The History of DARE

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. In the early 1980s, the Los Angeles Police Department was losing the war on drugs. Although Chief of Police Darryl Gates believed in the importance of heavy handed policing, he had, after all, once told a congressional committee that, "The casual user ought to be taken out and shot," he now saw the need for a new tactic, one that would get to potential drug users before they even had a chance to start. In the fall of 1983, Gates and the LAPD, in collaboration with the LA Unified School District, launched Project DARE, DARE standing for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, which sent police officers into schools to teach kids how to say no. This wasn't the first time the LAPD had sent police officers into schools. In the 1970s, undercover police officers had been placed in schools as part of the School Buy Program, a program that was wildly successful in terms of catching drug dealers and confiscating narcotics, but one that was doing little to reduce overall drug use by kids. Dr. Ruth Rich, a curriculum and health education specialist in the LAUSD designed the DARE program, which borrowed from an earlier Project Smart, or Self Management and Resistance Training. A major difference with DARE is that uniformed police officers taught fifth and sixth grade students in the 17 lesson program. Each lesson was 45 minutes to an hour. Topics covered included things like the harmful effects of drug abuse, resistance techniques, drug use alternatives, and gang pressures. In the first year of the program, 10 LAPD officers worked the classroom beat, each assigned five schools where they would teach students. Those 10 DARE officers taught over 87,000 students in 50 schools that year. By the following year, the program more than doubled, with 110 elementary schools and nine junior high schools participating. And within three years, the DARE program was city wide in LA, with 58 DARE officers teaching in schools. DARE wasn't limited to Los Angeles for long. Gates and Glenn Levant spread the news about DARE far and wide, and invited police officers from around the country to come to LA for the 80 hour training. By 1987, nearly 400 police departments representing 33 states had sent officers to be trained, and by the time DARE celebrated its 10 year anniversary, there were DARE officers in all 50 states, teaching 4.5 million students annually. DARE even went global, with 10 million students in over 50 countries by the year 2000. To manage this explosive growth and to raise funds to support it, DARE America founded as a 501 C3 nonprofit in 1987. DARE America's coffers were filled via fundraising drives, galas, corporate sponsorship. Those corporate sponsors included Coca Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Shell Oil, and Warner Brothers, among others. In 1996 DARE launched a for- profit arm DARE Incorporated, which sold items with the DARE logo, including T shirts, bumper stickers, slap bracelets. Mattel even produced a DARE van in its matchbooks collectible series. The profits from DARE merchandise accounted for just a small portion of DARE's budget, but they did keep the DARE logo front and center in the public consciousness. While DARE played up it's private funding, it also relied on public funds. The program's teachers, its trained police officers, were of course publicly funded employees of a city or state. DARE's rapid growth also benefited from federal legislation. A 1990 amendment to the Federal Drug Free Schools and Communities Act, DFSCA, required school districts that received federal funding to implement drug education programming, explicitly pointing to DARE as a model program. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued Proclamation 5854, designating September 15 as National DARE Day, at the request of Congress. In the proclamation, Reagan noted, "DARE instruction programs have already touched the lives of more than a million and a half students and contributed to improved study habits, better grades and greater respect for authority. In short, this positive program of drug abuse prevention is effective." Future presidents would follow suit through 2011 with President Obama saying in Proclamation 8648, "The Drug Abuse Resistance Education, DARE program, in addition to many other prevention programs across the country, serves as a resource in helping educate young people on how to resist peer pressure, and refrain from drug use and violence." If Obama's language was less effusive than Reagan's, it was because at that point, Reagan's assertion that DARE was effective was in doubt. A 1994 meta analysis conducted by social scientists at the Research Triangle Institute, that was later published in the American Journal of Public Health, concluded that the DARE program was ineffective in preventing drug use among kids, either in the short term while they were in the program, or later in their lives. Perhaps unsurprisingly, spokespeople for DARE vigorously defended the program, and took issue with both the study's design and its findings. The National Institute of Justice, which had originally solicited the study, refused to publish the results. But as further studies continued to question the effectiveness of the program, school districts began to drop the DARE curriculum. In response, DARE revised its program, launching the science based "Keeping It Real" curriculum in 2007, which was developed by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Arizona State University. DARE still exists today. According to its website, over 1,000,000 K through 12 students in all 50 states go through the program each year, and there are currently 15 international DARE training centers, with curriculum materials available in 13 languages along with Braille. Joining me now, to help us learn more about the story of DARE is Dr. Max Felker-Kantor, Associate Professor of History at Ball State University and the author of, "Dare to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools."

