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How DARE uses intimitation to quiet the media abou


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[The New Republic]
March 3, 1997

DON'T YOU D.A.R.E.
by Stephen Glass

On January 28, 1991, at 4 p.m., 10-year-old Darrin Davis, of
Douglasville, Georgia, returned from school to his suburban home. Both of
Darrin's parents were at work, and he let himself in. He immediately went
to his parents' bedroom to call his mother, who wouldn't be home for
another two hours. After talking to her on the phone, Darrin began
searching the bedroom for candy; his parents often hid sweets there. He
found none. Instead, after climbing on top of a chair, Darrin saw a white
powder on a small makeup mirror. At that point, Darrin would later say, he
thought of something he had recently been taught in school. Darrin's
fourth-grade class had been visited by a police officer under the auspices
of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, or dare, as it is known.
One of the things the dare officer had told Darrin and his classmates was
that they should inform the police if they ever saw anyone--including their
parents--use drugs. The kids were shown a video that reinforced the point.

Although Darrin had never seen either of his parents use drugs, he decided,
based on what he had learned in dare, that the substance on the mirror was
powdered cocaine. So he did what the dare officer had told him to do: he
called 911 and turned in his parents. Two hours later, when the Davises
returned home, they were handcuffed and arrested while Darrin watched. A
police officer put his hand on Darrin's shoulder, and told the boy he had
done "the right thing." Darrin's father spent the next three months in
jail, much to Darrin's surprise and dismay. "I thought the police would
come get the drugs and tell them that drugs are wrong," the boy told a
local reporter. "They never said they would arrest them. It didn't say that
in the video." When the sheriff's office told the boy he was too young to
visit his dad in jail, Darrin set the neighbors' house on fire, causing
$14,000 in damages. "I asked him why he did it," Darrin's mother said. "He
said he wanted to be put in jail with his daddy."

As it turned out, the substance on the mirror was not cocaine. The Davises'
lawyer says it was a small amount of speed. Both the Davises were charged
with simple possession. Ultimately, the Georgia Supreme Court ordered the
charges dropped, primarily on the grounds that the police had improperly
searched the Davis home. The damage, though, was done. Darrin's telephone
call destroyed his family. Heavy media coverage of the 10-year-old who had
turned in his own parents ruined the Davises' reputation. Legal fees nearly
bankrupted them, and they came close to losing their home. They filed for
divorce shortly after the criminal charges were dropped.

In January 1994, James Bovard, a freelance writer, wrote an account of the
Davis case for The Washington Post's prestigious Sunday Outlook section.
Bovard used the case to criticize dare for "turning children into
informants" in the war on drugs. Although Bovard had called dare to get the
organization's comment, dare officials had declined to talk more than
briefly. Jefferson Morley, an assistant editor at Outlook who handled
Bovard's column, edited the piece and faxed the edited copy to Bovard. The
piece remained extremely critical of dare. On the fax, Morley scribbled a
note: "Jim: ok?" Bovard called Morley and approved the piece as edited.

On Sunday morning, January 30, Bovard picked up the Post and read his
story. He was astonished to read, inserted into the piece and under his
byline, six paragraphs that he had not written--that, indeed, he had never
seen. The paragraphs ran counter to the thrust of the column, calling the
case against dare "murky." Far worse, the new paragraphs said "there was
evidence" Darrin's parents were not only drug users, but "were also
involved in drug trafficking, thus putting their child at risk." Not only
had the possession charges been dropped against the Davises, but there had
never been any evidence presented to show that the Davises were drug
dealers. They had never been charged with trafficking, only with
possession.

"I was stunned. I didn't know what to say," Bovard explains. "Nothing like
this had ever happened before." Bovard investigated, and what he found out
stunned him even more: the incorrect information in the added paragraphs
had been directly supplied by dare.

How did this happen? J.W. Bouldin, the Davises' lawyer, says the Post's
lawyers told him that dare had lobbied the newspaper to add the paragraphs.
The Post's lawyers told Bouldin that dare supplied Morley with the
information for the six paragraphs and Morley typed it in. Bovard also says
that dare put pressure on the Post. "When they learned more about my story,
dare put on the full-court press," Bovard says. "They wanted to kill this
story. It makes sense why."

Morley says it happened slightly differently. He says that after he edited
the column he became concerned that dare's point of view was not
represented. He consulted with the Post's lawyers, who agreed with him that
he should call dare and get their side of the story. He telephoned dare's
Los Angeles headquarters and talked to a spokeswoman for the organization.
Morley says that he wrote the six paragraphs based on his conversation with
the spokeswoman. He admits that the information came directly from dare and
that he never told Bovard he had added it to the column. But he says
neither he nor anyone at the Post "kowtowed" to dare. "This was my f *-up.
It was not the Post caving in to dare," Morley says. "The whole story
doesn't make me look very good. I regret, I really regret, any role in
spreading the false information.... This was my least finest hour."

