DARE to Say No: Police and the Cultural Politics of Prevention in the War on Drugs

In the fall of 1983, Los Angeles Police Department sent police officers into elementary schools to teach Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) Program. Within a decade DARE had become nation's preeminent antidrug education program. Yet program accomplished much more than teaching kids resist drugs. shifted responsibility preventing drug use from social and public-health policy local, police-led, educative projects that taught personal responsibility, value morally strengthened families, respect for authority police. By stressing consequences poor behavior demanding law order, attempted cultivate popular consent policies divorced economic conditions. DARE's approach helped justify reductions in welfare spending expansion policing incarceration during 1980s 1990s.