Hi Max. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  10:13  
Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Kelly  10:16  
I am really excited to talk about a piece of history that I actually remember. So let's start by telling me a little bit about how you came to write this book on the history of DARE?

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  10:27  
No, it's a great question. So I came to write this book, really out of the first book I wrote, which is called, "Policing Los Angeles." I was finishing that book and finishing the archival research for that in Los Angeles. And while I was doing that, I started coming across all these references to DARE, in like archival documents from 1983, '84, '85. And I just started questioning that because I was like, "Wait, I did DARE, as a fifth grader in Salt Lake City, of all places where I grew up in the early 90s." And so it's so that kind of archival find, led me to start questioning all sorts of things about like, "Well, how did DARE get to Salt Lake City? How did expand? How come everyone seems to know about DARE? Why did it become so big?" And then I was like, as a historian of policing, of politics, of late 20th century United States, I started to then, and urban history, I tried to kind of question, "Okay, well, what was the kind of meaning of DARE? What role did it have in policing? What role did it have in shaping kind of both policing, but then schools," because as many listeners probably know, DARE relied on police officers as teachers. So this little archival find, connecting to my personal experience with the program, started raising all these questions that I wanted to answer. And so that's what led me down this road, to writing a whole history of DARE, which led me in all sorts of directions I probably hadn't really expected when I was like, "I'm gonna write about these DARE officers and how they went into schools." But obviously, the book expands well beyond that. And so that's kind of the origin story was a coming out of archives, connecting to personal experience that raised all these kind of interesting questions. But then, of course, whenever I told anyone I was writing about DARE, they were like, "I remember that." And I have all these other stories to tell, right? And so it kind of snowballed from all of that to be this this project.

Kelly  12:29  
So how did you, speaking of archives, figure out kind of what archives you wanted to look at? This is obviously a much more expansive set of archives than what you were looking at in your first book. And there's oral history pieces of this, like, how did you figure out all the things you should be looking at and limit in some ways all the things you could possibly be looking at?

