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Google found hundreds of references. I collected a few dozen in sequence, without choosing according to my agreement or disagreement with this controversial program of using police to educate public school students about other than the legal ramifications of using or dealing in contraband. Click on "long" for the long-loading page, with pictures, or "short" for the page with mainly links (only one picture).

As a member of the Grand Jury, I admire and respect educational efforts by police, who spent several days acquainting us with the realities of the street scene of drug abuse, and from when I was a child, I'll never forget the lectures on neighborhood safety by the friendly cop on the beat (yes, that dates me to some degree :-). As a drug counselor for several counties, I visited people in jail, who were there because of drug-influenced behavior, or breaking drug laws. There's no doubt in my mind that the D.A.R.E. programs do a tremendous amount of good, in promoting community relations with the police and other caring agencies. For example, some people who might otherwise be nervous around police, will be more inclined to visit in a jail, and be able to talk with a friend or relative about how their involvement with recreational psychoactives is a problem.

On the other hand, as an educator and counselor in the area of alcoholism and other drug abuse, working for a county government, I was distressed at how a local police department lectured in public schools and shopping malls, exhibiting a marijuana plant in a cage with an armed guard. At that time there were about twenty television programs, depiciting illegal psychoactives as having intrinsically different problems from legal ones, as the subject of medical or crime dramas. I exchanged several interesting letters with the State on the matter, out of concern for this glamorization and stigmatization of a subset of psychoactives that made it practically impossible for people to communicate across the legal boundary, about personal issues, and similarly difficult for them to understand their legal comsumption in terms of the concerns being discussed about contraband (addiction, accidents, expense, toxicity, distorted values, degradation, death.)

The focus of Psychoactive Management is on behavior and experiences, not drugs, and my general feeling is that sensible Psychoactive Management can be practiced without enforcement authorities giving public lectures with the message that illegal substances are intrinsically or instrumentally different from legal ones. Consumers of contraband know different; unfortunately, the law keeps us from hearing their point of view, even as it gainsays it.*

But of all the professions, one would be hard put to find people more concerned about the health and welfare of individuals and the community, than among police. They escort people to lockups, millions a year, whose lives were interrupted by psychoactive mismanagement, and they see its violent results, from people torn to pieces in car wrecks, to miserable domestic disputes and broken homes. I can only imagine how one officer named Tony felt, when he found a young man named Dale on the floor, who had a fatal concussion. Dale had evidently injected morphine while he was standing up. I knew he knew better, but he probably forgot, that if he abstained for a while, his tolerance would go down. He'd been abstinent for a long time, but according to his friends, he'd had a wicked toothache. Tony was a friend of the family, and Dale's dad asked him to see what was wrong; he couldn't reach Dale on the phone. Officer Tony found his body.* So, out of respect for the compassion, dedication, and frustration of the sincere efforts of our finest public servants in stopping drug abuse, these links to the law enforcement point of view are provided.
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* Dale's dad was a friend of mine. At the funeral, in 1980, I saw Dale's "doper" friends being admonished by his mother, saying things like, "You see what happens when you use drugs?". Since then, I've thought about how I declined to admonish all the cigarette smokers at funerals of several smoking friends of mine, whose tobacco hobby killed them. Why didn't I speak up? Somehow it seems more correct to lecture consumers of contraband. Perhaps if the majority of people at Dale's funeral had been "dopers", no one would have admonished them. Perhaps if smoking tobacco were illegal, one could admonish smokers at funerals of other smokers whose hobby killed them. Now I realize this is a relevant footnote to another part of the above text, so the reader will find two asterisks there, for this note.

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Other DARE page is temporarily on hold.