With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and
iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most
popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the
cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug
education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured
that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the
iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing.
Max
Felker-Kantor has assembled the first history of DARE, which began in
Los Angeles in 1983 as a joint venture between the police department
and the unified school district. By the mid-90s, it was taught in 75
percent of school districts across the United States. DARE received
near-universal praise from parents, educators, police officers, and
politicians and left an indelible stamp on many millennial memories.
But the program had more nefarious ends, and Felker-Kantor
complicates simplistic narratives of the War on Drugs. He shows how
policing entered US schools and framed drug use as the result of
personal responsibility, moral failure, and poor behavior deserving
of punishment rather than something deeply rooted in state
retrenchment, the abandonment of social service provisions, and
structures of social and economic inequality.
