Who remembers the D.A.R.E. program?

It saved me when this random guy walked up to me in Wal Mart, asked if I want some cocaine, and I said NO, I DON'T DO THAT. Otherwise, without D.A.R.E., I'd be lying in the street, getting butt fucked by a meth head. (I mean, I did that part anyway, but skipped the coke)

Our cop gave us the Just Say No stickers as a reward on the last day

I was in fifth grade in 1998-99 - the year of Columbine.

And although we were deep into gel pens, Oreo O's, frosted tips, and Bill Clinton's rimjobs, we were still old enough to know it was a put-up job. Cops were not - and still are not - neutral or trustworthy in this decades-long war on drugs. They're the main reason it continues. And if they have to resort to cute little cartoon drug addicts and videos about starlets getting the high-five, then you know they're out of ideas.

Once the penis goes inside you = AIDS

I grew up in rural Kansas, born in 1978.

When I was in the first grade we all had to gather in the school cafeteria for a presentation. Our special guests were two Jeri Blank women who either said they were backup singers for ZZ Top or knew backup singers for ZZ Top. I don't remember, I doubt I really understood. Anyway, they put on a puppet show about drugs, then they told us six year olds about how they once watched a woman shoot heroin into her eyeball. Yes she said that. We had no idea what "shooting heroin" even meant-- neither of those words, in that context.

My teacher had us so damn scared and paranoid, whenever I heard my mom in the kitchen rattling plastic around after I went to bed, I just assumed she was opening tiny baggies of cocaine. Just Say No/DARE was a horrible program.

Just say no…

D.A.R.E had a way of teaching drug use as synonymous with street violence and gangs, at least from my recollection as a 90s kid. They way they talked you'd think rich white people never used.

We were far from the days of understanding addiction as a disease.

Yep I remember. A cop/douchebag came to our class and went to our desks one by one to show us different kinds of drugs. Even as a 12 year old I knew what an incredible moron this guy was.

Because you knew more about addiction and meth used in the 5th grade than the police did, right, OP?

Your toothless mother must have been so proud.

R3 I lived in Eugene Or in the late 90s. My mom was a substitute teacher across the bridge at Thurston High when that shooting happened. I remember thinking "this is so weird, this will never happen again."

Huh boy.

I love r5

I only remember the free shirts we got, so I guess it wasn’t super effective.

I only remember that we had D.A.R.E. in 5th grade and that the copper was a broad.

How many times do you have to have sex to get AIDS?

Cops showed up to my school to tell us how to cook crack. The visit was intended to be a scare tactic but the presentation was strangely specific.

R14 The character was a virgin and she got AIDS on her very first try

When I was in junior high, they packed us up on a bus to a high school gym to see David Toma, the inspiration for Barretta, scare everyone about drugs. Some of the kids, especially girls, were amped up like it was the second coming of Christ or a visit from Willie Aames.

Even as a gayling, I had a keen appreciation for hot cops and was subsequently baffled by the furor. Toma was by no stretch of the imagination hot.

Within two years I was smoking weed at lunch daily.

The real problem with the DARE program was that the instructors weren’t allowed to have EVER taken any illegal drugs. So you’d have these cops and instructors going around lecturing kids on the evils of drugs, but completely disconnected from the reality of WHY people consume them in the first place.

It would have been more effective to have recovering addicts speaking to kids, someone kids could identify with to emphasize how easy it is to fall into an addiction through the lure of the “pleasure” drugs give (and they do!), and to act as a cautionary tale of how addiction can destroy one’s life and the lives of those around them.

“First it’s oral, then before you know it you’re a heroin-addicted prostitute!”

R19 So you're telling me I can own my own business AND save on my medications? All by the age of 18?

R16 = Chloe Sevigny in Kids

My Aunt was crazy into DARE and running the program in her kids’ school and three out of my four cousins went to rehab for heroin addiction so not sure it was effective.

