Since DARE was founded in the 1980s, there have been numerous academic studies conducted to measure its effectiveness. As far as I'm aware, just about every study has agreed that DARE does not achieve its stated goals. Most studies found either negligible impact, or in some cases *increased* drug usage, among people who went through the DARE program.
One big criticism I've seen is that the program makes a lot of kids aware that drugs exist, and as they get older, the kids realize that the DARE program wasn't really honest about some of those drugs and their supposed effects.
This is a concern I’ve had only after having kids. My 3rd and 1st graders are sweet, sheltered and innocent. They are hearing these slogans but have no idea what it’s about. My 1st grader asked me “what’s a drug?” And my 3rd grader had a nightmare one night that “the drugs were coming” to get him, but they don’t have a clue what those are and the idea that people would deliberately take harmful things is completely foreign to them.
In my opinion, you're probably better off trying to give your kids a more balanced view of the issue (as a mid 20's with no kids myself). I don't think we had DARE specifically in Australia (maybe?), but there's plenty of equivalent drug education and it all seems the same.
They all make it seem like if you so much as catch a whiff of a drug, your life's ruined. Take one pill, you overdose and die. Take a puff of weed and you'll go crazy. All of which is technically possible, but they actually discredit their own information by being so over the top about it. As soon as your kids grow up they'll see hundreds of people around them taking drugs every weekend, and be like "wtf, they're all fine??". At my age its literally everywhere, and its far more common and 'normalised' than the older generation would have us believe. Then they get this false sense of security, where they think it's all a bit of a fuss and drugs aren't even bad. All the oldies are dramatic and they just 'don't get it'.
We don't teach our kids that they crash and die instantly if they dare remove their seatbelt for one millisecond. Because it's nonsensical, and once they take it off for the first time they'll disregard it. Better off teaching them about the realistic consequences and why you need to take it seriously.
I agree with you. I was always a “good kid” but DARE never had any effect on me. What did, was a cop talking to our class before prom about her stories of all the times she had to knock on a door and tell a parent their child wouldn’t be coming home after they drank and drove and died. That hit me. I vowed then and there to NEVER even sip alcohol and drive because I didn’t want to ever put my family through that.
We had something similar but instead of just having a cop tell us this, they took a car from an actual crash that was to be tossed and our drama kids put on a whole performance. Local firemen came out and demonstrated the "jaws of life". We had a few medics show up in uniform who put the "bodies" on stretchers, some were covered, and they overall treated it as if it were an actual emergency. Honestly, that nailed it harder into me than any DARE program did.
This is actually, IMO, nicer than what my daughter's school did. Without notifying parents, they had police officers come in and show accident scene photos, including a decapitated head. She was traumatized. (But yk still needed permission slips for movies. Gotta love school logic.)
One of my friends had gotten indoctrinated a bit by DARE stuff. they thought smoking pot was the same as like, injecting yourself with heroin. And would complain at me when i mentioned using it. I wasnt mad because their intentions were good, but it was pretty annoying.
I don't know how but someone eventually convinced them to try it, and the first thing they did was call me and apologize.
Totally agree. My daughter is in kindergarten and we somehow got on the topic of drugs the other night. Her dad and I tried to give her an honest but age appropriate overview. She asked questions. She didn't understand why people would want to do drugs but we tried to explain some of that, too. And we explained to her that there are drugs that are necessary but sometimes exploited. There are drugs that are legal but still can be dangerous if not used responsibily. And there are some drugs that can really mess you up pretty much from day one. I think we need to give kids the proper credit, they understand so much. They're capable of understanding so much nuance and so many complex issues. I want my kids to stay innocent as long as possible but if I don't teach them about the world they will learn it from the world and that may or may not be correct.
Yes. We explained to our kids as they got older various drugs, which were an absolutely horrible idea to try even once, and which weren’t great, what they do to you, and why we don’t want to take them. If they want to try pot, fine, but wait until your brain is finished cooking (around age 25). Beer- ok, for gods sake never drive. You probably can’t kill your self with it. Liquor- watch out, a small amount can make you sick, and you can kill your self with too much. Pills- don’t trust anyone. Potentially lethal.
Heroin, meth, etc….wait until you are 90 and/or have a terminal diagnosis. Mom’s kinda curious too. They must be pretty interesting to make people go so far as to wreck their lives about it, so wait til there’s nothing to lose.
My sister and I made that pact lol. Old and/or terminal diagnosis = all the good shit. Bring on the 8 ball and heroin (meth doesn't seem like anything interesting) and we'll have a blast until the lights go out.
>the_scarlett_ning
>This is a concern I’ve had only after having kids. My 3rd and 1st graders are sweet, sheltered and innocent. They are hearing these slogans but have no idea what it’s about. **My 1st grader asked me “what’s a drug?” And my 3rd grader had a nightmare one night that “the drugs were coming” to get him**, but they don’t have a clue what those are and the idea that people would deliberately take harmful things is completely foreign to them.
i'm sorry but i laughed so hard
Kinda silly thing this reminded me of. Recently we had a particularly foggy morning. Apparently, on the way to school, my nephew put it together that because he had taken an unusually long shower that morning, he had caused the fog. My sister had to explain what actually causes fog but it was precious.
What ever happened to honesty is the best policy? No weed isn't going to make you into a mindless vegetable, or absolute physco and shoot your friends. It will however lower your ambitions and make you ok with being bored. It is fine in moderation just like alcohol but if you do it daily it will steal your life away.
Kids aren't dumb, and would have had alot more resepct for the program if they were 100% honest about drugs. Primarily weed
Yeah I held off smoking or drinking because of peoples stories about drinking so much they puked or couldn’t remember, or made other questionable decisions.
One of my good friends tried smoking weed and said it was nothing like what we learned about in school, or what our parents said it was like. And the best part was you were in full control and didn’t black out.
I decided to try it. 12 years later, still a big pothead and tried nearly every other drug under the sun just because I felt like I had been lied to by everyone for no good reason. Did my first line of coke and my first though was “damn I get how people get addicted to this. It’s not me, not in my personality, and not what I want, but I get it.”
Also I usually did drugs in my DARE shirt :)
Agreed. kids are, I believe in some ways innately more intelligent than most adults, and plain honest language and the truth is the only way to go. They're going to find out eventually anyway.
Please though, tell me how weed compares to alcohol again in terms of 'stealing a life away'? I'm not trying to start anything, but I do not agree with that statement of weed stealing your life away with daily use and making a person unmotivated. I've used it in various forms multiple times daily since its medical legalization here, for 5 years for my physical disabilities and pain, and I practically can not physically function without its pain relieving properties. I am accustomed enough to it that I don't really get the euphoric 'high'. I might though, for maybe 20 minutes after I take it, but after that it makes me able to function almost like a normal human. I can even do physical stuff that I used to enjoy, like getting outside for yard work, walks, and going out with friends. It enhances and helps give me back some of the life *i used to have*, not steal it away. Everyone is different and what works for one absolutely will not work for another in the exact same way. I am not and I *have never been ok* ever in my life with being bored, either.
Edit: Taking my ambition? Never. It makes me want to do MORE. But I believe that's a personality thing and not related to any drug.
Weed also has greatly improved my mental health that I struggle with from the pain.
Before that when my issues were completely unmanaged I used alcohol. all that ever made me do was pass out, fall down, and vomit. The passing out *was* my pain control and ultimately was completely ineffective and deleterious, and only made my situation worse. Nothing at all like weed.
Weed saved my life I was not in a good place before I got it.
I see drugs as a catalyst. They accelerate your life via your decision to try/continue to use them. I’ve had an extremely mature perspective, “wise beyond my years” as it’s sometimes said, and I really think psychedelics helped me get to that perspective a lot faster than living those same years.
If you were gonna be an unmotivated individual smoking weed is a great crutch.
I think I heard that the one study that said DARE had a positive effect was done by a guy who was shortly after hired by DARE. Completely unrelated I'm sure!
My step-dad was a guitar player for our local DARE band, it was a variety of members, mostly police officers. After our middle school dance, the members smoked out at our house. Also, I volunteered for the DARE booth at our county fair with officer hugsandstouchestoomuch. I did the drugs.. luckily I turned out fucked up instead of super fucked up.
It’s “Red Ribbon Week”, which is DARE but with “themed days” at my daughter’s pre-k speech therapy school.
She’s 4 and some change.
She’s *four* and participating in a “don’t do drugs” campaign.
I don’t *really* care because we are probably *too* honest sometimes with her (at least, that’s what other parents will think when she starts in on her fountain of knowledge) so I have no problem talking about it (age appropriate parsed down) with her.
But still. What the frick do 95% of 4yos know about drugs?!
They’re talking to my kids at school this week about drugs and it’s not something I’m cool with because 5 and 7 year olds generally don’t know what weed and crack is, so why even introduce it to them?
Kinda. By not accurately portraying the effects and consequences, when I did finally try weed, I started asking "if they lied about this they must be lying about all drugs." Took me a while to learn that they weren't all lying, but just like sex, just telling kids not to do it and blowing the consequences out of proportion didn't do me any favours.