Bouldin knew as soon as he read the column that he had a dandy libel case.
He called the Post's lawyers and informed them that he was going to sue on
behalf of the Davises. "They soon saw they had one very, very big problem
on their hands," Bouldin says. Shortly before the Davises' libel suit was
to be filed, the Post settled. The settlement included a large cash payment
to the Davises. The paper also printed a correction, which cleared the
Davises of the drug trafficking accusation and admitted that no evidence
connecting them with drug trafficking had ever existed. Bouldin says that
the terms of the settlement prohibit him from disclosing just how much the
misinformation provided by dare cost the Post, but he makes it clear that
the price was high. "Let's just say this was a very expensive mistake for
The Washington Post," he says, the tone of satisfaction clear in his
Southern drawl.

dare spokesman Ralph Lochridge doesn't deny his organization gave the Post
false information, and he doesn't apologize, either. "Just because [the
Davises] weren't convicted in court doesn't mean they're not guilty of it,"
Lochridge told me.

The anti-drug and anti-alcohol program called dare is popular,
well-financed and widespread. Started in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police
Department and the L.A. School District, dare has quickly become the
nation's standard anti-drug curriculum. The dare logo is everywhere: on
bumper stickers, duffel bags, Frisbees, even fast-food containers. dare is
the only drug education program specifically sanctioned for funding under
the federal Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act. This year, the program
will receive $750 million, of which some $600 million, according to outside
analysts, comes from federal, state and local governments. At the core of
the dare curriculum are seventeen weekly lessons taught in the fifth or
sixth grade. The teachers are all uniformed cops trained by dare. The
officers lecture and assign homework on the dangers of drugs, alcohol and
gangs. Many schools, like Darrin Davis's, offer a shorter curriculum in
every grade before the fifth. Some school districts also participate in
supplementary junior high school and high school programs. The Los
Angeles-based dare America, the nonprofit company that develops and sells
the dare curriculum, boasts that cops working with dare now lecture in 70
percent of the nation's school districts. In 1996, two of the last
holdouts, the New York City and Washington, D.C., school districts, signed
up for the program.

Most parents know about dare, and most of them approve of it. So do most
politicians, most police officers, most teachers and most journalists.
President Clinton has been a fan ever since Chelsea graduated from the
Arkansas dare. "We ought to continue to expand the ... program so that in
every grade school in this country there's a dare officer," he said to
cheers at an Orange County campaign rally last October. How many people,
after all, are opposed to warning children about the dangers of drugs?

But what most people don't know is that, in the past five years, study
after study has shown that dare does not seem to work. The studies have
found that students who go through the program are just as likely to use
drugs as those who don't. In fact, the results in one study even show the
dreaded boomerang effect: dare graduates are more likely to use marijuana.
Behavioral scientists have begun to question, with increasing vigor,
whether dare is little more than a feel-good scheme of enormous
proportions. As one researcher put it: "dare is the world's biggest pet
rock. If it makes us feel good to spend the money on nothing, that's okay,
but everyone should know dare does nothing." None of this is a secret among
drug policy experts and reporters who cover drug policy; some of the
studies have been available for years. Reason, Kansas City Magazine and USA
Today have published substantial stories criticizing the program's
effectiveness. But these stories have done nothing to impede dare's
progress, and most parents and educators still believe it works. Why isn't
the case against dare better known? Why, at a time when federal funds are
scarce, is it not a public issue that a program which costs the government
more than half a billion dollars a year may be a waste of the taxpayers'
money?

What happened to James Bovard and to The Washington Post is an illustration
of the answer. For the past five years, dare has used tactics ranging from
bullying journalists to manipulating the facts to mounting campaigns in
order to intimidate government officials and stop news organizations,
researchers and parents from criticizing the program. dare supporters have
been accused of slashing tires, jamming television transmissions and
spray-painting reporters' homes to quiet critics. "What you have to
understand is that dare is almost a billion-dollar industry. If you found
out that a food company's foods were rotten, they'd be out of business,"
says Mount Holyoke sociology and criminology professor Richard Moran.
"What's now been found out is that dare is running the biggest fraud in
America. That's why they've gone nuts." dare has become so well-known for
the hardball tactics it employs to shut down its critics that drug
researchers and journalists have a word for those hushed-- they say they've
been "Dared."

Glenn Levant, the executive director of dare, did not respond to repeated
requests for an interview about dare's effectiveness and its tactics in
squelching bad publicity. Provided, at his request, with written questions,
Levant did not reply. dare spokesman Ralph Lochridge says his organization
does not silence researchers. "We don't go after anyone, and dare doesn't
stop critical stories," he says. "It does try to help journalists write
balanced pieces." Lochridge says his organization tries to "work" with
journalists. "We don't mind criticism, but we want balance. Is your story
going to be balanced?"