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  12:49  
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the that was a huge kind of issue in a lot of ways. So as we'll probably discuss, DARE starts in Los Angeles, but then it goes nationwide and worldwide. So the kind of start of the archival search started in Los Angeles. But then it was like, doing kind of archival searches on the internet through kind of library databases, I kept finding archives everywhere with references to DARE. And so ranging from like New York State with to Wisconsin, to Georgia to Arizona are just like all over these, like school boards, or state archives have all these kind of collections on DARE. And some of them, some of them were small, some a little bit bigger. And this is like one of the kind of I guess, I happenstances of COVID, actually, was that I didn't have to travel there. And all the archivists actually were willing to get that material and have it scanned, obviously I had to pay for that. But so they actually sent me archival materials from all over the country. So I didn't. So it kind of was like this luck in some ways of not of people being willing to do that in a moment when otherwise they might have said, "No, you've got to come see this." And so, so that was one. And I kind of limited that the kind of choices of that was to what I could kind of find just from from searching kind of basic databases, because in the back of my mind, I was like, I bet I could go to every state archive across the country and find something right. If I was to dig in some sort of educational files or go to local school boards, I could probably find some reference to it or local police departments. And of course, that would have led me on an archival research task that probably would still be going if I was trying to do so that was the kind of limitations I put on that and was like, "Well, I think I can tell this story nationally, with the ways I've pieced together that archival story," and so that is kind of how that grew. And then, as I was doing this, I wanted to talk to as many people who had been involved with DARE as I as I could, because I was really interested in the ways that the people who started the program, were thinking about it. "Why use police officers? What was the purpose? How did students react? How did teachers react?" I wanted to kind of know, some of those questions from the people involved of designing the program, which involved the LAPD. And so I was lucky enough to actually get put in touch with a few people and did oral interviews with some of the kind of original members of kind of LAPD who put DARE together, the main one being Glenn Levant. And those stories, those oral histories, largely were kind of background interviews. There wasn't really a kind of consent to sort of quote from those interviews. So I didn't use those that way. But I was able to talk to some of those people involved from the kind of DARE side, so to speak. I also went to DARE headquarters in Culver City, Los Angeles, and spoke with the kind of current Executive Director and sat down and, and chatted with them. Unfortunately, they said they didn't have any historical materials in their records, which I'm not entirely sure was like, entirely true. But they, I was because I was hoping that they would have kind of a private archive that they would let me see. And that didn't end up happening. So I spoke with a lot of those people, mostly on background. And in part that was, I think, a function of the history of DARE's also one that has had a tense relationship with academics, because of the 1990s, and the controversy with social scientists from universities, who wrote these studies that said, DARE doesn't work. And they had a kind of tension there. And so I think I was trying to kind of tread that water, very kind of lightly to not to be able to talk to people, and kind of get a better sense of this program, without kind of being alienating them entirely. So that was like one path. The other path of oral interviews, is I interviewed all those social scientists that did those studies. And so and they were much more willing to kind of open up and talk about that history of why they did these evaluations, what they found, what they thought about the program, and what they their relationship with DARE when it was kind of coming out and attacking them. And so that was that was this kind of oral history piece that I hadn't really expected to be kind of talking to these academics who had done studies 30 years ago. And so I kind of pieced it together there. And then to kind of answer that kind of following question of how to limit all that, in at one point, I was like, you know, what I could probably figure out how to do like, crowdsourcing interviews through Twitter of like, everyone, and all their stories. And I just was, like, overwhelmed. I was like, I don't quite know how to manage like, the hundreds of 1000s of people, to millions of kids who went through this program, who all probably had some memory or some story, and how to grapple with that. I'm sure if I had someone with me, who was like a tech big data person, they could be like, "Oh, we could figure out a way to do that." But that's, I didn't end up going that route. But it was something that I had thought about, like, how might I incorporate a little of that, and I did that, here in there. I interviewed really two people, two or three people who I know who are academics, who are in kind of my network, but who had very distinct experiences related to specific things in the book, really. And so I interviewed them for their memories. And a couple of them, were able to actually give me documents from when they were kids. And so that was very different from just, oh, I have memories, but they had like, "Oh, I can give you this school newspaper that I wrote when I was a fifth grader about DARE," right. And so that was a really hard thing, because I wanted to talk to as many people as possible, but it could have led down this road of like, how many interviews do you do with every single person? So that's kind of the the long answer to that question of this kind of source base that I used. 

Kelly  19:02  
I wonder how many GenXers and millennials in their parents' basement have their own archive of DARE.

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  19:08  
Right. Right. Right. Yeah. And a few people that I know also, when they were like, going back to their parents' homes to help them like clean something up, would send me pictures of their DARE workbooks filled out, right? And so, and I use a couple of them anonymously as sources, just because sometimes it's like, oh, my fifth grade self really bought into that DARE message. And it's a little, you know, embarrassing now or something, you know, so I didn't necessarily use their names. But,

Kelly  19:37  
Mom, if you're listening, go see if we have my stuff. So I want to talk a little bit about this question that you started with about how it got so big. How do we start in LA with the LA Police Department and the LA school district and get to where it is everywhere. It's a ubiquitous program. I in the late 80s or early 90s went through it in Stark County, Ohio, people over the globe in various countries were going through this program. So how did it expand, so far so quickly? 