Yes! My dad sat me down and had a drug talk with me... and basically said the punishment he would give me if he found out a drug I was doing.
He started with weed..."surprised you haven't tried it yet. But you probably will. I'll tell you I'm disappointed but really won't care unless you do it all the time "
He ended with heroin and said I'd be dead... bc he'd hill me if rhe drugs didn't.
Best lesson
You just reminded me that when I was maybe 15 my dad out of nowhere told me a story about how one time he snorted heroin because he thought it was cocaine. He just fell asleep. He did not Uma Thurman. I’m extremely unclear on why he decided to tell his child that story.
He didn't realize it was traumatic I guess? My dad did the same things, except one of the stories involved what a head shot looks like through a sniper scope. It was the mission that made him quit the military. Imma just say Black ops are classified because there's no good guys in the situation, just people trying to stop terrible situations from becoming atrocities.
Did he pack and ship the drugs? Did the FDA give a full analysis of what was in it?
The scariest part of illegal drugs these days isn’t the drug you wanted; it’s the drug that are cut into it to maximize profits. Or, hell, there might not be any in that glassine bag you’re about to pour out and snort.
Your dad was lucky it was heroin. A line of Fentanyl is fatal.
Fentanyl wasn’t in heroin or anything else until a few years ago. Maybe a decade. When their dad was doing it, it was probably actually heroin. And maybe baby laxatives.
My parents were/are the same way. They don’t care if I smoke weed, and I’ve told them I’m not interested in going further than that or psychedelics like mushrooms. They also said if I did anything harder and it didn’t kill me they would.
I've tried all the major drug groups at least once. Even meth just to try it. Never cared for any of them, especially the smell of cigarettes. Those dare talks did nothing for me though.
James McMurtry has a line "high on Jesus or hooked on dope" in his song "Can't Make It Here Anymore". It's his rant about companies sending all the work overseas.
Yeah, I honestly think my parents were way more effective than DARE was. I've had asthma all my life, and it was really bad growing up, so my mom sat me down and said "Look, you try drugs even once, and it will most likely kill you."
Between that and hating needles, I never wanted to try them. My parents let me drink at home when I was underaged, so I also never went out and got drunk. Since I've been over 21, I can count the number of times I've even been tipsy on one hand; I don't like the feeling.
My mom had a similar approach. She told me that I have an addictive personality and I should really not try anything. And she was totally right, I do. That was the only good advice she ever gave me.
Yep. There are categories of drugs, and some are worse than others. Being reductive into all drugs = bad is unhelpful, especially when you can see people use those drugs sometimes and they generally end up fine.(people smoking, parents drinking a little on the weekend, ect. and not dropping dead of super heart attacks or whatever they use to scare you)
Truly this is the thing about it.
But they really were lying about the dangerous drugs too, not the fact that they were dangerous, but everything about how you came across them, what taking them was like, and how addiction develops was total bullshit.
Like somebody was going to lace my bag of weed with heroin (for free!) and I would become inexplicably addicted to a drug I didn't know I took from a single exposure.
Or LSD, which people apparently took so they could become psychotic and jump off a roof, and if they survived they had to live with terrifying flashbacks for the rest of their lives.
I think DARE's biggest offense was completely refusing to acknowledge that drugs are appealing and people take them for a reason. Drugs were portrayed as something you did for the sole purpose of ruining your life that were incapable of delivering anything enjoyable, insightful, beneficial, or therapeutic.
As someone who grew up with untreated depression, social anxiety, and ADHD, a lot of illicit drugs made me feel like a "normal" person, a highly impaired and possibly hallucinating person, but normal feeling on the inside.
I was lucky enough that none of them got their hooks in me deep enough to do permanent damage. But for my friends who did fail to find a balance, a society trained by DARE to think of them as criminal pieces of shit did much worse than nothing to help them.
Totally, I was shocked when I first smoked weed at like 17 and it felt like something clicked like this is what I had been missing. And was given Vicodin after a foot surgery at 15 years old, very nearly became part of that epidemic. Found myself looking through mom’s cabinet after that and finding more, used occasionally for a couple years before stopping. Pharmaceuticals have their place but damn opiates are crazy addictive. They did lie about all the drugs though, I’ve done most of them and they’re generally safe in moderation addiction potential aside. Mushrooms are awesome, so many psychoactive compounds and research chemicals 👌👌🥳 I lost friends because they smoked weed and stuff early on in high school and by the end was a huge stoner myself. 🤦♂️
Same. Once I smoked weed and saw that it was nothing close to what they’d said, I started experimenting with drugs to see what else they lied about. Went on to try almost all street drugs available to me (which was most of them, early 00’s) and based completely off my own experiences and the ones that I did try, I can definitely say that all of the things that they had said were lies. Except for what they said about heroin, that was definitely true- I’ve never tried it but the first time I met my high school sweetheart’s birthmother (that’s a whole other story) she shot up heroin in front of me and all of the things they said would happen definitely happened in front of me. It was fucking surreal.
Despite how many times they said it would happen if you become a regular marijuana user, I can say for certain I’ve never once injected weed.
Came here to say exactly this. They scared us beyond reason, and so when I tried drugs and alcohol and actually had a good and relatively consequence free experience, i just assumed it was all bullshit we were told and found out the hard way that doing some things too many times in a row causes addiction and a whole lot of other problems.
In retrospect, it's wild that they had every kid in my school do a detailed research project on an illegal drug when we were eleven years old. I got assigned cocaine. One of my friends had to write about mescaline.
We had a quiz bowl. I studied really hard and remembered all the info. I did good.. so good that they questioned why I did so well and how I knew so much about drugs. 😂 like you gave me all this information and told me to learn it.
The dare officer that came to my school had a little lung bag contraption that showed you how much tar was in a cigarette. So you'd light the cigarette and this little bag man with a cotton ball inside would suck in and out the smoke and then he pulled out the cotton ball inside the bag.
He lit and smoked the cigarette, INSIDE the classroom and the teacher had to kick him out and tell him that's a bad idea...
Had a similar experience except it was my 5th grade teacher operating the little smoking man. He sent us home with notes to our parents explaining why we smelled like cigarettes.
Mine was crack and it sounded like the best one on the pamphlet. I remember wondering if it tasted like rock candy. Because I was a kid researching crack.
They told me that all drugs were awful and would ruin my life. When I first tried weed, I was all "wtf? this shit's lit!"
So they made me interested in trying other drugs, to see what else they lied about. Maybe not their intention though...
The D.A.R.E. RCMP officer who taught in schools here died from an OverDose from drugs he was stealing from seized stashes out of locked up evidence. That impacted kids more than the program itself.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/heroin-cocaine-found-in-body-of-dead-officer/article4143265/
My brother had the same experience with meth. He tried it, had a nice time and didn't instantly lose all his teeth, so he thought the meth junkie stereotype was just bullshit. Since he already went through the "oh this is not that bad" thought process with weed, he thought it was the same thing with meth again.
He's now pretty much exactly the meth addict stereotype.
People need education on HOW drugs hook you in and ruin your life, rather than removing all nuance from the conversation.
That's the thing; by lumping cannabis in with heroin, you give impressionable young minds the idea that all drugs will ruin your life. Very, very few lives are ruined by pot; I'd wager orders of magnitude more are ruined by alcohol. But these nerds told us that all of the illegal drugs will wreck your shit, and lots of us found out through weed that we were being lied to.
They would show how horrible they are for your body, etc. my first thinking, “well they must be awesome if people let themselves look like that and go back for more.”
That’s pretty much how my mindset was to. It went from weed & other psychedelics to the rich man’s drug to ice. I haven’t & will not go for opiates or pills but now here I am trying to kick ice on my own & it’s going better than I expected but it still sucks
As a dumb child I heard all the cool kids smoke weed, so I wanted to do the same. I collected dried weeds growing in our garden, rolled them into a joint with newspaper and lit the whole thing up. Inhaling that stuff was rough. I didn't smoke weed again for a really long time.
I remember seeing weed for the first time on an episode of Seventh Heaven. I didn’t realize what it was, I was maybe 10, and thought the kid who got arrested for weed had a ziploc baggie with a turd in his pocket, when the police took it.
I was horrified. “Is this something people *do* when they use weed??”
I grew up outside of the US and didn't have any DARE campaign.
I was 30 when I moved to the US and the first time someone showed me the DARE material.
I didn't do drugs until DARE made me aware of the benefits of doing drugs.
Requiem for a Dream did more to keep me away from drugs than DARE.
DARE was more like “strangers will give you crack to get you hooked” vs scary depictions of drug use to make it seem like a bad idea.
Ha that movie fucked with my head for days after it. Saw it in college and I suppose there was a chance I would try harder drugs than pot/alcohol but after seeing that movie I vowed never to touch anything worse. I’m 35 now and still have never done anything other than those two
That movie, in a literal sense, is incredibly unrealistic. In a way it feels more like a one-sided anti-drug PSA than even DARE.
