DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools

by Max Felker-Kantor

Overview

With its signature “DARE to keep kids off drugs” slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing.

Max Felker-Kantor has assembled the first history of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 as a joint venture between the police department and the unified school district. By the mid-90s, it was taught in 75 percent of school districts across the United States. DARE received near-universal praise from parents, educators, police officers, and politicians and left an indelible stamp on many millennial memories. But the program had more nefarious ends, and Felker-Kantor complicates simplistic narratives of the War on Drugs. He shows how policing entered US schools and framed drug use as the result of personal responsibility, moral failure, and poor behavior deserving of punishment rather than something deeply rooted in state retrenchment, the abandonment of social service provisions, and structures of social and economic inequality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469679044
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	04/02/2024
Series:	Justice, Power, and Politics
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Max Felker-Kantor is associate professor of history at Ball State University.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Max Felker-Kantor’s illuminating and highly original study demonstrates how the DARE program mirrored the LAPD’s racialized practices and how the 'soft' war on drugs undergirded the expansion of the carceral state. DARE to Say No will forever change the way we think about the war on drugs.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“For decades, DARE has toggled between the 'solution' to the drug crisis and a generational joke. Max Felker-Kantor does something entirely new: he takes the program seriously, revealing how seemingly nonpunitive institutions like schools have become extensions of the country’s carceral state.”—Emily Dufton, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America

“Masterful—DARE to Say No pierces through usual debates about the drug war with an original and damning framing. Many people have cultural impressions and memories of DARE, and Felker-Kantor’s book illustrates that the program’s significance is far wider and more complex than we imagined.”—Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, author of Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America

“No such historical account exists of the most widespread and well-funded antidrug program in American history. Max Felker-Kantor’s carefully studied policy history on the underlying agenda of the DARE program will be readily welcomed by a range of scholars.”—David Farber, author of Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed

“As the demand for increased police presence in schools continues, Felker-Kantor’s timely analysis of the history of police-based antidrug programs shows clearly that these interventions don’t work. DARE to Say NO is a necessary read for anyone who thinks we can police our way out of this problem.”—Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing

Editorial Reviews

2024-01-17
Intriguing social chronicle of the DARE anti-drug education program.

Felker-Kantor builds on prior work on policing with an account of the stealthy rise and fall of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 under aggressive chief Daryl Gates. While often ridiculed, the once-ubiquitous DARE programs, which featured officers in uniform as “teachers,” normalized the presence of police in everyday life. “DARE attempted to give the police a human face,” writes the author, “while simultaneously expanding the scorched-earth policing” of the drug war. Felker-Kantor takes an evenhanded approach, showing how DARE benefited many parties, attracting support from educators, politicians, and donors, as well as police officers who emphasized their bonding experiences with schoolchildren. Early on, few noticed how it concealed the racialized mechanics of “zero tolerance” prohibition and normalized the unnecessary presence of police in schools. In the 1980s, DARE expanded in line with the Reagan era’s conservatism, which “placed the family, personal responsibility, and morality at the crux of the drug war.” The author documents how DARE accrued political power as it was franchised nationwide, becoming a nonprofit in 1987, while gaining corporate sponsors and a merchandising arm. “By the mid-1990s, DARE had become a cultural icon of its own,” writes the author, while ignoring the structural roots of drug abuse and how middle-class suburban students’ experience with the program diverged from that of students from marginalized communities. Yet pushback accrued by the late 1990s, due to both parental backlash and studies suggesting the program did not influence behavior. “The continued attention DARE received, whether praise or mocking, demonstrated the deep impact the program had on American society, politics, and culture,” writes the author. While his central points can be repetitive, his straightforward account of DARE’s insidiously authoritarian growth is insightful and instructive.

An approachable consideration of an unexamined aspect of the failed war on drugs.

Kirkus Reviews

“Intriguing social chronicle of the DARE anti-drug education program . . . . An approachable consideration of an unexamined aspect of the failed war on drugs . . . . evenhanded.”—Kirkus Reviews

"A comprehensive history of a program whose glory days may be behind it but that left an indelible mark on America—and not just as a target of mockery.”—Reason Magazine

From the Publisher