The story of dare and its critics starts in Kokomo, Indiana. Fifty-three
miles north of Indianapolis, Kokomo is an auto factory town of 45,000
people in the heart of the state's rural and Republican midsection. The
city hall operator boasts that Kokomo was the birthplace of stainless
steel. In 1987, it also became the first Indiana city to sign up for the
dare program. That year, school officials invited two sociology professors
at the local branch of Indiana University to run an experiment to see how
well the program worked. Everyone expected glowing results, and hoped the
positive study would accelerate dare's implementation elsewhere. The
research team studied 1987's fifth-grade class in Kokomo through 1994, its
last year in high school. They also studied the high school class of 1991,
which had made its way through the school system prior to dare's
implementation, and had never been exposed to the program. Sociology
professors Earl Wysong and Richard Aniskiewicz measured drug use among the
students in both the 1994 graduating class and the 1991 class. They also
measured dare's secondary objectives: boosting self-esteem and reducing
susceptibility to peer pressure. Wysong and Aniskiewicz were careful to
measure the students' drug use with a multi-part questionnaire, which
included dare's own test as well as tests commonly used by psychologists.
They found that the level of drug use among kids who had gone through dare
was virtually identical to the level among kids who had not. This means
that in every category of drug use tested--lifetime usage, how recently the
students had used drugs, how often they had used drugs and the grade in
which they started using drugs--the results were "very similar" for both
the dare alumni and the non-dare students. So similar, in fact, that the
differences were within the margin of error. Moreover, students in both
groups rated the availability of drugs nearly identically. In fact, the
only statistical difference between the groups was that more dare graduates
said they had used marijuana in the past thirty days and the past year than
non- dare alumni. Wysong and Aniskiewicz concluded that "dare exposure does
not produce any long-term prevention efforts on adolescent drug use rates."

What about the more touchy-feely results? Again, the sociologists found no
statistical differences. Using questionnaires to examine self-esteem and
"locus of control," a common psychology test that measures susceptibility
to peer pressure, they found numbers so similar for the two groups that any
differences were again within the margin of error. They wrote that
self-esteem and peer pressure are "two more areas where we can see no
long-term effects resulting from dare exposure." "That's all, that's it,"
says Wysong. "It's simple. There was no difference."

But Wysong and Aniskiewicz also found out what other critics of dare would
discover: no one--not parents, not educators and certainly not dare
officials--wanted to hear the bad news. Kokomo's parents, teachers and
school board latched on to the study, but Wysong says they missed the
point. "I told them the study shows dare doesn't work," he says, but no one
listened. "So what they did was implement drug testing." Since last April,
the high school has required every student who leaves the building at
lunch, participates in extracurricular activities or drives to school to
sign a waiver. The waiver allows the school to pull them out of class at
any time and force them to take a drug test. On average, forty-five
students are tested each week. "That wasn't what our study recommended,"
Wysong says. "After our study it became very clear they kept dare for
public relations reasons." The school board has not renewed any studies on
the local dare program.

Even after Wysong and Aniskiewicz published their results, dare continued
to boast that an earlier California study--in fact, the first study ever
done on dare--showed that kids who went through the program accepted drugs
less often than kids who had not gone through the program. The data also
showed that dare alumni reported using drugs less often. This study,
however, did not ring true to many researchers because it had no pre-test.
In other words, students were only surveyed after graduating from dare.
Without measuring drug use before dare, it's difficult to know whether or
not the students' behavior had changed. What is more, the study last
examined its subjects as seventh- graders, meaning it never measured dare's
long-term impact. "If you don't know where your base is you really don't
know anything," laughs an Ivy League biologist who examined the methodology
of the California study. "My kid's science fair project with plants and
swinging lights was more rigid than this."

Another drug policy expert who has questioned dare is Dick Clayton, a
widely respected drug abuse researcher at the University of Kentucky. In
1996, Clayton published, in the journal Preventive Medicine, the most
rigorous long- term study ever performed on dare. Starting in September
1987, Clayton surveyed schoolchildren in all of the thirty-one elementary
schools in Lexington, Kentucky. The schools were randomly assigned to
receive the dare curriculum or to receive "no treatment." Students were
tested before going through the dare program, immediately afterward and
again each year through the spring of 1992. Clayton's team found that any
results from dare were extremely short-lived. "Here it is in layman's
terms: dare is supposed to reduce drug use. In the long term, it does not,"
Clayton says. Just before and after Clayton's release of the two-year data,
more studies quietly began popping up with similar results. In total,
Clayton wrote in the 1996 book Intervening with Drug-Involved Youth, at
least fifteen studies were conducted. "Although the results from various
studies differ somewhat, all studies are consistent in finding that dare
does not have long-term effects on drug use," he wrote. Among those studies
was a 1990 Canadian government report showing dare was less effective than
anyone imagined. The program, the Canadians reported, had no effect on
cutting abuse of any drug from aspirin to heroin. (The Canadians were
studying dare because the program was becoming more popular abroad. Today,
Lochridge says, dare is used in forty-nine foreign countries.)