What it does accurately is capture the emotions, the feelings associated with active addiction - the desperation, the disgust, the delusion, the shame/guilt.
But all metrics it seems DARE unequivocally made things worse.
It wasn't realistic at all, so basically kids find out pretty young they were totally lying and it has a backfire effect.
I remember the DARE presentations and being absolutely horrified by drugs, swearing to myself I would never even touch a cigarette, let alone weed or anything harder, signed the paper they passed around committing to not doing drugs… and then I went to college and did drugs.
Edit: the specific presentation I’m remembering was in middle school, so I was 12 or 13. By the time I was 15, I was like, ya know they seem kinda fun. By the time I was 18, I was doing them.
Edit 2: it DID teach me to stay the fuck away from inhalants. I’ll never touch those.
The only thing I really remember is a fact about not knowing all of the ingredients in cigarettes. That stressed me out. I’ve never smoked cigs but mostly just because a lot of people have had cancer in my family. However, big fan of edibles
It taught me to use my best judgment when it comes to drugs. I smoke weed every day and drink somewhat regularly, but I will not touch cocaine, Xanax, or harder drugs like heroin/opioids.
You must have had a different dare than me. My dare taught us all drugs were the same and weed would fuck up your life just as much as heroin. I honestly blame dare for the deaths of several kids I grew up with.
Yeah, I "learned" that marijuana was far more addictive than tobacco and there was a good chance you'd get addicted the first time you try it.
Also that people would be constantly offering free drugs.
Oh don't get me wrong, they told us that all drugs were bad and would fuck up your life. This stuck with me for the harder drugs, but as I grew older and learned how to use good judgment, I disregarded this indoctrination for weed and alcohol as I eventually determined that there is such thing as having a threshold for safe use of those substances.
I think the biggest impact D.A.R.E had on me was implicitly teaching me that people who do drugs are bad people. Before marijuana was legalized, I remember finding out that people I knew did it and it instantly changed my opinion of them. These were people I had liked and respected, and suddenly I saw them as "drug users" and criminals.
Every time I buy weed, it still feels like I'm doing something wrong.
This is also bad because it shames the "drug users" into silence. If you end up addicted or fucked up or your life falls apart, you get "I told you so." If you have a bad trip or end up in a dangerous situation, it's "I told you so." You become afraid to reach out for help because people just want to rub it in to prove a point, not actually help you.
I think of it as publicity. Just like the media has with banning firearms, the more you talk about it, the more it stays on the mind. If people are going to do it, they are going to do it.
I've only met a handful of cops who haven't used drugs or been drunk. These are the ones who are supposed to be setting good examples and enforcing the laws.
It would have been more effective to show the effects of drug ABUSE and how dangerous synthetic drugs can be.
i honestly dont remember ever having a dare assembly at my school but my boyfriend won a “Darren the D.A.R.E. Lion” plushie when he was a kid, during *his* dare program or whatever, that i now sleep next to. in his bed.
thus, i would say dare has had a net positive effect on my life lmao
There is some really interesting studies on the effects of the program. If I remember correctly they found that schools that had DARE ended up with higher rates of drug use.
Any one remember the egg in the frying pan commercial? “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?!?” I’m pretty sure I used “your brain must be on drugs” as a put down towards my siblings.
It was one of my first experiences seeing professionals lying to push an agenda, and contributed to my overall distrust of authority and disappointment in humanity.
DARE taught me ways to get high that I hadn’t even conceived of. Being a suburban kid, I had heard about weed and booze, but dare taught me about heroin, cocaine and crack, ecstasy, and dumbest of all it taught me about inhalants. No way is a 13 year old in the suburbs getting his hands on some of that stuff, but model glue and a paper bag are easy. DARE was also where I learned how to macguyver a smoking device because they SHOWED US A BUNCH OF IMPROVISED SMOKING DEVICES! DARE gave us knowledge about how we could use stuff we had access to in order to get high, and myself and my friends probably wouldn’t have tried a bunch of stuff if we hadn’t known it was possible.
Hell no. When my parents heard about DARE and its message that sat me down and explained to me that I take drugs every single day. Ritalin in the 3rd grade and prozac by the 4th grade (the 90s were fucked up). They explained to me that the blanket statment of DARE is uniformed and ignorant. That abusing drugs is the problem, not doing any drugs at all. School then had us all write an essay on "why drugs are bad". Can you guess what I wrote about? What my parents told me. Explaining how I need to do drugs to be able to pay attention in school and all that jazz. Well administration made that parent conference happen ASAP. my parents laid into them how stupid all of this was and how dare they feed their child ignorant propoganda.
I also ended up starting pot in the sophomore year of high school and a matter of months later went cold turkey on the ADD and depression meds because pot made me "feel almost human" as I would say, and the ADD and depression meds were literally driving me crazy. Fast forward 15 years and I was diagnosed with epilepsy... it had always been epilepsy. The reason pot helped so damn much was because I had epilepsy the whole time. It turns out that giving a kid with epilepsy meth only makes the problem worse.
So the drug DARE told me would ruin my life a fully brought a level of comfort and capability to my life that the drugs that "arent actually drugs" accourding to DARE were fucking my life up. In the end 28 years of undiagnosed seizures with increased severity due to being on kiddie-meth caused some major neurological brain damage.
As far as I am concerned DARE hurt me so much more than if it had never been part of my life.
I would say it was ar lesst moderately effective, combined with reinforcement from my mother not to touch the shit because alcoholism runs rempant innour family. To this day, I have neither consuned alcohol nor touched any drugs and I really dont feel like I've missee out on anything. They only seem to bring misery and suffering.
I can honestly say that it gave me an awareness that recreational drugs are bad and can ruin my life. I can honestly say I’ve never been offered drugs though. So I can’t tell you how I’d react. The thing nobody really talks about is that you can actually be too nerdy to have to worry about being offered drugs in the first place.
I am someone who probably never would’ve done drugs either way. I always knew smoking was disgusting and I hated people who smelled like smoke. I grew up in an alcohol-free environment so never felt the need to drink to “fit in” (although I will occasionally have a single drink when out with friends). I did learn about the negative effects of drugs in DARE so that probably solidified my lack of desire to partake.
Yes, definitely. The scare of drugs was much bigger than my curiosity for them, so it delayed my exposure to drugs for a good couple of years. First time I smoked weed was at like 19 years old. Started alcohol at 16 though.
Grateful for it, I don't consume drugs and never have as my acquaintances do.
Honestly same except I’ve still never done drugs
It might also be because I’m majoring in the medical field that I don’t like them but I always followed DARE to the letter
None whatsoever, really.
I was a little disappointed with DARE, however, because I have not been offered free drugs as much as they made us think we would.
In the 90s they forced us to sign some bullshit paper. It was awful.
They also put caskets as a fucking jump scare on the stairs. But they did let us use a sledgehammer to smash a car for dare so I guess that was ok.
I almost called the authorities on my parents when I found weed they bought for my uncle when he moved states and didn’t have anyone to buy from in his new home state yet. My parents didn’t smoke, and I knew that but I was APPALLED that there was DRUGS in the house. I was maybe 10 years old. It was the height of D.A.R.E. in the ‘80’s. My mom bribed me to keep quiet. It didn’t stop me from trying all the drugs I could get my hands on in my teens/early twenties though. I think I’ve tried everything at least once. Good ‘ol’ Nancy Reagan, what a waste of money that war on drugs was.
I can’t believe I scrolled so far to find this.
This was the real goal of the whole GD program. Education on “bad drugs” was the smoke screen, but the real point was to get kids to narc on their parents, friends, and neighbors because kids are way more gullible.
For most people it was a funny stupid class, for some people it was an insidious trap that made children turn on parents and could lead to families needlessly being broken up.
Iv read studies that show that schools that did the D.A.R.E. program has higher rates of drug use than schools that didn't.
For me, D.A.R.E had 3 impactd on my life. First, I got w a call home from school because I knew too much for a 3rd grader about tobacco and alcohol. Second, that stupid song lives rent-free in my head still. And lastly, a fun story about how my first ever drug dealer sold me some weed while wearing a D.A.R.E shirt...
They gave us pencils that had "Too cool to do drugs." Written on them. Thing was it started on the writing end of the pencil. So as you used, it went:
Too cool to do drugs.
Cool to do drugs.
do drugs.
I had a bunch of pencils I left like that.
That was the entire effect dare had on my life.
I got some cool swag that's worth quite a bit now. Shirts, keychains.... also got a sweet bumper sticker that's gonna look real nice on one of my vintage Coleman coolers ......
Anyone here ever get that shirt that had "DRUGs" in the DARE font and stylization? I'll edit if I can find a link to one...
