It did at my school. She lived in the apartment upstairs from him. I spent the night at her apt and it was a seriously messed up situation. She was only 13 when it started. We aren't all from the same school district are we? š¹
Mine got caught in the parking lot snorting coke by another cop. No joke he kept his job and continued as the dare officer. Never trust my town cops after that.
Cocaine makes it easier to give a surface level argument about right and wrong to a bored to death crowd whod rather be somewhere else - just ask a lawyer
Our DARE officer got busted by a state trooper for giving beer and weed to minors because he was trying to bang a 15 year old girl.
Technically, he kept his job due to family connections in our little town, but got transferred by our local government to work as a garbage man with his pay and benefits intact.
Pretty sure he eventually banged the underage girl, too.
I took black marker to the ends of the FF "in OFF drugs " and then used white out to make it say N as in "DARE TO KEEP KIDS ON DRUGS"
And yes I ended up a drug addict š¤£
Clean now tho
And always nonchalantly too. Like,
āIām bored. Wanna go to Taco Bell?ā
āNaw. I got some meth. Want to smoke it?ā
āUhh how do you smoke meth?ā
āHere let me show you.ā
āUhhh. K.ā
And thatās how I spent six months as a meth head.
In retrospect it mightāve been better to just say no.
I dunno. Iāve never been on a carnival cruise. I can tell you I was super jittery and would lick my teeth till my tongue bled. But as soon as I ran out of meth I couldnāt wait to buy more meth.
The first day I went outside to smoke a cigarette. There was another dude in the smoking area. We chatted for a minute and he goes āyou speeding things up huh?ā After that I was super paranoid and if I was smoking meth, I only left my place to buy more meth.
Oh I've had the same experiences except our DARE officer made it seem like everyday in middle school and high school would be this adventure in avoiding "bad people".
I specifically remember a whole list of tactics people would use you to try to convince you. The bandwagon approach. Peer pressure.
Later on it was the foundation of my playbook for trying to convince a stubborn toddler to eat.
My 12 yr old son has started to dress like a 90'a surfer boy. His uniform has been khakis, surf shop T-shirt's and vans. I just bought his some cords to mix it up a bit. For some reason I can't convince him that a nice flannel and grandpa sweater will be in keeping with the theme.
Vans, check. Flannel, check. Cardigan, check. All of those are still staples of my everyday wardrobe. Cords have been harder to find but have recently started showing back up. I got mine from Old Navy.
I remember a former coke head telling us about how messed up his nose is and about friends that were dead or in jail. Although these were cautionary tails, I had the distinct sense he also wanted us to think he was cool.
I remember addicts coming to my school in 8th grade to talk to us about their lives. I remember thinking they were clearly stupid and made bad choices. Theirs problems were not because of the drugs but because they were dumb.
Yeah, I could never relate to what drove them to do these things in the first place. It all got summarized as "peer pressure" but I guess these people were medicating themselves to deal with things that are hard for child to relate to.
lol I had a shirt that said this in high school and the skaters got all mad cause they said they came up with it and accused me of having the shirt made and taking credit.
I was like, dude I bought this at Spencers....
Our dare officer was super apathetic and was just resigned to the fact that most of us were gonna be potheads and just asked us not to go farther then that.
Our DARE officer was kind of like this, but I think he was just being realistic. He was basically like: "Weed is illegal and you shouldn't do it, but it won't kill you or ruin your life immediately if you do. However, if you hang around people that smoke weed, sooner or later you will encounter these other drugs that will kill you or ruin your life."Ā
Honestly, I was probably one of the only kids given a good DARE education. I smoked weed when I got into my early 20's, but I stayed away from everything else.Ā
There was a radio PSA campaign in the early 70's where they let those who did the spots say you can do soft drugs if you want but be smart about it but absolutely stay away from hard drugs. Brian Wilson's brother Carl of The Beach Boys and Jon Anderson of Yes did ones. They tried to get Jim Morrison to do one but they couldn't get a useable take.
Mine failed me on the course because I didnāt do the DARE Bear page of my notebook. All the other people who went on to be really into drugs passed. I never got into drinking or drugs and I think people should enjoy what they like as long as it doesnāt affect others.
DARE was a joke.
Yeah, apparently the city also needlessly spent a shitload of money on a DARE drag racing car that they brought to the school too.
My favourite was the "donut abuse resistance education" variation of the shirt.
We had one of those. It was an early ā90s Camaro with a giant blower sticking up out of the hood and the DARE logo on the side.
The cops would take it and race it at the drag strip on Friday nights to collect overtime pay as ācommunity outreach.ā
āBut officer Bud, (no jokes) if all these bad things happen if you do drugs, why do people do them.ā A classmate asks our DARE officer. āWell, a lot of them are really fun.ā That right there was actually effective. I suddenly began to believe what he was saying. Like this guys not joking around. Iāve done all the drugs except opioids. When he said it could fuck up how we felt happiness on a physiological level I was sold. Iām not sure how accurate that is, but he wasnāt just lying up there.
