[caseyohara]

It's funny you mention DARE because studies have shown the program was a complete failure, along with the War on Drugs™ and "Just Say No". The only reason it continued as long as it did was not because it was effective, but because it was popular with politicians and the general public because they thought – intuitively – that the program should work. It did not reduce student drug use. In face, it backfired and taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have found learned about otherwise. This ineffective program cost U.S. taxpayers $750M per year for 26 years. Let's not do that again.

[lightyrs]

> It did not reduce student drug use. In face, it backfired and taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have found learned about otherwise.

I will never forget the day in fifth grade when a DARE representative came to our class with a briefcase full of samples of esoteric (to me at least) drugs. The way they were presented made them extremely appealing to me, similar to perusing the choices at a high-end candy store. I don't know for sure if this had any effect on me but I strongly suspect that it did.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

What did work for smoking? From my understanding, that dropped significantly. Could we do what worked for smoking?

[kombookcha]

A large part of it was public awareness of the health risks and relatead damage to the image of smoking as cool and classy.

Now, the proportion of people who still take up smoking today do so in spite of all this, which is probably down to them having various specific user profiles that are unaffected by this (IE they live in communities/work jobs where its ubiquitous or are huge James Dean fans).

For gambling, you could possibly go a long way with awareness and labelling, but I think an issue is that gambling is a lot less visible than smoking. Nobody can smell that you popped outside to blow your paycheck on tonight's game. Making gambling deeply uncool might make some people not take it up, but most of the existing addicts would likely carry on in secret. They're already commonly hiding their losses from spouses and friends, so what's one more layer of secrecy?

At any rate, what worked for smoking wasn't making smokers quit, but making fewer and fewer kids start doing it, so making it a pain in the ass to place your first bet might help.

[xen0]

Smoking, in many countries, is no longer aggressively advertised (if it's advertised at all).

Gambling in some of those same countries is now very aggressively advertised.

[AlexandrB]

I suspect what worked - at least in Canada - is making it very very inconvenient. The number of places you can smoke outside of your own house is very limited now. And "going outside for a smoke" at -20C is miserable.

[rcxdude]

It was already dropping a lot by the time most places implemented smoking bans, though I think it certainly helped push rates even further down.

[mcmoor]

Other replies have mentioned the positive reasons why smoking declined, and I'd like to believe that because I want to imitate it in my country. But in my most skeptical heart I suspect it's because of marijuana and vape instead. I haven't researched further to support this hypothesis but the first Google hit I get looks confirming.

[astura]

The decline of smoking started long before vaping existed and weed was popular. Smoking peaked in the US in 1965.

[vintermann]

> because it was popular with politicians and the general public because they thought – intuitively – that the program should work

Are you sure they did? Maybe they were just OK with programs that didn't actually work.

What does work is restricted access through age limits, closing times, and higher prices (through taxes is what's been studied, but it's safe to say making something illegal also increases prices). These are unpopular policies, and those who profit from alcohol/gambling/etc. have an easy time mobilizing opposition to it.

What has been studied little, but was a big part of historical anti-alcohol movements until total prohibition won out, was profit bans. Government/municipal monopolies were justified in that it took away regular people's incentive to tempt their fellow citizens into ruin, and the idea was that while government may be corrupted by the profit incentive, at least they carried the costs of alcohol/gambling abuse as well. (Some teetotallers didn't think that was enough, and came up with rules that e.g restricting municipal monopolies from spending the profit as they pleased)

[jimbob45]

How could you possibly study such a thing? Even if you compare DARE students against non-comparable DARE students, how could you reliably capture measure how many did drugs? People can lie on surveys, particularly with respect to illegal actions. You could measure arrests but that's not going to capture how many used drugs without ever getting arrested, nor the social context in which they were used. It's a double-edged sword too because the control data would have similar issues with obtainment.

I've seen a lot of these talking points before by the pro-drug crowd. "It taught kids about interesting drugs that they probably wouldn't have learned about otherwise" is laughable when subjected to scrutiny. You'd have to live under a rock to otherwise not learn about the drugs the DARE program teaches (and they don't get particularly exotic either). The idea is asinine to begin with - you'd want kids to know about exotic drugs and their side effects to know to avoid them in the first place.