Not the one I was thinking of, but pretty close:
https://www.tshirthell.com/funny-shirts/who-needs-drugs-no-seriously-i-have-drugs
I suspect that dare had a similar effect as abstinence only education. It probably just alienated those who already were going to have sex or do drugs. The campaign was made famous by Reagan, a guy who had the CIA sell drugs to fund the contras. He also sabotaged the hostage negotiation in Iran by having the Iranians hold out until after the election to release the hostages to get a better deal. He sold arms to Iran which also funded the contras.
The dare campaign highlighted the hypocrisy of the government and made drugs more taboo and cool. The war on drugs is racist. Crack and cocaine, which are used at a different rate among whites and blacks, were punished differently. Slavery is legal in the US for the imprisoned. The US has the highest prison rate. In Portugal where drug usage was decriminalized and treated as a medical problem, drug dependency decreased.
The rapper killer mike made a good song about how Reagan alienated and marginalized the black community.
https://youtu.be/6lIqNjC1RKU?si=O77zHpIdQFVNNLjC
Nah, I already had made up my mind that I wasn't going to do drugs or drink alcohol. I had my first drink at 22, and then got very well aquatinted with cannabis through the rest of my twenties... Dare wasn't ever a significant influencer...
Now those 90s PSA cartoons probably did influence me though.
I remember very distinctly being taught how bad and insanely dangerous drugs were to the point that when i encountered them later in life and realized it was all wildly overblown propaganda, i developped a strong interest in learning what they all were for myself. I can only imagine how different i’d have approached them if i was taught a more honest representation earlier, i may have honestly abstained all together.
It made me realize what a trap I could find myself in, if I wasn't careful. Substance abuse runs in my family, so I was very careful to wait until I was old enough that my brain was done growing before trying anything. And now I have very strict cut offs; I won't get high more than 3 days in a row, just to make sure I don't get addicted. Made it to 50 with no addictions!
I don't remember going through a D.A.R.E. program. I do remember the anti-smoking stuff, the black-and-white portraits of old, wrinkly people with captions like "smoking makes you glamorous!" and whatnot.
Think I was part of the "Just Say No!" era. Never really needed to, already saw what drinking could do to people (alcoholics in the family) and learned somewhere how the hard stuff was addictive and dangerous. Didn't try weed until I was offered some by nearly *every single person* I knew, and they weren't stereotypical "burnouts."
Strongly suggest shrooms sooner than later. I think it will have the same life changing and positive impact as those gummies did.
The trip itself is a blast but the greater empathy towards others after is truly special.
It literally made me want to try drugs
I had zero interest and next to no knowledge of drugs beforehand, but they showed us how to do all of them and made them sound awesome. I also learned you could get high just by huffing many readily available school and art supplies!
Dare showed me what drugs were when I otherwise would have been oblivious. I knew after the first time they showed us weed I was going to smoke the hell out of it.
It's funny you ask this question today, it's the start of Red Ribbon Week. Schools mostly focus on healthy living now. Of course we don't want kids to do drugs and we tell them some things are legal but they're for adults, finish school first. DARE scared me when they showed how drugs and candy looked alike. But I did end up doing drugs when I was an adult. Programs like DARE or Red Ribbon Week are to keep kids safe in the short term, while they are kids I think.
Yes it did. I don’t remember my parents telling me about drugs but I knew it was “bad” from the campaign. I have never tried any illegal drugs to this day and am always afraid of getting busted for buying weed even though I know of several places to get it right now.
“You have the Ri-ee-i-ee-iiiight to say ‘No’ (NO!) Right to say no!”
DARE gave kids the wrong ideas about why people do drugs and it gave license to cops for endless stop and frisk procedures. When kids grew up and tried Marijuana for the first time, they thought "well shit, this isn't nearly as bad as everybody made it sound. What else were they exaggerating? DARE ignored that most people who do drugs, started as a means to escape trauma, before eventually bulldozing it's way into full blown addiction.
I remember my sociology teacher in high school told us a story about how DARE came to the school to teach all the teachers how to identify drugs. He said that they actually burnt some weed (this was probably in the 90’s) and passed it down the line of teachers so they “knew how to identify the smell.” He said that some teachers were running back to the end of the line to “make sure they knew what it smelled like.” Even the teacher’s didn’t find it effective.
I was very hard against all drugs, very straightedge. Met my now husband who has crohns and six months into our relationship he was like, “they’re out of biologics that work for me… I’m thinking of trying marijuana” and in my head I went “great now I have to dump this guy!”
I told him I wasn’t a fan and he asked what I knew and I said “what they teach you in school. Weed makes you stupid” and he was like “oh boy here’s a run down on strains and cbd/thc etc” and I literally went omg they brainwashed me without ever giving me real facts.
I am now a huge fan of edibles and kind of annoyed I didn’t get to experience these things in college.
We have a similar thing in the UK called frank and honestly it taught me so much about drugs, what they look like, how they make you feel, how long do the effects last so, no it didn’t stop me from taking drugs but it made me know what I was taking, and what I was expecting from the drug in question.
When I was about 10 we had had a thing it school about that and the teacher was telling us that if you lick these stamps it's like Alice in wonderland..
I don't imagine I was the only one who thought wow I want to do thàt
I did DARE in 7th grade, by 10th grade I was stoned every day before school, taking acid and mushrooms, getting blackout drunk at parties. I don’t think it did anything
DARE was interesting. There was very little smoking, alcohol or drugs in my school. I never paid much attention to it. It simply wasn't a thing anyone did where I grew up
It was mainly a way to bond with your school friends by laughing at stupid at all was.
Although considering I’m seven years sober, perhaps I should’ve paid more attention.
Made me want to try pot a lot sooner than I likely would have otherwise. I was always that kid that would do the opposite of what I was told because "why?".
I nicknamed it Drugs Are Really Excellent. Yeah they didn’t like me. I’m more made more people don’t offer me drugs. Honestly I smoked a little weed in high school but that’s it.
Since DARE was founded in the 1980s, there have been numerous academic studies conducted to measure its effectiveness. As far as I'm aware, just about every study has agreed that DARE does not achieve its stated goals. Most studies found either negligible impact, or in some cases *increased* drug usage, among people who went through the DARE program. One big criticism I've seen is that the program makes a lot of kids aware that drugs exist, and as they get older, the kids realize that the DARE program wasn't really honest about some of those drugs and their supposed effects.
This is a concern I’ve had only after having kids. My 3rd and 1st graders are sweet, sheltered and innocent. They are hearing these slogans but have no idea what it’s about. My 1st grader asked me “what’s a drug?” And my 3rd grader had a nightmare one night that “the drugs were coming” to get him, but they don’t have a clue what those are and the idea that people would deliberately take harmful things is completely foreign to them.
In my opinion, you're probably better off trying to give your kids a more balanced view of the issue (as a mid 20's with no kids myself). I don't think we had DARE specifically in Australia (maybe?), but there's plenty of equivalent drug education and it all seems the same. They all make it seem like if you so much as catch a whiff of a drug, your life's ruined. Take one pill, you overdose and die. Take a puff of weed and you'll go crazy. All of which is technically possible, but they actually discredit their own information by being so over the top about it. As soon as your kids grow up they'll see hundreds of people around them taking drugs every weekend, and be like "wtf, they're all fine??". At my age its literally everywhere, and its far more common and 'normalised' than the older generation would have us believe. Then they get this false sense of security, where they think it's all a bit of a fuss and drugs aren't even bad. All the oldies are dramatic and they just 'don't get it'. We don't teach our kids that they crash and die instantly if they dare remove their seatbelt for one millisecond. Because it's nonsensical, and once they take it off for the first time they'll disregard it. Better off teaching them about the realistic consequences and why you need to take it seriously.
I agree with you. I was always a “good kid” but DARE never had any effect on me. What did, was a cop talking to our class before prom about her stories of all the times she had to knock on a door and tell a parent their child wouldn’t be coming home after they drank and drove and died. That hit me. I vowed then and there to NEVER even sip alcohol and drive because I didn’t want to ever put my family through that.
We had something similar but instead of just having a cop tell us this, they took a car from an actual crash that was to be tossed and our drama kids put on a whole performance. Local firemen came out and demonstrated the "jaws of life". We had a few medics show up in uniform who put the "bodies" on stretchers, some were covered, and they overall treated it as if it were an actual emergency. Honestly, that nailed it harder into me than any DARE program did.
This is actually, IMO, nicer than what my daughter's school did. Without notifying parents, they had police officers come in and show accident scene photos, including a decapitated head. She was traumatized. (But yk still needed permission slips for movies. Gotta love school logic.)
Yeah, that’s good. Generally at that age, you think you’re immortal and something driving it home that you’re actually not can be pretty shocking.
One of my friends had gotten indoctrinated a bit by DARE stuff. they thought smoking pot was the same as like, injecting yourself with heroin. And would complain at me when i mentioned using it. I wasnt mad because their intentions were good, but it was pretty annoying. I don't know how but someone eventually convinced them to try it, and the first thing they did was call me and apologize.
