Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 13:33:04 -0400 To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> Subject: Study faults popular anti-drug efforts in schools Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by aztec.asu.edu id KAA19313http://www.dallasnews.com/national/463381_drugs_06nat.AR.html
Study faults popular anti-drug efforts in schools
Students say substances are present on many of their campuses
09/06/2001
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Sixty-one percent of high-school and 40 percent of middle-school students say drugs are used, kept and sold on their campuses, according to a survey released Wednesday by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.
The center, a nonprofit institute associated with Columbia University in New York, also reported that neither of the two most popular American systems for controlling drug abuse by school-age children works well. The most popular, Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE, shows "little evidence . . . of any extended impact," the center concluded.
Another frequently used approach - "zero tolerance" policies that impose harsh penalties for even minor drug abuse - often discourages students from turning in substance abusers.
The center says the report is the "first comprehensive analysis of all available data on substance use in our schools and among our students."
The center, headed by Joseph Califano, who was secretary of health, education and welfare under President Jimmy Carter, acknowledges that the amount of reported drug use among teens nationwide generally has stayed the same or declined in recent years, except for some new drugs, such as ecstasy.
But Mr. Califano said drug abuse would decline more sharply if parents stopped leaving the problem to school-sponsored programs such as DARE and involved themselves more deeply.
"Parents raise hell and refuse to send their kids to classrooms infested with asbestos," Mr. Califano said at a news conference. "Yet every day they ship their children off to schools riddled with illegal drugs."
The most recent student responses about drug use in schools were based on a survey of 1,000 students, taken in telephone interviews from Oct. 20 to Nov. 5. The responses have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.
It was part of a broader survey, "Malignant Neglect: Substance Abuse and America's Schools," based on 10,000 random telephone interviews nationwide over six years with parents, teachers and students, coupled with reviews of outside research on the effectiveness of conventional drug abuse-education programs.
The center's report concluded that "Drug Free School Zone" laws, which make punishment extra severe for drug dealing within 1,000 feet of a school, are not clearly effective. It cites a Boston University School of Public Health study of three Massachusetts cities that found that 80 percent of drug cases occurred inside drug-free school zones, although most occurred after school hours.
Zero-tolerance policies in schools don't work well, either, the center found. The tough penalties discourage students from turning in their drug-abusing peers. Those expelled for drug abuse often wind up on the streets or in alternative schools where drugs are plentiful.
The center's report cites two widely reported outside studies that give DARE, a program police officers teach to fourth-graders through middle-schoolers in about 80 percent of U.S. schools, a low success rate. One, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1999, found no differences 10 years later between students who had and had not taken the courses. Another, which appeared in the American Journal of Public Health in 1994, challenged the effectiveness of DARE's concept.
The organization's president, Glenn Levant, said that those studies were based on old DARE curricula or based their results on small samples. The organization has upgraded its curriculum, Mr. Levant said.
DARE also offers a kindergarten through 12th-grade curriculum, but many schools don't use it.
"Drug use in young people overall is down since DARE was put in place," Mr. Levant said.
Mr. Califano recommended increased parental involvement and one-on-one programs pairing troubled youths with advisers to deter drug use.
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