WOL: Your study
of the California DATE (Drug, Alcohol, and Tobacco Education) program in
1995 came to much the same conclusion as the new study from Kentucky.
What does that tell you about the state of drug education in this country?
JB: Let me put it this
way: if you had a senior citizens program that was found, repeatedly, to
be ineffective or even hurting the senior citizens, there would be an uproar
like you wouldn't believe. But here we have many studies that show
that the kids are being hurt by these programs, and there's not a peep
from anyone.
There is still not a single
scientifically sound, long-term study that shows that DARE prevents kids
from using drugs. But more importantly, this isn't really about DARE.
We now have at least nine recent examinations of drug education that show
that the programs like DARE, Life Skills Training, Project Alert, etc.,
do not prevent kids from using drugs. And we have at least three
recent examinations which show that they cause a multitude of negative
effects -- including, but not limited to, increased drug use, exiling those
kids in need of help from the school system, and cognitive dissonance.
WOL: How do drug education
programs cause cognitive dissonance?
JB: There is a severe
emotional disturbance in kids that's raised by the conflict between the
just-say-no messages they receive in school versus a variety of people
using a variety of substances with different effects outside of school.
We are quite sure now that that emotional conflict results in a reduction
in educator credibility. And not just in drug education -- we think
that it generalizes into the larger educational community. That is
to say, if students don't receive honest, accurate and complete information,
they develop a basis for the belief that educators are lying to them.
WOL: Spokespeople for DARE
complain that studies showing DARE's ineffectiveness don't take into account
the changes made to the curriculum over the years.
JB: The curricula are
always changing, but they're building on an original curriculum.
Ten versions of what doesn't work in the first place will not suddenly
make it effective. But there are deeper issues here. For instance,
what is emerging right now is a basic federal policy conflict. The
federal government mandates implementation of only effective drug education
programs. But the only programs they will allow to be implemented
have been found to be universally ineffective.
But ultimately, it's a critical
error of judgment to believe that this is about DARE. The political
aspects may be about DARE, but this is really about the overall effectiveness
of drug education, and whether, under a no-use model, it is possible to
prevent kids from using drugs. And the preponderance of evidence
at this time is telling us that it is not possible. It's telling
us that we need to change from focusing on young people's disabilities
to their capabilities.
WOL: That focus on disabilities
is known as looking at kids' "risk factors," or the attitudes and beliefs
they hold that puts them at risk for using drugs. What does it mean
to focus on young people's capabilities?
JB: It's called a resilience
approach. What we now know is that if you take kids in the worst
possible situations and emphasize their capabilities, they have a much
better of chance of developing positive life outcomes than if you emphasize
those risk factors. That's been shown in a number of studies.
For example, one key risk
factor is a lack of connectedness between young people and adults.
But we now know that adult-youth connectedness is one of the most powerful
predictors of positive youth outcomes.
So what we need is what's
called is a resilience model, that emphasizes relationships over rules,
and emphasizes emotional attachments rather than the emotional disconnection
between young people and adults. When those emotional attachments
are present, then the educator can bring in good and honest and accurate
and complete information. Because we also know, although it's never
brought into drug education, that if young people are given sufficient
information, they are virtually as good as adults at decision making.
WOL: So a zero-tolerance
environment is not only ineffective, but makes it more difficult to develop
resilience.
JB: Absolutely.
I look at it like this: these zero tolerance programs and policies are
the equivalent of mandatory minimum sentences for kids. When a first
time drug offender is sentenced under mandatory minimums, the judge has
no discretion. Similarly, when young people violate a zero-tolerance
policy in school, the educational community has made it so that there's
no discretion about them getting kicked out of school. The only difference
is that we're talking here about children.
Rather than teaching kids
a valuable lesson, almost all the evidence points to the conclusion that
these zero tolerance policies teach young people unintended lessons about
a punishing society, and the limited learning opportunities in a punitive
educational system. That's the key lesson. If you listen to
the voices of kids in all of our research, that's the key lesson they pick
up from these policies.
WOL: Is there a place for
the "get tough" approach?
JB: For some kids it
does work. However, those are in fact the kids who are least likely
to experiment with drugs or develop drug problems in the first place.
But we know that by the end of high school, at least eighty percent of
kids will have experimented with alcohol, tobacco or other drugs.
So why would you make policies for all kids based on the problems of a
few?
But the key is that just
because we say that just-say-no programs don't work, doesn't mean that
we're just-say-yes researchers. There's a long distance between just-say-no
and a paradigm shift that focuses on children's well being.