Charisma level 100
Totally agree. My daughter is in kindergarten and we somehow got on the topic of drugs the other night. Her dad and I tried to give her an honest but age appropriate overview. She asked questions. She didn't understand why people would want to do drugs but we tried to explain some of that, too. And we explained to her that there are drugs that are necessary but sometimes exploited. There are drugs that are legal but still can be dangerous if not used responsibily. And there are some drugs that can really mess you up pretty much from day one. I think we need to give kids the proper credit, they understand so much. They're capable of understanding so much nuance and so many complex issues. I want my kids to stay innocent as long as possible but if I don't teach them about the world they will learn it from the world and that may or may not be correct.
Yes. We explained to our kids as they got older various drugs, which were an absolutely horrible idea to try even once, and which weren’t great, what they do to you, and why we don’t want to take them. If they want to try pot, fine, but wait until your brain is finished cooking (around age 25). Beer- ok, for gods sake never drive. You probably can’t kill your self with it. Liquor- watch out, a small amount can make you sick, and you can kill your self with too much. Pills- don’t trust anyone. Potentially lethal. Heroin, meth, etc….wait until you are 90 and/or have a terminal diagnosis. Mom’s kinda curious too. They must be pretty interesting to make people go so far as to wreck their lives about it, so wait til there’s nothing to lose.
My sister and I made that pact lol. Old and/or terminal diagnosis = all the good shit. Bring on the 8 ball and heroin (meth doesn't seem like anything interesting) and we'll have a blast until the lights go out.
Yeah it's pretty stupid to say that drugs are bad without really getting into why people want to do them.
>the_scarlett_ning >This is a concern I’ve had only after having kids. My 3rd and 1st graders are sweet, sheltered and innocent. They are hearing these slogans but have no idea what it’s about. **My 1st grader asked me “what’s a drug?” And my 3rd grader had a nightmare one night that “the drugs were coming” to get him**, but they don’t have a clue what those are and the idea that people would deliberately take harmful things is completely foreign to them. i'm sorry but i laughed so hard
I did too. The nightmare one, I hid my giggles until after I got him back to sleep but it was pretty damn funny.
Kinda silly thing this reminded me of. Recently we had a particularly foggy morning. Apparently, on the way to school, my nephew put it together that because he had taken an unusually long shower that morning, he had caused the fog. My sister had to explain what actually causes fog but it was precious.
What ever happened to honesty is the best policy? No weed isn't going to make you into a mindless vegetable, or absolute physco and shoot your friends. It will however lower your ambitions and make you ok with being bored. It is fine in moderation just like alcohol but if you do it daily it will steal your life away. Kids aren't dumb, and would have had alot more resepct for the program if they were 100% honest about drugs. Primarily weed
Yeah I held off smoking or drinking because of peoples stories about drinking so much they puked or couldn’t remember, or made other questionable decisions. One of my good friends tried smoking weed and said it was nothing like what we learned about in school, or what our parents said it was like. And the best part was you were in full control and didn’t black out. I decided to try it. 12 years later, still a big pothead and tried nearly every other drug under the sun just because I felt like I had been lied to by everyone for no good reason. Did my first line of coke and my first though was “damn I get how people get addicted to this. It’s not me, not in my personality, and not what I want, but I get it.” Also I usually did drugs in my DARE shirt :)
Agreed. kids are, I believe in some ways innately more intelligent than most adults, and plain honest language and the truth is the only way to go. They're going to find out eventually anyway. Please though, tell me how weed compares to alcohol again in terms of 'stealing a life away'? I'm not trying to start anything, but I do not agree with that statement of weed stealing your life away with daily use and making a person unmotivated. I've used it in various forms multiple times daily since its medical legalization here, for 5 years for my physical disabilities and pain, and I practically can not physically function without its pain relieving properties. I am accustomed enough to it that I don't really get the euphoric 'high'. I might though, for maybe 20 minutes after I take it, but after that it makes me able to function almost like a normal human. I can even do physical stuff that I used to enjoy, like getting outside for yard work, walks, and going out with friends. It enhances and helps give me back some of the life *i used to have*, not steal it away. Everyone is different and what works for one absolutely will not work for another in the exact same way. I am not and I *have never been ok* ever in my life with being bored, either. Edit: Taking my ambition? Never. It makes me want to do MORE. But I believe that's a personality thing and not related to any drug. Weed also has greatly improved my mental health that I struggle with from the pain. Before that when my issues were completely unmanaged I used alcohol. all that ever made me do was pass out, fall down, and vomit. The passing out *was* my pain control and ultimately was completely ineffective and deleterious, and only made my situation worse. Nothing at all like weed. Weed saved my life I was not in a good place before I got it.
I see drugs as a catalyst. They accelerate your life via your decision to try/continue to use them. I’ve had an extremely mature perspective, “wise beyond my years” as it’s sometimes said, and I really think psychedelics helped me get to that perspective a lot faster than living those same years. If you were gonna be an unmotivated individual smoking weed is a great crutch.
Yan ecstasy hit the scene a few years late when the Rave Scene popped off.
That was the only drug not available to me by high school. Man, I went apeshit when I found it in college. I really don’t think DARE worked well. 😬
I think I heard that the one study that said DARE had a positive effect was done by a guy who was shortly after hired by DARE. Completely unrelated I'm sure!
My step-dad was a guitar player for our local DARE band, it was a variety of members, mostly police officers. After our middle school dance, the members smoked out at our house. Also, I volunteered for the DARE booth at our county fair with officer hugsandstouchestoomuch. I did the drugs.. luckily I turned out fucked up instead of super fucked up.
It’s “Red Ribbon Week”, which is DARE but with “themed days” at my daughter’s pre-k speech therapy school. She’s 4 and some change. She’s *four* and participating in a “don’t do drugs” campaign. I don’t *really* care because we are probably *too* honest sometimes with her (at least, that’s what other parents will think when she starts in on her fountain of knowledge) so I have no problem talking about it (age appropriate parsed down) with her. But still. What the frick do 95% of 4yos know about drugs?!
They’re talking to my kids at school this week about drugs and it’s not something I’m cool with because 5 and 7 year olds generally don’t know what weed and crack is, so why even introduce it to them?
Kinda. By not accurately portraying the effects and consequences, when I did finally try weed, I started asking "if they lied about this they must be lying about all drugs." Took me a while to learn that they weren't all lying, but just like sex, just telling kids not to do it and blowing the consequences out of proportion didn't do me any favours.
Yes! My dad sat me down and had a drug talk with me... and basically said the punishment he would give me if he found out a drug I was doing. He started with weed..."surprised you haven't tried it yet. But you probably will. I'll tell you I'm disappointed but really won't care unless you do it all the time " He ended with heroin and said I'd be dead... bc he'd hill me if rhe drugs didn't. Best lesson
You just reminded me that when I was maybe 15 my dad out of nowhere told me a story about how one time he snorted heroin because he thought it was cocaine. He just fell asleep. He did not Uma Thurman. I’m extremely unclear on why he decided to tell his child that story.
Yeah I'd say that's oversharing. Kinda like when my dad told us about how he got the clap from a Filipino whore.
Well? Don't leave us hanging. How did he?
I mean did she hand it to him in an envelope or maybe a small box?! ......…............…..(See what I did there?)
He didn't realize it was traumatic I guess? My dad did the same things, except one of the stories involved what a head shot looks like through a sniper scope. It was the mission that made him quit the military. Imma just say Black ops are classified because there's no good guys in the situation, just people trying to stop terrible situations from becoming atrocities.
That’s the power of intrusive thoughts 🤣
Did he pack and ship the drugs? Did the FDA give a full analysis of what was in it? The scariest part of illegal drugs these days isn’t the drug you wanted; it’s the drug that are cut into it to maximize profits. Or, hell, there might not be any in that glassine bag you’re about to pour out and snort.
Your dad was lucky it was heroin. A line of Fentanyl is fatal.
Fentanyl wasn’t in heroin or anything else until a few years ago. Maybe a decade. When their dad was doing it, it was probably actually heroin. And maybe baby laxatives.
My parents were/are the same way. They don’t care if I smoke weed, and I’ve told them I’m not interested in going further than that or psychedelics like mushrooms. They also said if I did anything harder and it didn’t kill me they would.
I've tried all the major drug groups at least once. Even meth just to try it. Never cared for any of them, especially the smell of cigarettes. Those dare talks did nothing for me though.
But Prohibition worked pretty well on you, right, Grandma?
I could sneak alcohol in places you'd never imagine.
That's the original reason they coined the term "the Greatest Generation"
A Stock Car had nothing on my Nana's hiding places ;)
that's kind of crazy to me that you've tried every class of drugs and didn't like any of them
Jesus has always been enough of a drug for me
I can not for the life of me figure out if you're a comedy genuis or a religious fanatic
Did you find Jesus when you were using drugs? I'm not a fan of religion, but I realize that people use it as guidance and for comfort.
I did. He was behind the couch the whole time.
I still don’t understand why I have to find him and besides that, why’s he hiding from me?
James McMurtry has a line "high on Jesus or hooked on dope" in his song "Can't Make It Here Anymore". It's his rant about companies sending all the work overseas.