As the number of debunking studies grew, something else also grew: the
number of researchers getting Dared. Take the case of Daniel, a young
professor at an Illinois college. He asked that his last name not be used,
since he is up for tenure within the next two years and nervous about
adverse publicity. Daniel says he wants to study behavioral programs that
have political impact. While he suspects that to improve his chances for
tenure he should study the behavior of lab animals, he's fascinated by
"real world" problems. "That's why Clayton's study appealed to me," he
says. "I thought here was a chance where people like me can make a
difference." Daniel designed and performed a study of college freshmen. All
of the freshmen were in-state students, but only some had attended dare.
Once again, Daniel's study found no meaningful difference in drug use
between students who had gone through dare and students who hadn't. He did
find, however, that dare graduates were slightly more likely to drink
alcohol regularly for the purpose of getting drunk. Over lunch one day,
Daniel, proud of what he thought was an "important finding for the Illinois
school system," showed the data to a colleague in a different department.
"That was the biggest mistake of my career," Daniel says. "That's
right--even bigger than sleeping through an oral exam in graduate school."
Daniel says that, within a week, a local dare official called him at home
and asked to see the data. Daniel says he freely showed the information to
him. That, he says, resulted in a "big argument with lots of yelling." Two
weeks later Daniel says he received a call from his department chairman.
The chairman told him that the local dare official had complained that
Daniel was offering kids marijuana as part of his study. Daniel says the
allegations are false, but that he immediately stopped work on the dare
study, and returned to lab animals. "That could have been, and still might
be, a career killer," Daniel says. "dare has made it so I will never
venture out of the lab again."

While it's not possible to say exactly how many researchers have been
Dared, it is clear from talking to academics in the relevant fields that
there are a number of them. It's common knowledge among researchers that
doing dare studies can ruin a promising career. Wysong and David W. Wright,
a Wichita State University professor, wrote in Sociological Focus that the
dare researchers they had interviewed "asked to remain anonymous out of
fear of political reprisals and to protect their careers." Interviews with
drug researchers support this statement. An author of one prominent paper
says he no longer studies dare. "I needed my life back. I'm in research. My
wife and I couldn't take endless personal attacks," he told me. "You want
to know why I stopped researching dare? Write your article and you'll see."
Another researcher who was critical of dare says he became so unpopular
among fellow professors he went into the private sector. "If you fight
dare, they make you out to look like you want kids to smoke pot. I thought
it was my duty to say the emperor is not wearing any clothes," he says. "It
was stupid of me to think I could fight them. Everyone told me I couldn't,
but I tried. Here [in the private sector] I can start over." The researcher
says after he published his study, someone etched the words "kid killer"
and "drug pusher" into the paint of his car.

The extent of dare's ability to muzzle critical studies can be seen in the
treatment of the most definitive test of the dare program ever conducted.
In 1991, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ)--the research wing of the
Justice Department--hired the prestigious Research Triangle Institute (RTI)
to analyze the studies on dare and determine the bottom line. Initially,
dare supported the "meta-analysis." In a 1992 letter, it urged state groups
to work with RTI, saying it "will give us ammunition to respond to critics
who charge that dare has not proven its effectiveness."

"Everything was going along just fine," explains a researcher who worked on
the RTI analysis and who asked that his name not be used so he wouldn't get
"any more nasty, screeching phone calls" in the middle of the night. "That
is, until we started finding dare just simply didn't work. Then all hell
broke loose."

In 1993, RTI presented its preliminary results at a San Diego drug
education conference. According to Sociological Focus, a dare supporter
immediately responded by urging RTI to call off the research, saying: "If
[dare] fails, it will be making a statement about all prevention programs."
After the conference, dare launched an all-out war to sink the study. An
internal memo from the July 5, 1993, meeting of dare's advisory board
offers evidence that Levant tried to squelch the study. The memo contains
the minutes of Levant's speech. Levant criticized an advance copy of the
RTI study. The minutes summarize Levant: "The results of this project are
potentially damaging to dare. dare America has spent $41,000 in trying to
prevent widespread distribution of what is considered to be faulty
research." The minutes also noted that "dare America has instituted legal
action," aimed at squelching the RTI study. "The action has had some
positive results," the minutes reported. "It has resulted in prevention of
a second presentation by RTI. Legal action is intended to prevent further
public comment until completion of academic review." Lochridge did not
return a phone message asking for comment on the memo, and asking whether
government funds had been used to stop the government from distributing a
government-funded study questioning the efficacy of a government-funded
program.

