Drug education and Censorship

Definition: Programs designed to educate young people about the dangers of drug use

Significance: Despite widespread agreement that programs to reduce drug abuse are needed, critics have charged some programs with being counterproductive because they have distorted facts

The American counterculture of the 1960s, with its psychedelic music and widespread use of mind-altering drugs helped bring what had been a marginal subculture to suburbia. Drug use had long been recognized as common among jazz musicians and other marginal groups, but few parents and educators concerned themselves with drug problems until drugs suddenly became more widely known and experienced. State and federal governments began strengthening laws relating to controlled substances, as well as increasing penalties and creating special agencies to combat drug use.

By the mid-1990s and into the twenty-first century the debate over effective approaches to education to prevent drug abuse by children and adolescents had become acrimonious. While few disputed that substance abuse contributed to serious social problems, organizations ranging from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws to the American Medical Association (AMA) expressed concern that many drug education programs engaged in censorship and distortion. Many policy analysts began to believe that the long-term effects of the government’s War on Drugs might be worse than the effects of the drugs themselves. In 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a collective of world leaders and thinkers, released a report that declared the War on Drugs a failure and called for an overhaul of global drug policy, stating "fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed."

DARE

Advocates of the most popular drug education curricula in U.S. schools, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program—known as DARE—claimed that their own educational materials significantly reduced the use of legal drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco, and illegal drugs, such as marijuana and crack cocaine. Critics of DARE, however, cited studies, including one commissioned by the U.S. Justice Department in 1993 and another released by the American Psychological Association in 1999, indicating that participation in DARE had no statistically significant effect on rates of substance abuse by young people. Rather than effectively educating young people about the real dangers of various drugs, critics claimed that DARE programs distorted facts and used scare tactics, such as claiming that it was possible to overdose fatally on marijuana, that then backfired when students were exposed to conflicting information. Having learned that some so-called facts were actually fiction, students then discounted all of the DARE material. Debates such as this were nothing new, however, as the history of twentieth century drug policy was characterized by melodramatic distortions and suppression of information by government agencies and by drug advocacy groups.

Scholars in criminal justice studies have documented that much of the drug war of the late twentieth century was the product of political opportunism, racism, and media hype. Condemning drug use has always been politically safe. Traditionally, many politicians found taking harsh stands on the drug war a productive rhetorical tactic to use when campaigning for election, as no one wants elected officials who are soft on crime. Critics have noted that the pandering of politicians to public hysteria over drug abuse has contributed to ever-harsher mandatory sentencing laws; persons convicted for possession of drugs meant only for personal consumption have frequently served more time in prison than criminals arrested for violent crimes.

As of 2015 the United States had the dubious distinction of imprisoning a greater percentage of its population than any other industrialized nation. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 2011 bulletin drug offenses accounted for 48 percent of all incarcerations. Crimes that would have drawn only small fines or probation before the war on drugs were sending drug users to jail. Draconian sentencing laws often seemed irrational when examined from a historical viewpoint.

Although drug abuse has long been recognized as a social problem, government did not become involved in regulating the nonmedical use of drugs until the late nineteenth century. The first antidrug laws were passed in the late nineteenth century to control access to opium dens, which became common in cities such as San Francisco, into which thousands of Chinese workers had immigrated. Even then the initial attempts at regulation did not forbid the use of opium, but rather simply attempted to restrict who could frequent the dens. Typically, Chinese workers were permitted access to opium dens, white workers were not. Drug policy in the United States thus had racist undertones from the start. Society deplored the abuse of drugs and expressed pity for addicts, generally people who had become addicted accidentally to opiates such as laudanum (a solution of opium in alcohol once commonly prescribed for various ailments), but did not attempt to restrict access to anything. This changed in the early twentieth century with the 1906 passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Opium Exclusion Act became law in 1909.

Pure Food and Drug Act

The federal government did not intend the Pure Food and Drug Act as a criminal law to restrict access to drugs. Its intent was to ensure that foods and drugs meant for human consumption were safe. Still, by requiring that certain substances, such as opiates, be available only through prescription, the new law greatly reduced the number of drug addicts in the United States. It also changed the demographic profile of addiction. Prior to the law’s enforcement the typical opiate addict was a middle-aged woman who had become addicted accidentally through consumption of an unregulated patent medicine. After passage of the act, drug abuse and drug addiction became problems found mainly among marginalized segments of the population.

