Sheriff's Race Could Hinge on Support For Drug Education
Debate Flares Over DARE's Elimination

By Megan Greenwell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 6, 2006

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.

"That will definitely tell us where we need to take the program in the future," said Gene E. Ayers, DARE coordinator for the Virginia State Police.

Some St. Mary's parents say they do not need a multimillion-dollar survey to convince them that their children should be participating in DARE, and they plan to vote against Zylak because of his decision to cut the program.

"We've got this situation where the studies say it's not effective, but everyone still loves it," Zylak said. "Clearly it's become an issue in the campaign, but we eliminated the program because we didn't have the manpower to staff a program that wasn't working."

DARE advocates generally play down the scientific studies questioning the effectiveness of the program in favor of testimonials from parents and former students who say it helped them make good decisions.

"I was at the county fair a couple of years ago, and a woman who was probably 22 came running up to me and said, 'You were my DARE officer, and you're the reason I didn't do drugs,' " said Mickey Bailey, a former sheriff's deputy who taught drug education in St. Mary's schools for 10 years. "That type of stuff happens all the time, and that's what convinces me it's useful."

Mia Zimmerman, a former PTA president at Piney Point Elementary School whose three children attend St. Mary's public schools, said the program is crucial to children's development.

"It was so sad when they got rid of it because it brought so much to the children," Zimmerman said. "It's information they're not able to get anywhere else, and if you teach them at an early age, they'll soak it in."

Zimmerman said she was elated to learn that voting for Cameron would mean the return of the DARE program.

"I think that'll help him win over parents, definitely," she said.

Cameron said it is clear to him that the community wants officers in schools teaching kids about drugs. Hanson, the professor emeritus, said Cameron is probably correct, adding that it would be unfortunate if Zylak lost his job based on a decision that scientific research rejects.

"Students love DARE, parents love it, and I've never met a school principal who didn't love it," he said. "Everybody thinks it's tremendously effective except the researchers who actually study it."

Bailey, who has retired from the sheriff's office and now teaches criminal justice courses at a local high school, countered that scientific evidence is unable to quantify a program's benefit to a community.

"It was the type of job where you felt like you could make a difference," he said. "On patrol you lock the same people up over and over again. DARE was one of those rare things that was proactive instead of reactive."