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  20:11  
Yeah, I mean, that's the kind of one of the big questions, as you mentioned. And it does that in in really three to four ways. The first being the LAPD, when they started in '83. And it was under the kind of  infamous, I guess, you could say, Chief of Police, Darryl Gates, who kind of partners with the Los Angeles Unified School District to push this initiative forward. And they were really explicit when they designed the program that they wanted to expand it, to, at the very least every elementary school in Los Angeles. So they had this. So this early vision of that was kind of exciting, we want to see this expand to begin with. And one of the early plans they had for the program actually included things like we need to hire a public relations firm, we need to kind of like, get on this to promote this program. So from the very beginning, there's this kind of sense, I think, from Gates and others, where they're envisioning the growth, and then how it grows. Right? Los Angeles much easier, right? Because they just say, "It was successful the first year. We're going to add 10 more schools, 50 more schools. Within three years, it's in every elementary school, right. And so and then what starts to happen. And this is largely one of the central arguments I make about its expansion at the start was expands through law enforcement networks. So Gates is going out, and he's writing about DARE in law enforcement magazines, and some school magazines. And so he starts to get awareness of the program. And then police departments by even '84, '85, start sending officers to Los Angeles to get trained to then go back and teach it in their kind of local communities, local schools. So there's law enforcement networks, then enable these other departments to learn about it, and then to come to LA and get trained. And then that's this initial expansion. Then the LAPD get a federal grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. And that allows them to expand the training, and then eventually, through a series of federal grants that are coming in the 80s, to create regional training centers, that then they are able to kind of expand the training apparatus all over the country so that officers don't all have to come to LA. So they're expanding this kind of training, and expanding the number of officers trained in DARE. That happens pretty quickly. This is all before 1990, that this stuff all develops. And so it expands really, really fast from there, you know, so again, apart from this infrastructure that develops around these, you know, criminal justice grants, law enforcement networks, and Gates being out there promoting the program. Connected to that, the other thing that helps promote it, and this happens even within Los Angeles, again, the public relations side of it, is Gates and LAPD start to partner with corporations to promote the program, as well as like entertainment and actors and others. And so the the one that I use in the book that's kind of a central one is that this happens the mid 1980s, they partnered with Hanna Barbera productions to bring Yogi Bear in as like the DARE spokes bear, and kind of promote it through children's programming and things like that which grows. And there's a great image in the book of Darryl Gates with Yogi Bear, which is kind of hilarious to me. So culture in that kind of popular culture realm, it's spreading and the message is spreading. And then a kind of another element is then the federal government sees this as a really great program, during the Reagan era, and then into the first Bush, White House, George HW Bush, and then even Clinton, right. They're all supporters of DARE. But what starts to happen in the 1986, anti Drug Abuse Act, they have a small provision in there for drug prevention. It's not just the kind of war on drugs punitive side, but they're saying starting to say we need to address the demand for drugs, and we need drug prevention on kids. So we're gonna fund that. And they create in that something called the Drug Free Schools and Communities Act, and that allocates portions of money for drug education. And so DARE starts to get some of that money. That act is revised, so that by 1990, and some of those amendments, DARE is  actually mentioned by name in the legislation as a model program. So you get this combination of law enforcement networks, Gates, kind of spreading his message, federal grants, corporate and kind of popular culture and entertainment promotion. And then the federal government comes in and says, we're actually going to put this in like, quite literally in legislation allocating money for DARE or other programs that rely on police officers as instructors. And the only program that really relied on police officers instructors at the time was DARE. So they get this all kind of funnels and fuels itself. So that as you said, by really the early 90s, mid 90s, when DARE's kind of at its height, it's in 75%, or more of at least public school districts across the country, right, and tons and tons of kids are going through it every year. 

Kelly  25:26  
So let's talk some about the police officers in classrooms piece of this, and you devote a portion of the book to it. Why police officers? Why police officers in uniform? How, how and why were these decisions made? And then what's the impact of doing that of having the police actually come in and be the ones teaching the students?

