NEWS
Attorney General Sessions Wants to Resurrect the D.A.R.E. Program
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But he seems to have forgotten that the popular anti-drug program was deemed a failure.
Published on July 12, 2017

Although the D.A.R.E. program has been deemed one of the most worthless attempts at keeping kids off drugs on the United States, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions would like to see it make a resurgence to support his anti-drug stance in Washington D.C.

On Tuesday, as part of speech for the Drug Abuse Resistance Education International Training Conference in Texas, Sessions proclaimed his admiration for the infamous drug prevention racket, calling it “the best remembered anti-drug program today.”

“In recent years, people have not paid much attention to that message, but they are ready to hear it again,” Sessions told those in attendance. “We know it worked before and we can make it work again.”

The D.A.R.E. program was launched in 1983 by the Los Angeles Police Department intent on teaching children “the skills” they need to handle drug dealers and other street ruffians wanting to send them down a darkened path to total self-destruction.

Essentially, the program entailed sending uniformed police officers into classrooms to “teach” children from an early age tried and true methods for maintaining a drug-free existence.

In the program’s heyday, it was not uncommon for children to be exposed to drug samples and even get to shake paws with the local K-9 unit.

Law enforcement would typically use D.A.R.E. presentations as an opportunity to con the younger generation into believing that always being honest with police was the only real way to escape the wrath of the criminal justice system. None of which is true, by the way.

During his lecture, Sessions failed to mention that the National Criminal Justice Reference Service submitted a report to Congress nearly 20 years ago, calling the D.A.R.E. program a poorly designed waste of education.

The report said the classroom crime prevention program was largely ineffective due to its “content, teaching methods, and the use of uniformed police officers rather than teachers.”

Interestingly, a 2014 report from the publication Scientific American not only found that the D.A.R.E. program and its dope prevention counterparts of the “Just Say No” era “does little or nothing to combat substance abuse in youth,” it can actually backfire, causing teens to become more cavalier about the use of legal substances like alcohol and tobacco.

“By emphasizing the hazards of severe drug abuse, D.A.R.E. may inadvertently convey the impression that alcohol and tobacco are innocuous by comparison,” the article reads.

While Attorney General Sessions believes “we need D.A.R.E. to prevent [drug dealers] from finding new victims,” he fails to acknowledge the most problematic sector of drug peddlers in the United States – family doctors. Throughout the past decade, these so-called medical professionals have acquired an insatiable lust for prescribing highly addictive drugs to patients unaware of the potential consequences. Opioid medications, which are often doled out for minor aches and pains, were responsible for a large perfcentage of the 33,000 opioid overdose deaths recorded in 2015.

Although it is true that children need to be more educated about the “true” risks involved with the use of drugs and alcohol, the approach should not be wrapped up in scare tactics and misinformation. Programs like D.A.R.E. are really nothing more than an illusion designed to scam the pop-flock into thinking that the government is always looking after their children’s’ best interests.

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Mike Adams
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Mike Adams is a contributing writer for MERRY JANE. He also writes for High Times Magazine and Cannabis Now. You can follow him on Twitter @adamssoup and on Facebook.com/mikeadams73
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