In the past, dare had been unable to effectively refute its critics on
scientific grounds, and its claims rang correspondingly weak. "They must
not know how to measure things," maintained an Indiana dare official about
the Kokomo research at a local community agency. "If they could just see
the kids' faces, they'd know how much good it's doing." Herbert Kleber, a
Columbia University professor who heads dare's scientific advisory board,
says the RTI study was flawed. "It used the old dare curriculum, which had
already been substantially revised," Kleber says. "No, the new curriculum
has never been examined."

So this time Levant turned to grass-roots pressure. According to one
Justice Department official, Levant arranged for dare supporters to flood
the Justice Department with phone calls. Nationwide, many teachers,
principals, dare officers and parents believe in the program with almost
religious devotion. In local debates, they have always been more than
willing to make phone calls, write letters and hold forums to support dare.
This time, the callers stayed "on message," the official says, speaking
almost as if from a script. "They'd call and tell us if we published the
study, dare would be sunk and millions of kids would get hooked," says the
official. "Whenever we'd say the research looked mathematically good,
they'd say, `there's more at stake here than good statistics. Can you live
with that?'"

In September 1994, RTI finished the lengthy report. It concluded that,
while dare was loved by teachers and participants, it had no effect on drug
use. It also went one step further, a step that dare feared most of all.
"What got [RTI] in the most hot water is that they said other programs work
better," says Moran, the Mount Holyoke sociologist. In other words, RTI
found that dare is not merely a failure in itself, but crowds out money for
programs that actually keep kids off drugs. RTI published a lengthy
bibliography of some of the other programs. Kleber says the alternatives
RTI looked at, which he calls "boutique programs," were only examined in
highly controlled environments.

Levant upped the ante. Congressmen and mayors began calling the National
Institute of Justice. The politicians stressed two messages: the curriculum
had changed since the study, making it irrelevant; and the public did not
want to hear criticism of an anti-drug program widely regarded as
successful. The Justice Department official says the "phone rang off the
hook."

One month later, for the first time in memory, the Justice Department
refused to publish a study it had funded and successfully peer-reviewed.
"We're not trying to hide the study," Ann Voit, an NIJ spokeswoman, told
USA Today. "We just do not agree with one of the major findings." A
puzzling statement, since NIJ hired RTI in the first place because it
trusted them to evaluate dare impartially. Still more puzzling is that even
as late as six months after the San Diego conference, NIJ sent RTI memos
praising the study. One note from Laurie Bright, NIJ's program manager,
said the "methodology appears to be sound and dare representatives did not
offer any specific flaws ... [it] presented findings in a very fair and
impartial light." Eventually, Jeremy Travis, who heads the NIJ, stepped in.
He publicly reiterated that Justice had not caved under dare's pressure,
explaining that NIJ's independent reviewers unanimously recommended against
publishing the report. Not so, according to one reviewer. William DeJong, a
Harvard lecturer, told USA Today: "They must be misremembering what I
said." Two of the independent reviewers who examined the report in March
1994 recommended that more analysis be done. But both urged the publication
and wide dissemination of the executive summary of the report, and one
praised the crucial section that analyzed dare's efficacy as "well done."
NIJ still has not approved the study, but will sell it upon request.

The same day Justice refused the study, The American Journal of Public
Health--a highly respected academic journal--accepted it. It had conducted
its own peer review and found the paper to be worthy. The Justice
Department official says this infuriated Levant and that dare tried to
prevent the journal from publishing the study. While no one at Public
Health would comment on Levant and dare, two editors at the journal said
that it stands by editor Sabine Beisler's comment of October 1994: "dare
has tried to interfere with the publication of this. They tried to
intimidate us." When NIJ learned the journal was going to publish the
study, it issued its own two-page summary. The summary oddly heralded
dare's popularity, but virtually ignored the thrust and bulk of the study,
which showed dare doesn't curtail drug use.

Today, the researchers who worked on parts of the RTI study remain
thoroughly spooked by their experience. Two researchers at RTI, four at
universities and two now in the private sector refused to talk more than
briefly about the study. All but one said they were scared of losing their
jobs. Three told me that their superiors had been contacted by politicians.
"A state representative called my boss and asked if my research was really
in the best interest of the community," said one state university
professor. "Thank God my boss said `yes.' I don't know if even tenure would
stand up to that."