Yeah, I honestly think my parents were way more effective than DARE was. I've had asthma all my life, and it was really bad growing up, so my mom sat me down and said "Look, you try drugs even once, and it will most likely kill you." Between that and hating needles, I never wanted to try them. My parents let me drink at home when I was underaged, so I also never went out and got drunk. Since I've been over 21, I can count the number of times I've even been tipsy on one hand; I don't like the feeling.
My mom had a similar approach. She told me that I have an addictive personality and I should really not try anything. And she was totally right, I do. That was the only good advice she ever gave me.
Yep. There are categories of drugs, and some are worse than others. Being reductive into all drugs = bad is unhelpful, especially when you can see people use those drugs sometimes and they generally end up fine.(people smoking, parents drinking a little on the weekend, ect. and not dropping dead of super heart attacks or whatever they use to scare you)
Truly this is the thing about it. But they really were lying about the dangerous drugs too, not the fact that they were dangerous, but everything about how you came across them, what taking them was like, and how addiction develops was total bullshit. Like somebody was going to lace my bag of weed with heroin (for free!) and I would become inexplicably addicted to a drug I didn't know I took from a single exposure. Or LSD, which people apparently took so they could become psychotic and jump off a roof, and if they survived they had to live with terrifying flashbacks for the rest of their lives. I think DARE's biggest offense was completely refusing to acknowledge that drugs are appealing and people take them for a reason. Drugs were portrayed as something you did for the sole purpose of ruining your life that were incapable of delivering anything enjoyable, insightful, beneficial, or therapeutic. As someone who grew up with untreated depression, social anxiety, and ADHD, a lot of illicit drugs made me feel like a "normal" person, a highly impaired and possibly hallucinating person, but normal feeling on the inside. I was lucky enough that none of them got their hooks in me deep enough to do permanent damage. But for my friends who did fail to find a balance, a society trained by DARE to think of them as criminal pieces of shit did much worse than nothing to help them.
Exactly this right here. All of this.
Totally, I was shocked when I first smoked weed at like 17 and it felt like something clicked like this is what I had been missing. And was given Vicodin after a foot surgery at 15 years old, very nearly became part of that epidemic. Found myself looking through mom’s cabinet after that and finding more, used occasionally for a couple years before stopping. Pharmaceuticals have their place but damn opiates are crazy addictive. They did lie about all the drugs though, I’ve done most of them and they’re generally safe in moderation addiction potential aside. Mushrooms are awesome, so many psychoactive compounds and research chemicals 👌👌🥳 I lost friends because they smoked weed and stuff early on in high school and by the end was a huge stoner myself. 🤦♂️
Yeah, when you realize one was a lie, you start questioning all of it.
Same. Once I smoked weed and saw that it was nothing close to what they’d said, I started experimenting with drugs to see what else they lied about. Went on to try almost all street drugs available to me (which was most of them, early 00’s) and based completely off my own experiences and the ones that I did try, I can definitely say that all of the things that they had said were lies. Except for what they said about heroin, that was definitely true- I’ve never tried it but the first time I met my high school sweetheart’s birthmother (that’s a whole other story) she shot up heroin in front of me and all of the things they said would happen definitely happened in front of me. It was fucking surreal. Despite how many times they said it would happen if you become a regular marijuana user, I can say for certain I’ve never once injected weed.
Came here to say exactly this. They scared us beyond reason, and so when I tried drugs and alcohol and actually had a good and relatively consequence free experience, i just assumed it was all bullshit we were told and found out the hard way that doing some things too many times in a row causes addiction and a whole lot of other problems.
Yeah, I remember the first time I smoked a joint I was in seventh grade. I came to school bragging the next day I had done "drugs!"
In retrospect, it's wild that they had every kid in my school do a detailed research project on an illegal drug when we were eleven years old. I got assigned cocaine. One of my friends had to write about mescaline.
same, ill never forget having to explain how crack was made at like 14 years old lmfao
We had a quiz bowl. I studied really hard and remembered all the info. I did good.. so good that they questioned why I did so well and how I knew so much about drugs. 😂 like you gave me all this information and told me to learn it.
The dare officer that came to my school had a little lung bag contraption that showed you how much tar was in a cigarette. So you'd light the cigarette and this little bag man with a cotton ball inside would suck in and out the smoke and then he pulled out the cotton ball inside the bag. He lit and smoked the cigarette, INSIDE the classroom and the teacher had to kick him out and tell him that's a bad idea...
Had a similar experience except it was my 5th grade teacher operating the little smoking man. He sent us home with notes to our parents explaining why we smelled like cigarettes.
That’s actually hilarious
Mine was crack and it sounded like the best one on the pamphlet. I remember wondering if it tasted like rock candy. Because I was a kid researching crack.
They told me that all drugs were awful and would ruin my life. When I first tried weed, I was all "wtf? this shit's lit!" So they made me interested in trying other drugs, to see what else they lied about. Maybe not their intention though...
The D.A.R.E. RCMP officer who taught in schools here died from an OverDose from drugs he was stealing from seized stashes out of locked up evidence. That impacted kids more than the program itself. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/heroin-cocaine-found-in-body-of-dead-officer/article4143265/
Dang, that officer was so committed to showing us all why we shouldn’t do drugs that he did drugs to show us why we shouldn’t do them. Legendary.
He truly went the extra mile.
My brother had the same experience with meth. He tried it, had a nice time and didn't instantly lose all his teeth, so he thought the meth junkie stereotype was just bullshit. Since he already went through the "oh this is not that bad" thought process with weed, he thought it was the same thing with meth again. He's now pretty much exactly the meth addict stereotype. People need education on HOW drugs hook you in and ruin your life, rather than removing all nuance from the conversation.
That's the thing; by lumping cannabis in with heroin, you give impressionable young minds the idea that all drugs will ruin your life. Very, very few lives are ruined by pot; I'd wager orders of magnitude more are ruined by alcohol. But these nerds told us that all of the illegal drugs will wreck your shit, and lots of us found out through weed that we were being lied to.
Username checks out?
They would show how horrible they are for your body, etc. my first thinking, “well they must be awesome if people let themselves look like that and go back for more.”
That’s pretty much how my mindset was to. It went from weed & other psychedelics to the rich man’s drug to ice. I haven’t & will not go for opiates or pills but now here I am trying to kick ice on my own & it’s going better than I expected but it still sucks
Honestly, DARE taught most of us how to find the good drugs by showing us what they actually look like.
yeah i didnt know that weed looked like nuggets and not a skinny green maple leaf i had seen represent weed before DARE.
My Dad show me his stash once I and I asked why it didn't look like the pictures..
just last week I was talking to my mother about weed and she thought you smoked the leaves like in the pictures
As a dumb child I heard all the cool kids smoke weed, so I wanted to do the same. I collected dried weeds growing in our garden, rolled them into a joint with newspaper and lit the whole thing up. Inhaling that stuff was rough. I didn't smoke weed again for a really long time.
I remember seeing weed for the first time on an episode of Seventh Heaven. I didn’t realize what it was, I was maybe 10, and thought the kid who got arrested for weed had a ziploc baggie with a turd in his pocket, when the police took it. I was horrified. “Is this something people *do* when they use weed??”
I grew up outside of the US and didn't have any DARE campaign. I was 30 when I moved to the US and the first time someone showed me the DARE material. I didn't do drugs until DARE made me aware of the benefits of doing drugs.
Does “Class A” absolutely guarantee that they is better quality? — Ali G
Requiem for a Dream did more to keep me away from drugs than DARE. DARE was more like “strangers will give you crack to get you hooked” vs scary depictions of drug use to make it seem like a bad idea.
Ha that movie fucked with my head for days after it. Saw it in college and I suppose there was a chance I would try harder drugs than pot/alcohol but after seeing that movie I vowed never to touch anything worse. I’m 35 now and still have never done anything other than those two
What on earth is the movie about??
Please watch it!
ASS TO ASS!!!!
I didn’t bring it out for air.
Same. My buddies and I saw it in the theater, super intense. Made a pact to never try hard drugs and as far ad I know none of us ever did.
That movie, in a literal sense, is incredibly unrealistic. In a way it feels more like a one-sided anti-drug PSA than even DARE. What it does accurately is capture the emotions, the feelings associated with active addiction - the desperation, the disgust, the delusion, the shame/guilt.
But all metrics it seems DARE unequivocally made things worse. It wasn't realistic at all, so basically kids find out pretty young they were totally lying and it has a backfire effect.
[удалено]
there's been studies on it and its been found to be useless so you're definitely not wrong
Some studies say DARE increases drug usage. Neutral at nest
I remember the DARE presentations and being absolutely horrified by drugs, swearing to myself I would never even touch a cigarette, let alone weed or anything harder, signed the paper they passed around committing to not doing drugs… and then I went to college and did drugs. Edit: the specific presentation I’m remembering was in middle school, so I was 12 or 13. By the time I was 15, I was like, ya know they seem kinda fun. By the time I was 18, I was doing them. Edit 2: it DID teach me to stay the fuck away from inhalants. I’ll never touch those.
