining) a ga li ha = (Illuminating from within) di tli hi = (Warrior) My Cherokee name. E-MAIL Marks2101@home.com "Marijuana clearly has medicinal value. Thousands of seriously ill Americans have been able to determine that for themselves, albeit illegally. Like my own family, these individuals did not wish to break the law but they had no choice." --Lyn Nofziger, former deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee (Note: The above quote was taken from an extraordinary new book, Marijuana Rx, by Robert C. Randall, the founder of the medical marijuana movement. Marijuana Rx is published by Thunder's Mouth Press.)