Dare's hardball approach is as well-known among journalists who have
attempted stories on the organization as it is among academic researchers.
James, a television news producer who does not want his last name used for
this story, says that ever since he was Dared he doesn't have any doubts
about retaliation. Several months ago, James, who works for a small
Missouri station, produced and aired a short editorial criticizing dare. In
more than a decade of local news, it is the only item he has ever regretted
running. After that show aired, so many kids called James so often at home
to read him lessons from the dare workbook that he was forced to unlist his
telephone number. "You bet I was Dared," James says. "The calls came and on
and on. I had to hear about so-and-so is offered a joint, but she says
`no.' I couldn't take it." Two callers told James that their dare officer
encouraged them to call his house at strange hours. After that, James's
house was attacked with graffiti messages like "crack user inside" so many
times, he moved to an apartment building. The local police, who run the
local dare program, spent no time looking for the vandals, James says.
After a math teacher asked his son how "the pot-head dad" was doing, he
transferred his kid to a boarding school. And, when the owner of a local
diner asked him to stop coming to lunch, since other customers were leaving
when he walked in, his wife took to calling him "Small-town Salman," after
Satanic Verses author-in-hiding Salman Rushdie. James says he phoned Levant
and asked him to "please call them off," but Levant never returned the
message. "This may sound as if I'm being extreme, but I'm not. I went to
Vietnam and that was less stressful," James says with a shaking voice.
"There, the people I love weren't always being attacked. And this time, I
know I'm on the right side."

In the past year, NBC's newsmagazine "Dateline" has become the most
prominent news organization to be Dared. Starting in September 1995,
"Dateline" producers began initial research on a hard-hitting story about
how dare doesn't work. They interviewed researchers who had concluded that
dare was a failure and students who couldn't remember the lessons. A
"Dateline" camera crew also flew to Indianapolis, where an affluent, mostly
Republican suburb was debating whether to keep dare. For the past year, the
school district had monitored a small pilot program. More than 100 parents
showed up to the meeting and, according to those who were there, the
majority vocally opposed dare. According to a longtime NBC News employee,
the show was scheduled to run on April 9, 1996--the day before National
dare Day. The following account of what then transpired has been
corroborated by two additional NBC sources; essential details of it have
also been confirmed by a dare source and a Justice Department source.

Last March, Levant heard about the planned "Dateline" show. According to
the NBC News employee--who does not work on "Dateline" but has read a
series of letters between Levant and NBC officials--Levant wrote an "attack
letter" to Jack Welch. Welch is the chief executive officer of General
Electric, NBC's parent company. The letter called the segment a
"journalistic fraud." Levant accused "Dateline" of "staging" the Indiana
meeting. Still under the shadow of an infamous episode in which "Dateline"
was accused of rigging trucks to explode, the NBC employee says Levant's
accusations sent "Dateline"'s staff into a "whirlwind of activity." But
Levant's accusation was a "flat-out lie-- no ifs, no buts about it, a lie
as low as it goes," says Betsy Paul, then the Parent Teacher Organization
president of the Indiana school district. "I don't know how to say this
strongly enough. I will tell you on any witness stand with God as my
judge.... We had scheduled the meeting for at least a week before
`Dateline' said they were coming out here." Paul says David McCormick,
NBC's senior producer for broadcast standards, called her. McCormick asked
her if she had brought in "ringers" to stack the meeting against dare. "And
that was the biggest bunch of bologna I've ever heard," Paul says. "dare
just doesn't like that parents here figured out they didn't work." As
further proof, Paul points out that this year dare was eliminated in her
school district and replaced with a locally developed program. "[Levant is]
a big liar because if we stacked that meeting, if it didn't accurately
reflect how this community thinks, then why did the school board eliminate
dare this year?" she says. "I'll say it again, he lied, and once more he
lied."

Levant's letter to Welch contained other untruths, claims the NBC News
employee. In the letter, Levant alleges "Dateline" producers would only
interview him on the day his wife was receiving a bone marrow treatment for
leukemia. Not true, according to the NBC News employee: "Dateline" offered
Levant "several" date options. Levant also alleged "Dateline" staffers were
interrogating kids in dark rooms like "old war movies." In truth,
"Dateline" cameramen had turned off the overhead lights when they
interviewed dare participants because they were using their own lighting,
which is standard practice. While the NBC employee says McCormick defended
"Dateline" in a response to Levant, the story was put on hold. "dare scared
NBC's upper brass," the NBC employee says. "The story was, and is, solid.
The people on it are some of the best in the business, but we did not want
to look like we were going after a program that keeps kids off drugs. You
can imagine that's a very unpopular position with G.E. So it was put on
hold." David Corvo, the NBC vice president that clears "Dateline" episodes
before they air, says, "There is no controversy about the program at NBC."
He says all delays occurred because he felt the segment needed more
reporting. "No way," the NBC News employee says. "That piece was solid in
every way. Sure, you can always get another interview, and they did, but
even before that it was better than much of what we air."

Then, in a September 1996 issue of TV Guide, NBC placed the following
announcement: "`Dateline NBC': A Len Cannon report on the dare program in
schools. Its effects are `statistically insignificant,' says segment
producer Debbie Schooley. `Research overwhelmingly shows no long-term
effect on drug use.' The report visits schools in suburban Indianapolis."

According to the NBC employee, the TV Guide announcement killed the episode
again. Dozens of dare supporters, including Levant, called NBC. According
to the employee, this time he made veiled threats of suing "Dateline."
Despite the listing, the show didn't air. Corvo maintains that NBC "did not
kill" the story and says if any lawsuit threats were made, they were not
taken seriously. He maintains that NBC sent TV Guide the listing several
weeks in advance, but when the date arrived, the piece still wasn't ready.