Our middle school teacher actually fought with the DARE instructors once. Their presentation was about online child predators and they showed us slides upon slides of cartoonishly fat or ugly people at the computer, supposedly looking to groom kids and give them drugs. "They're probably obese, unemployed, never shower etc." A scare tactic type thing.

Mrs. L stopped them mid Powerpoint to critique them for making it seem like all predators are hideous or have no social status. She basically took over for the day to tell us that some predators hide in plain sight and to trust our gut about it.

Didn’t they try to get kids to turn in their parents?

My dad worked nights, so it was just my mom, brother and myself at home at night. If I heard my mom step into the garage for more than two minutes, I thought she was probably out there in our garage, stripping for cash to buy drugs, or getting a rope because she was ‘in too deep.’ I would lie there awake imagining all kinds of scenariosI learned from DARE.

They really filled our heads with all kinds of shit, for first graders. My school pencils were chewed to stubs from anxiety, and I remember the teacher saving them in a plastic bag, without my knowledge, and presenting them to my mom at parent-teacher conferences, like it was my mom’s fault I was so keyed up.

Anyone remember this song? This was the song they played at our "award ceremony" in the school gym, where we got our DARE diploma from the police.

Millennials became the biggest potheads and druggies ever so this program was an obvious failure.

What did it stand for?

The whole thing was a total government money pit. I was a young teacher during the DARE years & schools would buy things that they needed (ex. new mats for the gym) and slap DARE stickers on it as a way to use DARE $$. Even teachers thought the whole thing was a joke, but they're not going to say no to the $$

r27 Drug Abuse Resistance Education.

R26 I wouldn't say that. Not any worse than what the older generations indulged in. I do remember though how the biggest drug users loved those DARE t-shirts. They were worn ironically. They failed because kids realized what liars they were. Instead of telling the truth about drug use, it was more like 1950's weed hysteria videos.

[quote]Also they showed us a movie where a preppy girl has sex ONCE and gets AIDS

It only takes once. You know that, right?

Or are you under the impression it takes many times to contract AIDS?

We didn't have anything as hardcore as that in my euro country because drugs and AIDS were never really that big of a problem. We just had cops come in every couple of years to show us what sorts of different drugs were out there on the market, with pictures of the drugs so we'd be able to recognise them. No scary stories.

However, we did get cops come in almost annually around Christmas time and show us GROSS photos of kids' faces and hands mangled from fireworks. So many extremely graphic photos of charred and torn off flesh, like you wouldn't believe. And of course it did nothing to deter us from buying and using fireworks.

[quote] Also they showed us a movie where a preppy girl has sex ONCE and gets AIDS.

Well, yes, but she was also gang-banged bareback by the entire Cleveland Browns.

Here is something from the Netherlands that is a lot more realistic than DARE. I think the punishment threats from DARE were really ridiculous.

One speaker seemed to be doing a commercial for drugs. "Acid makes you taste colors and music, cocaine makes you have an orgasm, pot makes the dumbest people feel smart and turns the world hilarious, look at this display case filled with samples of every drug known to man!" By the end of the talk, I was trying to figure out a way to steal the case. I was ultimately disappointed when I finally got my hands on some drugs.

Then we had a guy who obviously had some cuckholding kink about Black people. He had 10 stories about young white girls raped and sold into prostitution to black pimps by their boyfriends. He probably had a boner in his cop uniform. So weird

[quote]Cops showed up to my school to tell us how to cook crack.

They came to our school in a Winnebago and there was whole display with all the equipment needed to make meth

I do. Deputy François was assigned to my class. He once passed around as glass case full of vials of drugs like 'angel dust,' cocaine, etc., and I thought I was going to get some on my hand and scratch my nose and die of an overdose, so when I was finally able to go to the bathroom, I washed my hands for like five minutes straight.

Their brainwashing was insanely effective on me.