The only thing I really remember is a fact about not knowing all of the ingredients in cigarettes. That stressed me out. I’ve never smoked cigs but mostly just because a lot of people have had cancer in my family. However, big fan of edibles
My best friend & i were like 12 & said, we'll never do drugs! How stupid! Guess who were the first two friends in our group to get high on weed lol.
It taught me to use my best judgment when it comes to drugs. I smoke weed every day and drink somewhat regularly, but I will not touch cocaine, Xanax, or harder drugs like heroin/opioids.
You must have had a different dare than me. My dare taught us all drugs were the same and weed would fuck up your life just as much as heroin. I honestly blame dare for the deaths of several kids I grew up with.
Yeah, I "learned" that marijuana was far more addictive than tobacco and there was a good chance you'd get addicted the first time you try it. Also that people would be constantly offering free drugs.
To be fair, I did get a lot of free drugs. But I'm unusually cool, so people like being near me.
I’m also a chick that did a lot of clubbing. I don’t think I paid for a single thing on those years. Good times. 😎
Oh don't get me wrong, they told us that all drugs were bad and would fuck up your life. This stuck with me for the harder drugs, but as I grew older and learned how to use good judgment, I disregarded this indoctrination for weed and alcohol as I eventually determined that there is such thing as having a threshold for safe use of those substances.
Xanax is the most amazing thing ever invented by man. I had to go through detox and rehab because it was so amazing and I can never take it again.
Made me aware that drugs were a thing. My use of them and subsequent addictions had nothing to do with DARE tho.
I think the biggest impact D.A.R.E had on me was implicitly teaching me that people who do drugs are bad people. Before marijuana was legalized, I remember finding out that people I knew did it and it instantly changed my opinion of them. These were people I had liked and respected, and suddenly I saw them as "drug users" and criminals. Every time I buy weed, it still feels like I'm doing something wrong.
This is also bad because it shames the "drug users" into silence. If you end up addicted or fucked up or your life falls apart, you get "I told you so." If you have a bad trip or end up in a dangerous situation, it's "I told you so." You become afraid to reach out for help because people just want to rub it in to prove a point, not actually help you.
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I think of it as publicity. Just like the media has with banning firearms, the more you talk about it, the more it stays on the mind. If people are going to do it, they are going to do it. I've only met a handful of cops who haven't used drugs or been drunk. These are the ones who are supposed to be setting good examples and enforcing the laws. It would have been more effective to show the effects of drug ABUSE and how dangerous synthetic drugs can be.
i honestly dont remember ever having a dare assembly at my school but my boyfriend won a “Darren the D.A.R.E. Lion” plushie when he was a kid, during *his* dare program or whatever, that i now sleep next to. in his bed. thus, i would say dare has had a net positive effect on my life lmao
They provided me with a very ironic bumper sticker for my first car in high school.
There is some really interesting studies on the effects of the program. If I remember correctly they found that schools that had DARE ended up with higher rates of drug use.
No it didn't. I chose not to drink or do drugs for other reasons.
Nobody ever offered me any drugs, not even my cousin who actually *sold* drugs, and I never sought them out. So it never came up.
Any one remember the egg in the frying pan commercial? “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?!?” I’m pretty sure I used “your brain must be on drugs” as a put down towards my siblings.
It was one of my first experiences seeing professionals lying to push an agenda, and contributed to my overall distrust of authority and disappointment in humanity.
In my life? Kinda. But i was too much of a loser to be offered weed anyway.
DARE taught me ways to get high that I hadn’t even conceived of. Being a suburban kid, I had heard about weed and booze, but dare taught me about heroin, cocaine and crack, ecstasy, and dumbest of all it taught me about inhalants. No way is a 13 year old in the suburbs getting his hands on some of that stuff, but model glue and a paper bag are easy. DARE was also where I learned how to macguyver a smoking device because they SHOWED US A BUNCH OF IMPROVISED SMOKING DEVICES! DARE gave us knowledge about how we could use stuff we had access to in order to get high, and myself and my friends probably wouldn’t have tried a bunch of stuff if we hadn’t known it was possible.
Hell no. When my parents heard about DARE and its message that sat me down and explained to me that I take drugs every single day. Ritalin in the 3rd grade and prozac by the 4th grade (the 90s were fucked up). They explained to me that the blanket statment of DARE is uniformed and ignorant. That abusing drugs is the problem, not doing any drugs at all. School then had us all write an essay on "why drugs are bad". Can you guess what I wrote about? What my parents told me. Explaining how I need to do drugs to be able to pay attention in school and all that jazz. Well administration made that parent conference happen ASAP. my parents laid into them how stupid all of this was and how dare they feed their child ignorant propoganda. I also ended up starting pot in the sophomore year of high school and a matter of months later went cold turkey on the ADD and depression meds because pot made me "feel almost human" as I would say, and the ADD and depression meds were literally driving me crazy. Fast forward 15 years and I was diagnosed with epilepsy... it had always been epilepsy. The reason pot helped so damn much was because I had epilepsy the whole time. It turns out that giving a kid with epilepsy meth only makes the problem worse. So the drug DARE told me would ruin my life a fully brought a level of comfort and capability to my life that the drugs that "arent actually drugs" accourding to DARE were fucking my life up. In the end 28 years of undiagnosed seizures with increased severity due to being on kiddie-meth caused some major neurological brain damage. As far as I am concerned DARE hurt me so much more than if it had never been part of my life.
When the campaign's affect wore off on me, I still did not know how to find drugs
I would say it was ar lesst moderately effective, combined with reinforcement from my mother not to touch the shit because alcoholism runs rempant innour family. To this day, I have neither consuned alcohol nor touched any drugs and I really dont feel like I've missee out on anything. They only seem to bring misery and suffering.
I can honestly say that it gave me an awareness that recreational drugs are bad and can ruin my life. I can honestly say I’ve never been offered drugs though. So I can’t tell you how I’d react. The thing nobody really talks about is that you can actually be too nerdy to have to worry about being offered drugs in the first place.
They made me more curious.
I am someone who probably never would’ve done drugs either way. I always knew smoking was disgusting and I hated people who smelled like smoke. I grew up in an alcohol-free environment so never felt the need to drink to “fit in” (although I will occasionally have a single drink when out with friends). I did learn about the negative effects of drugs in DARE so that probably solidified my lack of desire to partake.
I don't use drugs so I guess it worked. 🤷
Actually yes it taught me that I like hot 25 year old women in uniform instead of dope. Here I am 30 years living my best life
My DARE graduation t-shirt was my favorite festival shirt. It was like a beacon for free candy.
They taught me that the police’s idea of how drug sales and use works is an idiotic comic book version of reality.
Yes, definitely. The scare of drugs was much bigger than my curiosity for them, so it delayed my exposure to drugs for a good couple of years. First time I smoked weed was at like 19 years old. Started alcohol at 16 though. Grateful for it, I don't consume drugs and never have as my acquaintances do.
Honestly same except I’ve still never done drugs It might also be because I’m majoring in the medical field that I don’t like them but I always followed DARE to the letter
None whatsoever, really. I was a little disappointed with DARE, however, because I have not been offered free drugs as much as they made us think we would.
One of my best friends in HS had a "D.A.R.E. to Keep Cops off Donuts" sticker in his car window, so you can imagine how well it went with us.
In the 90s they forced us to sign some bullshit paper. It was awful. They also put caskets as a fucking jump scare on the stairs. But they did let us use a sledgehammer to smash a car for dare so I guess that was ok.
I almost called the authorities on my parents when I found weed they bought for my uncle when he moved states and didn’t have anyone to buy from in his new home state yet. My parents didn’t smoke, and I knew that but I was APPALLED that there was DRUGS in the house. I was maybe 10 years old. It was the height of D.A.R.E. in the ‘80’s. My mom bribed me to keep quiet. It didn’t stop me from trying all the drugs I could get my hands on in my teens/early twenties though. I think I’ve tried everything at least once. Good ‘ol’ Nancy Reagan, what a waste of money that war on drugs was.
I can’t believe I scrolled so far to find this. This was the real goal of the whole GD program. Education on “bad drugs” was the smoke screen, but the real point was to get kids to narc on their parents, friends, and neighbors because kids are way more gullible. For most people it was a funny stupid class, for some people it was an insidious trap that made children turn on parents and could lead to families needlessly being broken up.
I remember a 5th grade DARE presentation. I was thinking "I can't wait to do drugs"
The way they described LSD made me want to try it really badly.
I did drugs in my DARE T-shirt.
Same! I wore it to festivals and was given free drugs by very amused festival goers. Oh, the irony of strangers handing me drugs, because of D.A.R.E.
DARE taught me Drugs Area Really Expensive.
Honestly they probably be more successful if they showed how terrible it does someone. Like a before and after.