Next, the biggest gun in the drug wars tried to sink the segment once and
for all. In mid-September, the White House's drug czar General Barry
McCaffrey stepped in. "Dateline" had already interviewed McCaffrey for the
segment. During the interview, McCaffrey ridiculed the research against
dare, but a Justice staffer says he did a "very poor" job refuting the
mounds of evidence. Corvo won't comment on McCaffrey's interview, beyond
saying the drug czar disputed the evidence against dare.

On September 20, 1996, Donald Maple, a spokesperson for McCaffrey's office,
wrote to "Dateline"'s executive producer. The letter asked "Dateline" not
to use the taped interview with McCaffrey. Maple wrote that he feared the
interview would serve "`Dateline''s purpose of painting dare in a bad
light." The NBC employee says pulling the McCaffrey interview might have
dealt a "death blow" to the show. NBC's McCormick responded to Maple that
the show's producer had written McCaffrey a letter before the interview
telling him the purpose of the interview was to discuss research on dare's
effectiveness. While the network did not promise to cut McCaffrey's
interview, the NBC employee explains, "at some point this story is much
more trouble than it's worth." Maple says writing this kind of letter to a
news organization is "uncommon," and he had never done it for McCaffrey
before. But he says "Dateline" treated McCaffrey unfairly.

The show was rescheduled one more time, for Tuesday, February 4. That time
slot--right after the president's State of the Union address--is commonly
considered to be a "death slot." Clinton's speeches are renowned for
running long, killing whatever television segment is planned to run next.
And, that night, the segment did not run. As expected, Clinton's speech ran
longer than scheduled and "Dateline" ran a show focusing on the O.J.
Simpson verdict. "This system has worked. This show has not been killed.
Whoever says that is out of the loop," Corvo says, adding that he has now
cleared it to air. As of February 10, though, the segment had not been
rescheduled. Corvo says it will be rescheduled when the executive producer
of "Dateline"returns from vacation.

And researchers and reporters are not the only ones getting Dared. Some
parents who question the program also say they've been strong-armed. In the
San Juan Islands northwest of Seattle is a small town called Friday Harbor.
There, dozens of parents have joined together in a group called San Juan
Parents Against dare. According to Andrew Seltser, the group's founder,
nearly all of the members want drug education in the schools; they just
don't believe the dare program works. In August, Seltser's group collected
more than 100 signatures on a petition asking the local school board to
review the effectiveness of dare. The debate about dare overtook the small
community, and became a matter of intense passion, with local dare
supporters raging against the parents who were challenging the program. In
September, the local school board announced it would review concerns about
dare.

Then an odd thing happened. On October 7, 1996, the "CBS Evening News"
aired a short segment that presented information critical of dare. No one
in Friday Harbor saw that segment, though. Thirty seconds into the story,
Friday Harbor's screens went black. Randy Lindsey, the station manager for
the local cable station, says when he watched a videotape of that night's
news "it looks like someone pulled the plug." Lindsey can't explain the
blackout. Friday Harbor, he says, often has problems receiving television
signals due to sun spots. But sun spot interference, he says, normally
distorts the screen differently. Seltser's group says they believe the
program was jammed by dare supporters since it came in the heat of the
debate. And some Friday Harbor dare supporters aren't denying it. One
prominent local dare supporter says it's "not important" whether or not the
show was jammed. "Look, I'm not going to answer the question as to whether
or not I know who jammed it. Hell, it might have been me," he says, asking
that his name not be used. "What I am going to tell you is that TV program
may have stopped dare in Friday Harbor, which means more kids here would be
on drugs."

Dare's public response to studies critical of the program has been to
dismiss the studies as irrelevant. dare says the studies are based on an
old curriculum that may not have worked, but that the program now uses a
redesigned curriculum that does work. The problem with the old curriculum,
dare officials say, was that dare classes were not interactive enough;
under the new curriculum, the classes are much more so. But this seems
debatable, judging from a recent dare class conducted by Detective Rick
Myers at Barcroft Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia. Myers, a big
man who looks very much like a cop, visits Barcroft's fifth-graders every
Thursday to lead them in the dare way. One week's lesson was about
resisting peer pressure. Myers's lesson lasted about forty-five minutes.
All but six minutes were spent on a lecture by Myers. To be sure, Myers
used interactive role play during those six minutes, but researchers
question the value of such role-playing as set out by the dare curriculum.

For the first scene, Myers chose two kids: a brown-haired boy who was so
nervous that he wobbled when he stood, and a tall girl who was so self-
confident that she bowed when she got to the front of the room. Myers
whispered the script to the two children and told them to face each other.

"There is a party on Saturday night at some person's house," the girl said
matter-of-factly.

The boy said nothing.

