DARE was the brainchild of Los Angeles Police Department chief Daryl Gates, who launched the program in the early 1980s. More than 20 million students receive DARE training each school day; DARE is taught in every state and in three-quarters of the nation’s school districts. The DARE curriculum is taught by police primarily to fifth- and sixth-graders, though children in kindergarten and in high school also receive DARE instruction. The police are supposed to serve as role models and trusted confidants.

America is deluged with DARE paraphernalia — including bears, bumper stickers, buttons, hats, and jeeps. DARE has everything — except good results. Many independent experts have found that DARE miserably fails students:

• The federal Bureau of Justice Assistance paid $300,000 to the Research Triangle Institute (RTI), a North Carolina research firm, to analyze DARE’s effectiveness. The RTI study found that DARE failed to significantly reduce drug use. Researchers warned that “DARE could be taking the place of other, more beneficial drug-use curricula.”

• Dennis Rosenbaum, professor of criminal justice studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, surveyed and tracked 1800 kids who had DARE training and concluded in 1998 that “suburban students who participated in DARE reported significantly higher rates of drug use … than suburban students who did not participate in the program.”

• A 1999 study by the California legislative analyst’s office “concluded that DARE didn’t keep children from using drugs. In fact, it found that suburban kids who took DARE were more likely than others to drink, smoke and take drugs,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

• A 1999 University of Kentucky study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, examined the effect of DARE on students’ behavior over the subsequent 10 years. The report concluded: “Our results are consistent in documenting the absence of beneficial effects associated with the DARE program. This was true whether the outcome consisted of actual drug use or merely attitudes toward drug use.” One Kentucky researcher observed: “The only difference was that those who received D.A.R.E. reported slightly lower levels of self-esteem at age 20.”