Dare Program

The issue of educating a personality in the current drug situation is becoming more and more acute, problematic, especially in the field of forming the moral foundations of the health of student youth. Therefore, the primary preventive measure in school education should be the organization of a systematic, purposeful educational process aimed at preventing addictive behavior, the formation of attitudes towards a healthy lifestyle, and such personal qualities that allow you to resist the negative impact of the narcotic environment. D.A.R.E. program introduced in the United States in 1983 manages to handle such a task quite effectively.

Analysis of Drug Problem

The phenomenon of drug addiction has been known to mankind for many millennia. According to various historical documents and facts, the analgesic and hypnotic properties of drugs were originally used for medical purposes. But over time, their circulation has gone beyond medical purposes. These substances began to be used to obtain specific sensations at the level of biological and psychotropic effects, as well as to restore the disturbed mental and physical condition. Euphoria after taking drugs is remembered by those parts of the brain that are responsible for pleasure and forces a person to constantly renew its contents in the body (“Alcohol and Drug Abuse Statistics”). There is an addiction and an irresistible craving for these substances.

Most often, drugs begin to be used by people from families in difficult life circumstances: these are usually children of alcoholic parents, children from single-parent families or families with broken family relationships, personal ties. Under such conditions, the child, leaving the family, falls under the influence of a negative micro-social group or its leader. People who are already using drugs need new people involved in this addiction (“Alcohol and Drug Abuse Statistics”). They need them as an environment in which everyone is in the same narcotic state.

It is believed that each addict during his drug "career" involves 13-14 people in drug addiction. Of particular concern is the fact that it penetrates into the school environment. Young people need to realize that drug use is not only harmful to human health, but also destroys and kills it. Drug addicts often suffer from various diseases, they become disabled early, their life expectancy is reduced by 4-5 times (“Alcohol and Drug Abuse Statistics”). Hence, drug abuse resistance programs are more of a necessity rather than an initiative. It is the duty of society to preserve every member.

Drug Abuse Resistance Education Navigation

In the United States, the government realized that police measures alone are an ineffective direction in solving the problem of drug addiction. Treatment of drug addiction, according to Americans, is a long, multi-stage process with a high risk of failure, accompanied by high costs. In this regard, the leading place in reducing the number of drug addicts is occupied by the primary prevention of drug addiction, and primarily among young students (Tupper 357). The U.S. government is making great efforts to promote healthy lifestyles and anti-drug education at the state and public levels. Widespread prevention and education programs in the United States have been very successful.

One of such educational projects on anti-drug education is the D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). The idea of ​​D.A.R.E. originated in 1983. The Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Joint School Committee have begun developing a school model for building anti-drug attitudes in students. The main goal of D.A.R.E. was to orient the younger generation towards a healthy lifestyle. Today D.A.R.E. is the largest-scale anti-drug program, which is very popular not only in America but also in more than 40 Western European countries (Tupper 363-365). On the effectiveness of the preventive work of the D.A.R.E. and similar to her says the fact that over the past 10 years, the number of teenage drug addicts in the United States has halved.

Critique of the Program

Over the years, the program has been criticized several times, however. In the 1990s, for example, research has repeatedly shown that D.A.R.E. was ineffective or that its effectiveness could not be proven (Gonnerman). Operating income D.A.R.E. America fell from $10 million in 2002 to $3.7 million in 2010 after the release of government reports that flawlessly discredited the effectiveness of the program. In 2001, Surgeon General of the USA David Satcher placed the D.A.R.E. in the category “Ineffective primary prevention programs.” The D.A.R.E was updated by the very sociologist who thought it was ineffective, Dr. Richard Clayton (Tupper 359-360). After that, the program managed to retain its success for some time.

Conclusion

Despite some reasonable critique, the D.A.R.E. program is still quite popular in the United States and some European countries for its relative efficiency and accessible nature. The program is relatively easy to implement in most Western countries. Due to its somewhat crude and radical characteristics, the program might not be universally effective, yet it manages to teach future generations about the harm of illicit drug use quite effectively. Additional research in the field of drug education in the future, however, should recognize the difficulty of implementing these programs in the school environment.

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Works Cited

"Drug & Substance Abuse Addiction Statistics". American Addiction Centers, 2022, https://americanaddictioncenters.org/rehab-guide/addiction-statistics.

Gonnerman, Jennifer. "Truth Or D.A.R.E. The Dubious Drug-Education Program Takes New York, The Villagevoice". Drug Library, 1999, https://www.druglibrary.org/think/~jnr/truthord.htm.

Tupper, Kenneth W. "Teaching Teachers To Just Say “Know”: Reflections On Drug Education". Teaching And Teacher Education, vol 24, no. 2, 2008, pp. 356-367. Elsevier BV, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2007.08.007. Accessed 9 Mar 2022.