Sheriff's Race Could Hinge on Support For Drug Education

Debate Flares Over DARE's Elimination

Mickey Bailey teaches a high school criminal justice class at the James A. Forest Technology and Career Center in Leonardtown. Matt Boltz, 17, assists. (Photos By James A. Parcell -- The Washington Post)

The race to become sheriff of one of Maryland's fastest-growing counties might turn on a popular drug education program -- and whether it does any good.

St. Mary's County Sheriff David D. Zylak (D) eliminated the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program used to warn elementary school students away from drugs two years ago, citing staffing shortages and questions about its effectiveness. His opponent, Republican Tim Cameron, is running on a platform of restoring DARE, saying parents want their children to receive accurate information about drugs from trained police officers.

But DARE, which began in the era of "Just Say No," has its critics. Major studies began to question its effectiveness within a few years of its 1983 launch. The U.S. surgeon general, the then-General Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences and a host of university professors came to the same conclusion: Young adults who went through DARE as fifth-graders were just as likely to use drugs as those who did not.

"Numerous well-designed evaluations and meta-analyses . . . consistently show [DARE has] little or no deterrent effects on substance use," the surgeon general's office wrote in 2001.

Advocates of the program take issue with the studies' methodologies and cite personal testimonials by DARE participants who say the lessons helped them.

Now the long-simmering fight over the future of how U.S. children are taught about drugs has come to St. Mary's, a county rapidly developing into an extension of the Washington suburbs. The population grew by 12 percent between 2000 and 2005.

Along with the growth, residents say, have come some big-city ills, such as growing drug and gang problems. The county sheriff's office recorded 689 drug-related arrests last year, up from 514 when Zylak took office in 2003, and the value of drugs seized has risen from $90,000 to $185,230. During that period, the sheriff reduced the number of narcotics detectives from seven to four, citing the staffing shortages that led to DARE's demise.

Nearly 80 percent of school systems nationwide use DARE, in which police officers to teach 10 weekly sessions about the dangers of drug use. When Zylak eliminated DARE in St. Mary's schools, the county became one of three in Maryland without the program. About 100 of Virginia's 134 jurisdictions use DARE.

"It's a case of misplaced priorities that a county with an emerging drug problem is one of the only places in the state where you cannot find drug education in school," said Cameron, the county public safety director and a former sheriff's deputy.

But David J. Hanson, a prominent critic of DARE and professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at Potsdam, said Cameron's belief in the program's benefit is common but misguided.

"All these police are out there proselytizing for DARE because they believe they have something that is valuable even though it's not," he said. "It may be that we want it to work so badly that we give it the benefit of the doubt."

Some of the country's largest school systems, including those in the District, Phoenix and Seattle, and dozens of smaller ones have eliminated DARE programs. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is expected to release results of a $15 million study of DARE's effectiveness this year, a project whose results could fundamentally change the program's methods.