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  25:47  
Yeah, no, I mean, that's a great question. And it's kind of the kind of second chapter largely of the book, but it's also what I was really thinking a lot about. And so what the decision to use police officers, of course, as Darryl Gates and LAPD, when they envisioned this program at the start, they're coming from a law enforcement side. And actually, originally, they're like, we've been trying to arrest all these drug dealers. And that's it hasn't worked. So we need an alternative. And we need drug prevention. But the police still need to play a role. And we think, and they say this in some ways. And there's these kind of quotes that I use in the book where it's like, really thought this but they say like, "Even kids as young as fifth graders are so savvy about drugs in 1983, '84, '85, that their classroom teachers are so incapable of having any legitimacy, right?" That they're like the ones who really need to be who have the authority, are these police officers who have the experience of being on the streets with all these negative consequences of drug use, and they talk all the time about that, like street and veteran police experience is valuable, because it allows the police to have this kind of legitimacy and authority in the minds of these kids who supposedly know so much about drugs that they're like, you know, it's and so that's the argument they make. And they say that the police officers need to be in uniform, right? Because it carries that authority. Right? And it's about so it's about that. The purpose, really right, then that's connected to that, that I make the argument about is that what they're trying to also do is turn the police into teachers, and to not be this kind of macho image in the classroom, but to have this kind of sense of, we're not here to arrest you, we're here to be your friend, mentor, and a trusted kind of confidant. So they're trying to use the DARE officer to then change the image of police in the minds of kids. Right. And in some cases, probably to counter the kind of, you know, image that many kids would have, especially in communities of color and elsewhere of the police as abusive, and all that because DARE, it's, it's not a coincidence, really, that DARE starts just at the same time that the LAPD is ramping up and police departments across the country are engaged in these kinds of really punitive, aggressive wars on drugs. And so those are some of the the pieces of why these police officers and the consequences as it rolls out, you know, in the police officers, they also stay on school campuses. So they're there for recess, that they're doing all these other extracurricular activities, right. It normalizes the police on school in schools, right, and on a daily basis. And then, you know, the long term effects in the kind of ways that we're kind of unintended, of course, maybe not, but they they, DARE would never admit this, is that then kids, we start to hear stories of kids turning in their parents, to police officers, who are their DARE officers for using because their parents had drugs. And that leads, of course, to parents getting arrested, and all of this. And a lot of those stories are kind of anecdotal in a lot of ways. But, you know, given the millions of kids who went through DARE, we don't really have a statistic of how often that happened. But we do have a fair amount of evidence that this happened on a fairly regular kind of often basis, that we have stories of it, you know, from the late 80s into the 90s, even into the 2000s of kids taking that message and rolling with it, so to speak.

Kelly  29:28  
So talk a little bit about the the financial aspects of DARE. So you mentioned that there's these corporate partnerships, but there's also legislation that involves some of DARE's grant funding. Could you talk a little bit about not just how it's actually funded, but how they're trying to portray themselves as being funded and why that's important in this particular time period, especially late 80s, early 90s and the way people are thinking about big government and all of that?

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  29:59  
Yeah, I love that. I mean, that's really an important kind of piece of this, that I really hadn't expected to go down. It's one of these places where I was like, "Wait, I've got, so I've got to track all this money and how it's working, because what ends up happening is DARE starts now. But then it forms a nonprofit corporation called DARE America. And that's this kind of national corporation. It's based in LA, but it's kind of overseeing DARE nationally. And so initially, these kind of small program, it starts and DARE America, as a nonprofit, is working on fundraising. And so they're like, we're getting these donations, you know, from these local corporations. And I list all sorts of ones in the book, like KFC is one of the first kind of national corporate sponsors, and they hold these events. And it's like this kind of 1980s message of corporate social responsibility, right, that like, look at the corporations are doing something good, right and giving back in this moment, right. And that's important, because in this moment, that in this kind of Reagan era moment with this kind of attack on government funding, DARE can portray itself as like, "Look, we're not relying on all this government, public funding. We're privately funded, we get fundraising. It's this kind of public private partnership. We do get some government funding through grants. But it's this way that we're, we're not a burden on taxpayers. We are getting all this other money," right. And so, and related to that they portray DARE then as cheap, right. And so what they start to say is like, "Oh, it only cost $12 a kid. The workbooks are cheap, we help fund it, we fundraise we sell, you know, all the paraphernalia." we get from not just like the T shirts, and all that sort of stuff. But they're the, you know, they're selling like, like Matchbox cars, and like, you know, bumper stickers, and all this sort of stuff, backpacks, and all these things that are on these, on the back of the the bumper sticker thing, like I think, are on the back of one of these kinds of cards that I found once. It's like all the things they were trying to sell. And if you actually look at the nonprofit tax returns from the late 90s, early 2000s, where you can get them, you can see them listing out like here's how much money we're getting from merchandising. And so they portray it as cheap. They portray it as not government funded because what starts to happen is as people become critical of it, they're like, "All this government money is going to DARE," and DARE America comes back and says, "No, no, no, we're not publicly funded, in the way you think, even though we're getting yes, lots of grant money to do these trainings to support the program." So they are getting government funding, but they use the private side of it to kind of push back at that critique, right. And so it's this public private partnership piece. And then the thing that I find, and that I make an argument about in the book, and it's, I think it's kind of a sleight of hand by DARE, at this time, is that all the tax returns show that it's the local police departments that are donating their officers' time, into the realm of like, hundreds of millions of dollars, right. So all these local, it's actually publicly funded by these local communities, who are donating all the officers' time and resources, but it doesn't come off as DARE being directly funded, because it's these donated services. So when you actually, if you factor that in, it's like, Oh, it's this huge public program with this little corporate stuff on the side, which totally flips it around, because then it's like, oh, yeah, like why are we fund why? Why is all this money, public money, taxpayers, you know, all this other going into it in a time when people are being critical of all that, especially when people start to find out that DARE doesn't work right to prevent drug use? 

