DARE's Effectiveness

Dr. Dennis Rosenbaum, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, completed a six-year study of 1,798 students and found that "DARE had no long-term effects on a wide range of drug use measures"; DARE does not "prevent drug use at the stage in adolescent development when drugs become available and are widely used, namely during the high school years"; and that DARE may actually be counter productive. According to the study, "there is some evidence of a boomerang effect among suburban kids. That is, suburban students who were DARE graduates scored higher than suburban students in the Control group on all four major drug use measures."

Source: 

Rosenbaum, Dennis, "Assessing the Effects of School-based Drug Education: A Six Year Multilevel Analysis of Project DARE," Abstract of article published in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Vol. 35, No. 4 (November, 1998).
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