In the fall of 1983, the LAPD, under Chief of Police Darryl Gates and in collaboration with the LA Unified School District, launched Project DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), sending 10 police officers into 50 elementary schools to teach kids how to say no to drugs. By the time DARE celebrated its 10-year anniversary, there were DARE officers in all 50 states, teaching 4.5 million students. The program was praised by presidents and supported by major corporate sponsors, but in the 1990s social scientists started to question its effectiveness, eventually leading to a precipitous decline in the numbers of school districts participating in the program.
Joining me in this episode is Dr. Max Felker-Kantor, Associate Professor of History at Ball State University and author of Dare to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools.
Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Back to the 80s”
by Roman Oriekhov from Pixabay; it is available via the Pixabay Content License. The episode image is “Children from Sterling Heights Elementary school recite the pledge of allegiance at the Drugs Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) graduation on Kadena Air Base (AB), Okinawa, Japan,” taken on February 28, 2003; the image is released to the public and is available via the National Archives (NAID: 6642856).
Additional Sources:
The Reconstruction Era & its Aftermath
The Southern Plantation System
Slavery & Incarceration in New Orleans
The Jazz Maestros of Jim Crow America
Negro League Baseball
Log Cabin Republicans and the Gay Right
American Posture Panic
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
Eleanor Roosevelt's Visit to the Pacific Theatre during World War II
Eliza Scidmore
Foreign Missionaries & American Diplomacy in the 19th Century
Tammany Hall, FDR & the Murder of Vivian Gordon
The Combahee River Raid of 1863
The History of Ice in the United States
The History of Blue Jeans
The History of Pinball
The History of US Foreign Disaster Relief
LSD, the CIA & the History of Psychedelic Science
Clotilda: The Last U.S. Slave Ship
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