The worst part is that the pro-drug crowd, like yourself, touts these talking points in an attempt to end the program - to what end? If I accept your talking points blindly that the program has failed, does that mean we simply stop trying? It seems less that you disagreed with the implementation of the program and more that you don't believe kids, or anyone, should be dissuaded from drugs.

[caseyohara]

It is well studied. I am pro-science more than I am pro-drug.

> D.A.R.E.’s original curriculum was not shaped by prevention specialists but by police officers and teachers in Los Angeles. They started D.A.R.E. in 1983 to curb the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco among teens and to improve community–police relations. Fueled by word of mouth, the program quickly spread to 75 percent of U.S. schools.

> But for over a decade research cast doubt on the program’s benefits. The Department of Justice funded the first national study of D.A.R.E. and the results, made public in 1994, showed only small short-term reductions in participants’ use of tobacco—but not alcohol or marijuana. A 2009 report by Justice referred to 30 subsequent evaluations that also found no significant long-term improvement in teen substance abuse.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-new-d-a-r-e-p...

> Launched in 1983, D.A.R.E. was taught by police officers in classrooms nationwide. Their presentations warned students about the dangers of substance use and told kids to say no to drugs. It was a message that was repeated in PSAs and cheesy songs. Former First Lady Nancy Reagan even made it one of her major causes.

> Teaching drug abstinence remains popular among some groups, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's messaging to teenagers still focuses on the goal that they should be "drug-free." But numerous studies published in the 1990s and early 2000s concluded programs like D.A.R.E. had no significant impact on drug use. And one study actually found a slight uptick in drug use among suburban students after participation in D.A.R.E.

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211217460/fentanyl-drug-educ...

[stephenbez]

Surprisingly you can test this with a randomized field test:

> The Illinois D.A.R.E. Evaluation was conducted as a randomized field experiment with one pretest and multiple planned post-tests. The researchers identified 18 pairs of elementary schools, representative of urban, suburban, and rural areas throughout northern and central Illinois. Schools were matched in each pair by type, ethnic composition, number of students with limited English proficiency, and the percent of students from low income families. None of these schools had previously received D.A.R.E.. For the 12 pairs of schools located in urban and suburban areas, one school in each pair was randomly assigned to receive D.A.R.E. in the spring of 1990

https://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/library/uic.htm

Yes, surveys do have flaws but they are a better approach than just giving up and saying any research is impossible.

I’d recommend we don’t simply stop trying, instead we test different programs, and only once we have shown their effectiveness do we role them out further.

[vintermann]

I'm a member of the "anti drug crowd" (lifelong organized teetotaller), and I rely on the research of Thomas Babor among others, for WHO among others. We know how to study social interventions. There's a lot of evidence this type of intervention doesn't work.

[giantg2]

Now there's New DARE (15+ years old at this point). Not sure if this has been scrutinized as much, but supposedly it is effective since it's eligible for funding that requires demonstrated effectiveness.

[buzzert]

I don't think it was a "complete failure" since we are talking about it here. I remember the whole thing quite vividly from elementary school, and it really scared me away from drugs, even as an adult to this day.

[alxndr]

Counterpoint: DARE didn’t scare me away from drugs at all, and in fact taught me how to do the more common ones and what “street names” to ask for at an age where I wasn’t otherwise being exposed to that knowledge.

[NeutralCrane]

The War on Drugs is now considered a failure because it was unable to eliminate drug usage and led to a large number of people being incarcerated for drug offenses. But as drugs have been increasingly legalized/decriminalized in certain areas of the country, the results are even worse. I’m now becoming more convinced that the war on drugs wasn’t a failure, and in fact might be the best that can feasibly be accomplished. I think the “war” terminology doomed it from the start, as it primed us all to think complete and total victory was actually attainable, instead of a scenario where we are instead simply trying to keep society afloat.