D.A.R.E.

D.A.R.E. — Drug Abuse Resistance Education — was created in Los Angeles in 1983, a joint project of LAPD Chief Daryl Gates and Harry Handler, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The concept was to put a real, uniformed police officer in front of schoolkids for a series of lessons on resisting drugs, alcohol, gangs, and peer pressure. It spread fast. Backed by federal money through the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1986, D.A.R.E. rode the era's war on drugs into classrooms across the country, and at its height it ran in roughly 75% of American school districts.

For a '90s kid, D.A.R.E. was a whole experience. The officer became a semi-regular fixture for a few weeks, handing out workbooks, pens, and rulers, running through scenarios about peer pressure, and sometimes rolling up in a seized sports car as a prop. It culminated in graduation and, above all, the merch — the D.A.R.E. T-shirt became one of the most recognizable pieces of clothing of the decade, worn long after anyone remembered the lessons. The program was earnest, well-funded, and, for a lot of kids, the first time a police officer was a friendly regular presence in their school.

The trouble was that it didn't seem to work. A string of studies through the 1990s found little to no effect on actual drug use, and a 1998 report backed by the National Institute of Justice concluded flatly that D.A.R.E. did not reduce substance use; some research even found no advantage, or worse, for kids who'd been through it. Under mounting evidence, the organization overhauled its approach — in the early 2010s it adopted "Keepin' it REAL," an evidence-based curriculum developed by researchers at Penn State and Arizona State that emphasizes interactive decision-making over lectures. D.A.R.E. still exists, but for millennials it lives on mostly as a memory: the officer, the workbook, and that unkillable T-shirt.