I remember an episode of The Americans in which the daughter came home from school and told the parents what she learned about the evil USSR and communism, and the mother looked like she could barely keep herself from murdering her daughter.

I thought of DARE while I watched that. I used to police my parents' smoking and beer drinking, and my mom's painkillers after a surgery. I know she felt like I was being brainwashed at school, and I really can't imagine how disturbing that must be for a parent to know that your kid could legitimately see you as a criminal who needs to be turned in. Very creepy.

Cops offering point by point instructions of cooking crack cocaine to high school students is not a deterrent

[quote]They came to our school in a Winnebago and there was whole display with all the equipment needed to make meth

R36 who was your chemistry teacher? Walter White??

R1 and R19 killed me!! I did it anyway too!!

DARE actually increased drug experimentation and usage among those who participated. Similar to R5's experience, these overzealous idiots were so amped up to teach 6 year olds about meth that it never occurred to them they were inadvertently glamorizing an illicit activity to a group of kids that were blissfully ignorant up until then. It piqued their interest and conditioned them to something that was guaranteed to upset adults right when kids are starting to flex their individual power and rebel against authority. The Streisand effect at its finest.

Drugs

Are

Really

Excellent

Was what we called it

D.A.R.E. Didn’t spend too much time at our high school. They held a pep rally and passed stickers out, but we didn’t rate demonstrations or lectures. Of course, there were 2,300 of us and it was a broken industrial town.

This is before MADD, but it was totally ok to drive after you’d been drinking, but you deserved prison if you lit up a joint.

A friend of mine, a young parent, organized an event at the local community center. It was supposed to be a "public safety" talk for kids, things like don't engage with strangers, if you see something say something, good touch v. bad touch, what have you.

I can't remember what group she was working with but they sent a local cop out to give this talk and right off the bat he's basically doing a D.A.R.E. presentation about drugs, addicts, the whole nine yards. Well these young parents, all millennials who probably sat through this b.s. themselves as kids, weren't having it, started challenging his b.s. right in front of their kids.

My friend stepped in within minutes and actually shut it down, said that's not really what this is about. The cop was pissed but took the hint and left. The parents had an ad hoc discussion with their kids instead. A complete fiasco because these morons literally don't know how to talk to kids let alone what parents actually want them to talk about.

r28, Our High school got the DARE mats for our gym. They said, "Say no to drugs." My late bf and a friend of his stole those mats. It was the scandal that rocked our school. My bf was so guilt-ridden, he ended up in a psych ward.

The DARE cops told us if we smoked weed we would be doing heroin five minutes later. Marijuana was a "gateway drug" lol!

None of the kids I went to school with ever turned into drug addicts, they just became alcoholics.

Well let's see, I was teaching D.A.R.E. in Oregon but it was a million years ago. I'll have to check my pictures.

[quote]D.A.R.E had a way of teaching drug use as synonymous with street violence and gangs, at least from my recollection as a 90s kid. They way they talked you'd think rich white people never used.

That's exactly how I remember it. Drugs = gangs and black people.

I grew up in an affluent, lily-white CT suburb and the main message the D.A.R.E. cops would impart to us was that if we ever did drugs we would end up "living on the streets of Hartford." "Living on the streets of Hartford" basically meant living in the ghetto amongst black people. This was the worst fate imaginable for affluent white kids, or so the cops would have us believe.

The whole D.A.R.E thing was inherently racist.

I was lucky to escape this as the program started in 1983 and I started junior high that year. By the time I would see the billboards when the program was in high gear, I was aged out of it.

I was out of high school by the early 80s so I guess I missed the dare stuff. However I do remember having it drilled into my head that one sexual encounter could kill you. The government did a horrible job with aids. The media was reporting on it every single night I do feel I was robbed in my youth at the same time. I'm lucky to be here in my elder gay age. Fuck I think that's the first time I said it out loud elder gay.

I won some award from them in our school so I got a free shirt and free other things.

