A Tale of Two Studies 

In March of 2007, the Association for Psychological Science’s journal, Perspectives on Psychological Science concluded, that the Drug Abuse Resistance Education or D.A.R.E program, funded by the Federal government to send 50,000 local law enforcement officers into 300,000 classrooms in 10,000 communities in all 50 states, was not only utterly useless at keeping kids off drugs, but also had the “…potential to cause harm in clients.” Three years later, a study by University of Pennsylvania found that students given abstinence-only sex education were 9% less likely to have sex than students given a comprehensive sex education program. Which of these two studies, would you think was greeted as “a game changer” by those involved? Before you answer, you might like to know that the Perspectives on Psychological Science article was not the first time that the D.A.R.E program had been found to be useless and potentially dangerous. Since, 1992, when an Indiana University study, commissioned by the Indiana Department of Education found that having gone through a D.A.R.E. program made students significantly more likely to use hallucinogenic drugs, almost everyone who has looked, - from the National Institute of Justice (twice), to the California Department of Education, to the American Psychological Association, to then Surgeon General David Satcher - has concluded that the D.A.R.E. program at best doesn’t work, and at worst is dangerously counterproductive. Assuming you are playing it safe and using your second life line, you might also want to know that the University of Pennsylvania study did not use an abstinence-only program currently in use anywhere, but rather a program custom made for the study. This brand of abstinence defined it as abstinence, not until marriage, but only until the students were “ready.” The study also including exercises focused on the proper prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. Also, vitally, the findings were based not on any quantifiable, long term longitudinal follow up, focused on empirical measures, like say the rate of pregnancy, or STI infection, but simply on the “model-estimated probability” of sexual activity, extrapolated from the self reporting of a handful of 13 and 14 year olds. If you guessed that 18 years of serious and damning studies caused more public reaction than one dubious and statistically insignificant study then all I can say is that you really haven’t been paying attention. Following the Perspectives on Psychological Science article, the spokespeople for D.A.R.E, simply discounted the results claiming that the study, like the half dozen before it, was simply pro-drug propaganda, motivated by the fiscal self-interest of the rehab-industrial complex, or some such. While this may seem unconvincing, it was as convincing as it needed to be, since the press gave up on the story in 1993. The University of Pennsylvania study on the other hand was treated with such breathless awe you could be forgiven for thinking that Jesus, Mohammad and the Buddha had sent the study down, heralded by angels, for the heavenly throne. Nicholas Papas, of the Department of Health and Human Services - ignoring the fact that his own department had, just three years earlier released a far more complete, and statically significant study finding that abstinence only education made no discernable difference - averred that “…the findings from the research paper suggest that this kind of project could be competitive for grants.” Things were even less circumspect on the right. Robert Rector, who, incidentally in his role as a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation had written the federal funding criteria for abstinence-only programs for the Bush administration noted that: “This takes away the main pillar of opposition to abstinence education." The frightening thing here is not that “the science” behind public policy is now apparently based on the rigging of studies to give expedient answers, and discounting unrigged and inconvenient studies. This has been going on in plain sight for years. What really is shocking is that we now live in a world where the fact that something demonstrable doesn’t work is not a reason not to do it, but is simply a “pillar of opposition” to be disregarded as soon as some more palatable figures can be cooked up. In such a context it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we, as a culture and a people, and even a species have, apparently lost the ability to talk seriously and rationally about these issues.