Kelly  33:46  
Let's talk about that then. What what is it that in the 90s, as social scientists really started to look at this? What were they finding about the effectiveness or non- effectiveness of this program?

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  33:58  
Yeah, I mean, so I'll back up just a little bit there. Because what the studies of DARE begin by a firm hired by the LAPD itself, because they like, as part of the program, when they develop it, recognize they're going to need to evaluate it, to see if it works. And this early initiative that and they come out to this Evaluation and Training Institute, it's called ETI. They come out and they start to say, "Oh, DARE's, great, it works. You know, all these kids they have, when they go through the before the program, they have maybe negative or, you know, they have more positive attitude towards drugs. Now, they have a negative attitude afterwards, and they do all these kinds of studies." And, but those aren't entirely independent, right? Because they're hired by the LAPD. They're part of these grant proposals. They're kind of all interconnected. So initially, everyone's like, this is great. Everyone on this program works. But then independent researchers start to evaluate the program in the late 80s, early 90s, and what they essentially start to find, and some of them start doing more longitudinal studies where they track try to track kids over time, a little bit more, and they start to find, well, it doesn't really, from a statistical point of view, prevent drug use over time, right? Maybe in the, for the first year, when kids probably weren't really doing that many drugs, in fifth, and in sixth grade to begin with, right? But then they're like, so. But by the time kids get three, four or five years down the road, it's like, totally worn off, it doesn't work. Right? That you know, and so there's different, and there's different arguments about that is it like, "Oh, we need a booster program so that it can come later. Is it just a DARE fundamentally does not work?" Right. And so, but these studies start to say, effectively, this program is, is ineffective. And this is in the early 90s. And the biggest one that comes out comes out of North Carolina and the Research Triangle. And it's this meta analysis. So it's a it's not an analysis of new data, but of all these other studies. They take all the studies and they look at all their their findings and kind of analyze it all together. And that is this major turning point that comes in '92. And then into '93, where they're like, this does not work at all, and DARE America, they get in this huge controversy and fight publicly, like in national newspapers and stuff over, over these findings. And so it's that kind of piece that then really starts to change how DARE is perceived across the 90s, as all of these evaluations start to come out, and then the big one that then raises a huge kind of stir of a little bit later is in '95, into '96. That comes out, and it says, the finding that comes out University of Illinois, Chicago, I believe, and it says, "White, suburban teenagers or like white suburban kids do more drugs after DARE than they did before." And that is really this, you know, problematic thing for a lot of people. And so because of all the race and class and all those dimensions, right? And so it's all these kinds of then that really raises all these controversies about how, and it's what linguists call this antagonism between DARE America and the research community, because DARE America is coming back and saying things like, "Oh, well, you're you're evaluating an older version of the program, or you need to, we've already we've already revised the program. So it's doing something different now." Right. And so there's this kind of back and forth, that eventually comes to this comes to a head and DARE kind of loses out because the federal government says, "We're not going to fund programs if they're not scientifically proven effective." And when that comes out in the in '97, '98, DARE is not on the list. And so they really have to then change.