I remember it being okay in elementary school then by middle school they were doing, "scared straight" and showing us the corpses of people who died from drugs.

There was one group of photos they showed us of a person who died from a drug overdose and wasn't found for quite some time. It was bloated and hideous and didn't even look like person.

Shit worked because decades later it's still burned in my brain.

I'll repeat what I said in the other thread since it died despite being newer.

I went through it. Not the abstinence only stuff. My state taught both condoms and abstinence. But the D.A.R.E. stuff. There were two parts to what I experienced.

One was showing us movies that told us to avoid drugs. I remember one was of a rebellious teen who did cocaine. His parents came home to find him dead. They tried to do CPR, but to no avail. Anyway, the twist was that while that was a dramatization, the real parents were then shown crying about the loss of their son (as they had experienced this and surprise, this was a real story.) All of the movies were relatively poorly acted and all of the situations ended the worst way possible. If someone huffed something their first time, they did. Etc. Not very effective and some kids would make fun of these movies while they were going on.

The second part was actually educational. A hot-as-fuck police officer came to our class, passed out a bunch of D.A.R.E. freebies (bumper stickers, pencils, t-shirt to the first person to answer a question correctly, etc), then gave us a talk about drugs. Rather than do the "You'll drop dead if you use this stuff once" stuff, he said he wanted us to know what various stuff looked like so we would know what was serious and what wasn't. He opened up a briefcase full of drugs (I assume fake, lol) and drug paraphernalia and went one by one explaining what all the various pills, powders, and items were used for. He explained the effects on the human body. How it made you feel as well as the negatives, both immediate and long term. And yes, he also mentioned the prison sentences one could get for having various things. But the way he did it was just very matter-of-factly. Far better than the videos that we all laughed at. It was just here's the facts. Also, it helped that he was younger and actually aware of current drug slang. He chose the good cop approach and no kids laughed during his presentation.

D.A.R.E. 6th grade (1988).

We would sometime have a cop in a McGruff the Crime Dog furry costume come in for pictures.

I remember the cop telling us one time that smoking one joint was the equivalent of smoking 10 cigarettes.

So I raised my hand and said, "Well since marijuana is illegal, then why don't people just buy a pack of smokes and inhale the whole pack to get a cheap high?"

The cop was not amused.

I was out of school by the time this program was implemented. However, I will be protected in the event of a nuclear attack as I received extensive “duck and cover” training in school. In case of an emergency, you’ll find me tucked under a desk.

I thought it was dumb and pointless even then, but I remember being SCANDALIZED that I did not win the essay contest! Some blonde midwit in the other class won, and not two years later she was suspended for smoking on campus. I definitely fantasized about calling the DARE offices and having her award rescinded and given to me.

I love you r56!

And a decade or so before this program were the scare novels like the overwritten drug story “Go Ask Alice” and the supernaturally tinged “Jay’s Journal”. Both were supposedly true journals but they weren’t.

And no people who believed these books ever ran around asking how the person who allegedly discovered them kept finding journals of dead kids.

Our drama class was tasked with producing a short play for a D.A.R.E. event at our school, and it was pitiful (I wrote it). We cajoled the shortest, youngest-looking student to play a heedless juvenile who has an epiphany in the ER after OD'ing.

I cared more about how the printed program looked, but it came back from the copy shop with this bumpkin deputy's handwriting on it giving credit to McGruff The Crime Dog and Archway Cookies (the only sponsor). Naturally we all tied one on at the "cast party."

Why am I not surprised that all of you juvenile delinquents landed here?

Here we had Really Me and Don't Do Drugs.

And this 18-year-old boy who blew various neurons and synapses spoke to our Grade 5 class about how using screwed him up. It had an impact on me.

^^^Did you ask him about his drug use, what drugs he did and what he charged& what sex acts he performed when he was working the streets^^^

Did he tell you if charged more for anal?

My grandma scared me straight!

LOL no, Phillywhore!