I was able to find this paper from 2009. It's a meta-analysis of about 20 studies. I didn't have time to do too thorough of a dive into it, but it looks like it showed that, across studies, the effectiveness of DARE is inconsistent. Where it does show positive outcomes (e.g., lower rates of drug use), the effect tends to be rather small.
DARE was extremely popular in the past but seems to have fallen out of favour. In 2001, the US Surgeon General put it in the "ineffective primary prevention programs" category.
Wikipedia has a pretty decent overview of the history of the program and some key studies that were undertaken on its effectiveness.
A revised version of the program has recently been evaluated in the UK (you can find a link to the study here). In the short term, this revised version seems to increase knowledge about drugs and result in a few other positive outcomes, but there is currently no data on medium- and long-term outcomes (e.g., reduced risk of drug and alcohol use in adolescence and adulthood).
I believe DARE has been replaced by "OPP KIDS" in most areas; KIDS standing for "Knowledge, Issues, Decisions, Support". I'm not sure what evidence has been generated on either.
Hi Cameron,
I was able to find this paper from 2009. It's a meta-analysis of about 20 studies. I didn't have time to do too thorough of a dive into it, but it looks like it showed that, across studies, the effectiveness of DARE is inconsistent. Where it does show positive outcomes (e.g., lower rates of drug use), the effect tends to be rather small.
DARE was extremely popular in the past but seems to have fallen out of favour. In 2001, the US Surgeon General put it in the "ineffective primary prevention programs" category.
Wikipedia has a pretty decent overview of the history of the program and some key studies that were undertaken on its effectiveness.
Hope this is useful,
Jeff
A revised version of the program has recently been evaluated in the UK (you can find a link to the study here). In the short term, this revised version seems to increase knowledge about drugs and result in a few other positive outcomes, but there is currently no data on medium- and long-term outcomes (e.g., reduced risk of drug and alcohol use in adolescence and adulthood).
I believe DARE has been replaced by "OPP KIDS" in most areas; KIDS standing for "Knowledge, Issues, Decisions, Support". I'm not sure what evidence has been generated on either.
Brief synopses with some links are here:
https://www.scientificamerican...gram-this-one-works/
And from The Effectiveness Bank, based in the UK:
https://findings.org.uk/PHP/dl...mp;s=eb&sf=sfnos
D