Kelly  37:56  
So let's talk a little bit about memory. I posted on Facebook that I was going to do an episode about DARE and everybody's responses, were just super snarky. And you know, I think that's a fairly common attitude. But you talk in the book about how people's experiences when they were actually in the program were largely positive. Can you talk a little bit about that? Do you see the same thing, that people's memories are colored by sort of what has happened in between? 

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  38:25  
Yeah, and I don't mean, when I write about that in the book, I don't mean to kind of question anyone's personal like individual's memory, obviously. But because that was one of the things like when I've been doing it, as you mentioned, like, same same thing, I get everyone every time I mentioned it, or something comes up. It's the it's snarky. It's a joke. It's, you know, a parody. And I do make a point in the book that those things are actually all important forms of critique, I think. And so I was looking for those things in like, archival documents, or reports or newspaper reporting from the 80s and 90s. And, you know, by and large, I found very little of that. Because, like, and I largely think that's probably because fifth graders are probably pretty young, you know, to be like, I find this a joke. I mean, so it's not and some people do say, oh, yeah, I remember. This was a joke from the get go. And I'm like, Okay, well, you know, great, and that's where the one person that I am one of the people I interviewed. One reason why I believe him is because he gave me a school newspaper in which he took a negative position on DARE as a fifth grader, where I'm like, "Okay, let's, we've got some like, archival backup of these memories." But so largely, I find that like, and then there is evidence, though, and I do say this in the book, but some of the studies do then talk to high schoolers, and the high schoolers in the 90s are like, oh, yeah, like that didn't work. So that gives me a little bit more sense of like, there was some critique at the time. But there wasn't like widespread students, you know, in fifth grade coming out saying we hate this program. And, you know, newspapers.com was a great friend of mine. And I did searches from newspapers across the country, and could just find very little of that. And so that was surprising. However, I think so people's memories, I think, because DARE still it's so culturally relevant, I think, and for many people and their memories of it, we kind of have this memory of it, of it now being a joke, because we look back and they're like, "Oh, yeah, we made fun of those DARE officers. We joked behind their backs, and all that sort of stuff." And, and I think that's all probably perfectly true. But the archival record is really hard to find that because also, a lot of fifth graders weren't leaving their writings about that. So that was a kind of teasing out of like, how do we think about that memory? How do we see it as a kind of continued critique of the program? Even if it we can't entirely say that that was like, what was present everywhere, like, what was really present in terms of the critique was that social science critique rooted in that evidence, but not in like, you didn't have kids rising up and saying, "We don't want this program anymore," right. And so, so there, so there's that kind of so so teasing out that kind of relationship of memory to archive was, was a piece of it, and which is why I kind of kind of write about that, I think in the introduction or elsewhere in the book as well, part of that blog. 

Kelly  41:32  
There's many, many other things we could talk about, including Johnny Depp, ironically, telling people not to do drugs, but we're not going to get to all of it. So how can listeners get a copy of the book? 

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  41:42  
Oh, I think you can order it pretty much anywhere books are sold. It should be out now. And this podcast is running. So I think it's available pretty much anywhere UNC Press website, or, you know any other online bookseller. 

Kelly  41:56  
Excellent. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talked about? 

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  42:00  
The one you know, the one thing that I always kind of think also about is just like what is thinking about it's kind of DARE's connection also to the larger kind of cultural politics that I talked about in the book of family values of kind of using racialized imagery, and racialized kind of language, connecting to the war on drugs and even kind of connections to critiques of rap and hip hop at the time and how it kind of gets folded into to DARE as this kind of wholesome program, that part of those culture wars is also a kind of key piece. And a road, again, one of those roads that I was like, I'm gonna write about police. And it was like, "Wait, I've got to do all this culture war stuff that I wasn't really expecting." So that's another piece of the book if you if listeners want to go read more about that. 

Kelly  42:47  
Yeah, I was, of course, I lived through the 90s but wasn't paying as much attention to politics back then. And, and looking at even during the Clinton administration, how far what we would call right now, the administration was on a lot of these kinds of issues was really kind of eye opening and shocking. Well, Max thank you so much. It was a really fun to it's not all a fun subject, of course, but really sort of fun trip down memory lane to read your book, and I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Dr. Max Felker-Kantor  43:17  
Great. Well, thank you for having me.

Teddy  43:57  
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