"The people there, they will be drinking things that have [now louder and
more slowly] al-co-hol."

The boy looked at the ground.

"I said, `The people will be drinking [very loudly and very slowly] al-co-
hol.'"

"No," peeped the boy.

Kindly, but firmly, Myers lectured the boy. "Posture. Eye contact. Posture.
Eye contact," Myers told him. "You need to be confident. You're doing the
right thing."

Take two. The girl said her first line. The boy said: "Oh." Myers shouted:
"Posture. Eye contact." The girl said her second line. The boy stood
straighter, looked the girl briefly in the eye, and said very quickly: "No
thank you, I don't take alcohol. I prefer juice and milk." Myers led
everyone in a round of applause. At one of the back tables, a
thuggish-looking kid sat regarding this little scene with frank scorn.
"He's supposed to say that? That won't work. He'd get the shit beat out of
him."

For another scene, Myers chose a small girl with wide eyes and scraggly
brown hair. She seemed a little nervous, but excited to have been chosen.
Myers whispered the instructions into her ear. They faced off, standing
about ten feet from each other. Myers walked up to the girl. "Hey, do you
want to buy a joint?" he said. She replied, almost inaudibly, "No." Myers
put his face close to hers. "Come on, wanna buy it?"

"No, thank you," she whispered.

Now, waving his finger in her face, Myers shouted: "Why not? Come on, buy
it!"

The little girl, backed against the windows, said, again, "No." Myers led
the class in a round of applause.

Drug researchers interviewed about Myers's scenes are dismissive. "That
role play is absurd. If the kids learn anything at all from it, they learn
not to buy drugs from police officers," one researcher says. "Making it
more interactive means making it more like real life. This is not useful.
Fun, maybe. Useful? Nope."

And Myers's class is typical. When I asked him if other dare instructors
did it differently, he was adamant in response. "No. The great thing about
this program is that everyone in the country is trained the same way,"
Myers told me. "We are told to go exactly by the book. There is no room for
modifying the program. No way. It's the same everywhere."

The claim that dare's curriculum is changing and maturing seems to be more
a matter of tactics than anything else. A longtime California instructor
who recently retired, and who told me that the curriculum has not in fact
changed much at all, conceded that saying the curriculum was in constant
flux did have an obvious strategic benefit. Experts agree. Wysong and
Wright wrote in Sociological Focus that if dare is portrayed as a
constantly evolving program it can't ever be studied and therefore can't
ever fail. "Thus dare is protected from criticism and remains `forever
young,'" they wrote. "In fact, in the view of dare stakeholders, this is as
it should be, because the program cannot be allowed to fail: the stakes are
simply too high."

In fact, the most controversial part of the program--the dare box--has
remained unchanged despite years of criticism about this systematic attempt
to encourage children to rat out the grown-ups around them, including their
own parents. After the first class, the students, following dare
instructions, fashion a shoe box into a colorful mailbox, often decorated
with dare stickers. Each week from then on, for the entire seventeen weeks,
students are encouraged to write anonymous notes asking any question they
want. They are also allowed to accuse people of using or selling drugs or
committing sexual abuse. These accusatory notes may also be anonymous. At
the end of every dare class, the officer reads the questions out loud. The
officer does not read the accusatory notes to the class, but those notes
are referred to the appropriate school and police investigative units for
action. As James Bovard pointed out, Darrin Davis is not an isolated case.
dare students have fingered their parents in Maryland, Oklahoma and
Wisconsin. In 1991, a 10-year-old told a Colorado 911 operator, "I'm a dare
kid," and urged the police to arrest his parents for marijuana possession.
After his parents were arrested, the cop assigned to his school publicly
praised him.

Parents and scientists in dozens of states have attacked the dare box,
saying that it reminds them of Stalinists rewarding kids for ratting on
their parents. Lochridge, dare's spokesman, dismisses their fears, saying
it's mostly "urban myths." "Officers, as part of their training," he adds,
"are taught not to elicit information about the [students'] personal
lives." Lochridge says students are not encouraged to make accusations.
But, according to one University of Illinois study, an accusation is made
in 59 percent of all dare classes. And while that number may be high, three
Washington, D.C., area dare cops interviewed said a dare box note accused
someone of using or selling drugs in at least one-third of their classes.
All three cops said they "didn't discourage" their students from making
accusations. Lochridge maintains the cops are just doing their job. "I
don't know of any state which doesn't have laws requiring us to investigate
any accusations of sexual abuse or drugs," he says.

In the end, dare has an answer that trumps all. Even if there is some truth
to charges that dare doesn't work, what this means is that we need ... more
dare. "Well, if you teach people fractions or a foreign language, it's
going to erode unless you reinforce it," Lochridge explains. "So the answer
is more dare. Kids need to get it more." And doubtless they will, whether
it does them any good or not. (Copyright 1997, The New Republic)
 
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