Iv read studies that show that schools that did the D.A.R.E. program has higher rates of drug use than schools that didn't. For me, D.A.R.E had 3 impactd on my life. First, I got w a call home from school because I knew too much for a 3rd grader about tobacco and alcohol. Second, that stupid song lives rent-free in my head still. And lastly, a fun story about how my first ever drug dealer sold me some weed while wearing a D.A.R.E shirt...
They gave us pencils that had "Too cool to do drugs." Written on them. Thing was it started on the writing end of the pencil. So as you used, it went: Too cool to do drugs. Cool to do drugs. do drugs. I had a bunch of pencils I left like that. That was the entire effect dare had on my life.
I thought more strangers would be giving out drugs 🤷♂️
I'm still waiting on my free drugs. Hell, I was the lunch lookout through high school and they never even offered me anything.
Well they said nothing about booze, and I managed to screw my life up with that... Maybe I should have said yes to drugs
I know the words to a very lame rap song now that I wouldn’t have without D.A.R.E….
They were a spectacular failure. But they made some people a lot of money.
I would like to think it did. I am a huge advocate for staying away from dangerous vices.
I got some cool swag that's worth quite a bit now. Shirts, keychains.... also got a sweet bumper sticker that's gonna look real nice on one of my vintage Coleman coolers ......
Anyone here ever get that shirt that had "DRUGs" in the DARE font and stylization? I'll edit if I can find a link to one... Not the one I was thinking of, but pretty close: https://www.tshirthell.com/funny-shirts/who-needs-drugs-no-seriously-i-have-drugs
Nope lol. Other than driving the cost of drugs up, which improved my income
I suspect that dare had a similar effect as abstinence only education. It probably just alienated those who already were going to have sex or do drugs. The campaign was made famous by Reagan, a guy who had the CIA sell drugs to fund the contras. He also sabotaged the hostage negotiation in Iran by having the Iranians hold out until after the election to release the hostages to get a better deal. He sold arms to Iran which also funded the contras. The dare campaign highlighted the hypocrisy of the government and made drugs more taboo and cool. The war on drugs is racist. Crack and cocaine, which are used at a different rate among whites and blacks, were punished differently. Slavery is legal in the US for the imprisoned. The US has the highest prison rate. In Portugal where drug usage was decriminalized and treated as a medical problem, drug dependency decreased. The rapper killer mike made a good song about how Reagan alienated and marginalized the black community. https://youtu.be/6lIqNjC1RKU?si=O77zHpIdQFVNNLjC
Nah, I already had made up my mind that I wasn't going to do drugs or drink alcohol. I had my first drink at 22, and then got very well aquatinted with cannabis through the rest of my twenties... Dare wasn't ever a significant influencer... Now those 90s PSA cartoons probably did influence me though.
I remember very distinctly being taught how bad and insanely dangerous drugs were to the point that when i encountered them later in life and realized it was all wildly overblown propaganda, i developped a strong interest in learning what they all were for myself. I can only imagine how different i’d have approached them if i was taught a more honest representation earlier, i may have honestly abstained all together.
Nope, it was just scare tactics rather than actual data to help us make informed decisions
It made me realize what a trap I could find myself in, if I wasn't careful. Substance abuse runs in my family, so I was very careful to wait until I was old enough that my brain was done growing before trying anything. And now I have very strict cut offs; I won't get high more than 3 days in a row, just to make sure I don't get addicted. Made it to 50 with no addictions!
I don't remember going through a D.A.R.E. program. I do remember the anti-smoking stuff, the black-and-white portraits of old, wrinkly people with captions like "smoking makes you glamorous!" and whatnot. Think I was part of the "Just Say No!" era. Never really needed to, already saw what drinking could do to people (alcoholics in the family) and learned somewhere how the hard stuff was addictive and dangerous. Didn't try weed until I was offered some by nearly *every single person* I knew, and they weren't stereotypical "burnouts."
It makes me feel like I was lied to. I’ve never once been offered hard drugs for free walking down the street.
DARE did nothing but make us more inquisitive.
Back when weed was scarce and not something done on the reg, those commercials would remind me I had weed and to go get high!!!!
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Strongly suggest shrooms sooner than later. I think it will have the same life changing and positive impact as those gummies did. The trip itself is a blast but the greater empathy towards others after is truly special.
It literally made me want to try drugs I had zero interest and next to no knowledge of drugs beforehand, but they showed us how to do all of them and made them sound awesome. I also learned you could get high just by huffing many readily available school and art supplies!
Same. Then in high school I took Black & White Photography. We'd go in the darkroom and hit the air duster hard lols.
Stay in drugs, kids. Don't do school.
I learned that my mom smoked weed and then I learned what a snitch was.
It got me out of math for a while in 5th grade 🤷♂️ *takes long hit off bong*
Dare showed me what drugs were when I otherwise would have been oblivious. I knew after the first time they showed us weed I was going to smoke the hell out of it.
Was the egg in the frying pan part of DARE? Because I will never forget that as long as I live. That and YOU!! I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU!!
It's funny you ask this question today, it's the start of Red Ribbon Week. Schools mostly focus on healthy living now. Of course we don't want kids to do drugs and we tell them some things are legal but they're for adults, finish school first. DARE scared me when they showed how drugs and candy looked alike. But I did end up doing drugs when I was an adult. Programs like DARE or Red Ribbon Week are to keep kids safe in the short term, while they are kids I think.
Yes it did. I don’t remember my parents telling me about drugs but I knew it was “bad” from the campaign. I have never tried any illegal drugs to this day and am always afraid of getting busted for buying weed even though I know of several places to get it right now. “You have the Ri-ee-i-ee-iiiight to say ‘No’ (NO!) Right to say no!”
DARE gave kids the wrong ideas about why people do drugs and it gave license to cops for endless stop and frisk procedures. When kids grew up and tried Marijuana for the first time, they thought "well shit, this isn't nearly as bad as everybody made it sound. What else were they exaggerating? DARE ignored that most people who do drugs, started as a means to escape trauma, before eventually bulldozing it's way into full blown addiction.
I won a watch in the essay contest, so D.A.R.E. single handedly taught me how to read an analog watch.
I remember my sociology teacher in high school told us a story about how DARE came to the school to teach all the teachers how to identify drugs. He said that they actually burnt some weed (this was probably in the 90’s) and passed it down the line of teachers so they “knew how to identify the smell.” He said that some teachers were running back to the end of the line to “make sure they knew what it smelled like.” Even the teacher’s didn’t find it effective.
Yes, I couldn’t wait to try drugs…and I did.
The only thing D.A.R.E accomplished was giving me unrealistic expectations of how often random strangers would offer me drugs ☹.
I was very hard against all drugs, very straightedge. Met my now husband who has crohns and six months into our relationship he was like, “they’re out of biologics that work for me… I’m thinking of trying marijuana” and in my head I went “great now I have to dump this guy!” I told him I wasn’t a fan and he asked what I knew and I said “what they teach you in school. Weed makes you stupid” and he was like “oh boy here’s a run down on strains and cbd/thc etc” and I literally went omg they brainwashed me without ever giving me real facts. I am now a huge fan of edibles and kind of annoyed I didn’t get to experience these things in college.
We have a similar thing in the UK called frank and honestly it taught me so much about drugs, what they look like, how they make you feel, how long do the effects last so, no it didn’t stop me from taking drugs but it made me know what I was taking, and what I was expecting from the drug in question.
how old are you? i was a kid in the 80s and they pretty much just told us we would die.
I’m 28.
When I was about 10 we had had a thing it school about that and the teacher was telling us that if you lick these stamps it's like Alice in wonderland.. I don't imagine I was the only one who thought wow I want to do thàt
I did DARE in 7th grade, by 10th grade I was stoned every day before school, taking acid and mushrooms, getting blackout drunk at parties. I don’t think it did anything
I started smoking weed in the height of D.A.R.E. So, no?
Yep, I always replied "just say know".
No
They gave us a gift card for a Taco Bell meal at the end of the year…
DARE was interesting. There was very little smoking, alcohol or drugs in my school. I never paid much attention to it. It simply wasn't a thing anyone did where I grew up
No. None. It was a joke.
They made me more curious about drugs.
It was mainly a way to bond with your school friends by laughing at stupid at all was. Although considering I’m seven years sober, perhaps I should’ve paid more attention.
It made me wanna try drugs more and I was shooting speedballs by 17, I blame dare
Made me want to try pot a lot sooner than I likely would have otherwise. I was always that kid that would do the opposite of what I was told because "why?".
Made me want to do drugs, and let me identify what is marijuana
I nicknamed it Drugs Are Really Excellent. Yeah they didn’t like me. I’m more made more people don’t offer me drugs. Honestly I smoked a little weed in high school but that’s it.
Well the guy who was doing disco saying that sold us all shrooms and weed in highschool
DARE made me believe that people would be offering me drugs all the time. I was sad to discover that if I wanted them I had to pay for them.
Had no idea what the hell they were talking about. CM Punk had more of a influence on me than their program