Marijuana—the drug which even in 2014 Americans were most likely to be arrested for possessing—also fell under the Pure Food and Drug Act. Known as a mild euphoric for thousands of years, it was widely cultivated for its fibers, which were used for rope. Its seeds also were used in bird food, and its medicinal applications were also known. Beginning with Utah in 1914, states passed laws that outlawed nonmedical use of marijuana, although it continued to be sold over the counter in drugstores. Until 1930 physicians often prescribed hemp tea or hemp cigarettes to patients suffering from nervous conditions. Some historians have speculated that the drive to outlaw marijuana began in the American southwest as part of a racist reaction to its reported wide usage by Mexican migrant farmworkers; they have also speculated that the term marijuana, rather than its scientific name, cannabis, or the more common term, “hemp,” was used to play upon racist images. Other historians have suggested that the move to ban marijuana began as part of the general prohibition movement of the early twentieth century. Having succeeded in prohibiting the sale of alcohol, the temperance movement then spread to other substances, including drugs such as narcotics and marijuana.

Tougher Federal Legislation

The federal government began cracking down on hard drugs, such as heroin, with the 1914 Harrison Act, but it initially ignored marijuana. It was not until the 1920s, following the successful prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages, that a national movement arose to prohibit the use of marijuana. By 1937 sufficient publicity against the drug had been generated that the federal government passed the Marijuana Tax Act. Films such as Reefer Madness (1936) coupled with claims by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics that use of marijuana inevitably led to insanity, violent criminal behavior, and death, convinced much of the general public that marijuana was a drug as deadly as addictive narcotics such as heroin. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics publicity campaign against marijuana was, in fact, so successful that juries found several murderers in the late 1930s to be innocent by reason of insanity after the accused criminals confessed to smoking marijuana prior to committing their crimes. One defendant testified that the drug caused him to grow fangs; another that it turned him into a giant bat. Such exaggerated portrayals of the dangers of marijuana were later recognized as ludicrous, but vestiges of them remained for decades in some drug education materials.

The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 passed despite testimony from numerous scientific and medical authorities that marijuana had legitimate medical applications and posed no threat to the general public. Still, law enforcement generally treated marijuana as a less serious crime than the possession or sale of narcotics such as heroin. This tendency to treat marijuana differently continued even after the passage of the 1969 Dangerous Substances Act. That act devised a schedule for drugs that ranked them according to their potential for abuse and their medical usefulness. Schedule one drugs, such as LSD, had little medical use and a high potential for abuse, schedule two drugs had high medical use and high potential for abuse, and schedule three had high medical use and low potential for abuse. Marijuana remained classified as a schedule one drug despite recommendations from organizations such as the Americans for Compassionate Use that it be made available for wider medical use. Although a few liberal politicians were willing to listen to advocacy groups, most lawmakers continued to ignore the findings of even such traditionally conservative organizations as the AMA regarding changes in drug policy.

The DARE Program

The reluctance of politicians to modify existing policy also extends to drug abuse education efforts, particularly where programs such as DARE are concerned. In the early 1980s Los Angeles chief of police Daryl Gates created the first Drug Abuse Resistance Education program in Southern California. Gates—who once drew criticism for claiming that casual drug users should be shot—enjoyed wide success in arresting dealers who sold drugs to high school students, but realized that society needed to discourage young people from buying drugs in the first place. He designed a program aimed primarily at children in the fifth and sixth grades, although some school districts use DARE from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. DARE sends police officers into classrooms to become friends to the children. In addition to emphasizing the dangers of substance abuse, DARE strives to increase children’s self-esteem to help them resist peer pressures. DARE supporters have noted that the curriculum includes much more than simply talking about drugs. DARE is also meant to help children feel comfortable coming forward to tell trusted adults—their parents, their teachers, or the local police—about issues such as child abuse and sexual molestation.

The DARE program quickly became popular with educators and lawmakers. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush both supported DARE, and Congress voted millions of dollars in federal funds to help school districts and local law enforcement agencies implement the program around the country. At the same time, criticisms of DARE emerged across a wide spectrum of political beliefs. While DARE has been attacked for a variety of reasons, the main point all critics make is that DARE does not work. Numerous studies, including one by the Canadian government and another by the U.S. Department of Justice, have concluded that there is no statistically significant difference in the rates of drug abuse by young people who have gone through the DARE program and those who have not. Critics have argued that in a time of scarce resources, DARE has been diverting funds from other programs that have demonstrated success rates. Just as the information conveyed in drug education programs has often been colored more by political interests than by scientific fact, so, too, have the interpretations of the success or failure of those drug education programs. In 2001, US surgeon general David Satcher, in his report Youth Violence, listed the DARE program as one of the "Ineffective Primary Prevention Programs." Numerous studies that have questioned the effectiveness of the program led DARE to introduce revised curriculum in 2009. Known as "keepin' it REAL," the curriculum employs social-emotional learning theory as well as stressing cultural differences and how such might play into someone's response to drugs and drug prevention.

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