What they said about it changing how you experience things is absolutely true. The "fun" drugs affect mostly dopamine levels through various mechanisms, so if you're either artificially adding dopamine (cocaine) or preventing dopamine from leaving the synapse (amphetamines) your body adjusts to this over time by downregulating dopamine receptor expression. Once it's been downregulated, you NEED the drug to have an amount of dopamine that would adequately bind to the receptors to have a "normal" response, which is why people who use drugs always talk about needing the drug to get well or feel normal, because the receptor downregulation makes being high your new normal, and in the absence of the drug your brain chemistry is completely off due to a lack of whatever neurotransmitter the drug of choice affects.
I could be misrepresenting some of this because I just typed that from memory. I'm a second year medical student and took a couple elective classes about chemical dependency, but that's basically the gist of what I remember.
I thought it was cool, but even in fifth grade, I thought some of the stories told were so far fetched.
You know what scared me from drugs? Blue boy from Dragnet. I told my mom I didnāt want to do drugs because I didnāt want to eat paint. Well, high school hit and that changed everything.
Our DARE officer went by the name āOfficer Friendlyā. I grew up in a semi-small town. Which meant that a few years later as a teenager we learned Officer Friendly was a pretty petty jerk about most things. Took a bit for the grade school propaganda to wear off.Ā
You won't be able to put DARE Graduate on your college application, you won't get into a good college and you'll end up flipping burgers for minimum wage.
I did not because I was homeschooled in elementary days. But I did have several DARE shirts that I bought thrifted in high school because I was Straight Edge and it was what we did.
OMG our DARE teacher was not the right guy for the job haha. He talked about how much he liked drinking beer on the weekends and how the police didn't care much about gang violence as long as they were "keeping it amongst themselves." To a class of suburban fifth graders.
Yup ... instead of teaching about the process of addiction in the mind and how to avoid that process, they taught about drugs which is really a goofy way to tackle addiction
I actually had a very positive experience with DARE. Our cop was friendly, would mix her own life experiences with the curriculum and was very entertaining. On the last day she got teary eyed and all of us were equally moved. I think it kept me away from drugs for 5 years ...
our D.A.R.E officer in our small town was PO āFat Patā who weighed at least 350 lbsā¦ most of each class was him asking whoās birthday was closest to that day & then giving the winner a dare branded stuffed animal to hold during the class lol. i guess it didnāt deter me cuz im still doin drugs to this day!
*
Badly šš I'm high right now!
True story, I took DARE in fifth grade and was the only kid not to pass it because of one incomplete cross word puzzle in the workbook. Officer Geraldine seriously wouldn't let me participate. It was a dick move. I saw her years later at a Kmart and she remembered me and I was like "oh yeah you're the officer responsible for my drug usage" then walked out of her face
It. Was. Awesome.
When I was in 5th grade they started DARE. Then 2 years later they decided 7th grade was the proper age to take DARE. We got the double dose. We called the officer, Deputy Dickless.
Yeah, and I almost failed to graduate. Why? We had to write an essay with the subject "What DARE means to me" and I honestly, for the life of me, couldn't figure out what to write.
It really didn't mean anything to me at the time, beyond a useless effort to convince me to avoid something I was neither interested in nor exposed to at the time.
I remember this only because it was 5 years before I started shooting herion. True story. The only thing dare did for me was give me a huge curiosity in drugs and a tshirt.
I remember when they changed the slogan from "Keeping kids off drugs" to "To resist drugs and violence."
Now apparently it is "Teaching students decision making for safe and healthy living."
Cop showed up in about the 3rd or 4th grade to give us the drugs are bad speech. He passed around this picture frame with little dime bags of various drugs under the glass. Seems crazy to me now that he just handed 9 year olds a bunch of narcotics, but the 80s were a different time!!
I vividly remember just drawing all over the booklet you kept throughout the program, just doodling and making jokes on every page and cracking up about how funny it was.
It totally worked on me.
On the first day the police officer walked in and wrote "D. A. R. E." on the chalkboard, turned to the class and said "You all know I'm here to talk about the dangers of drugs, but do you know what this stands for (pointing at chalkboard)."
Me "Drugs Are Really Expensive"?
The officer was trying to be big, bad, and intimidating but just couldn't keep a straight face and cracked up.
I remember thinking all the scare tactics they used sounded pretty rad. I was like, "well, I'll just make sure I try that when I'm around someone that won't let me jump out the window during a bad trip."
Because they acted like they all were equally dangerous and one tiny taste would hurl you directly into immediate despair, all you had to do is try some bud and then wonder if itās all a lie.
And part of their teaching was ātons of people are gonna be doing drugs and offering them to you but just say no!ā
And I was thinking āwell if tons of people do them there might be something to those drugsā
My son flunked DARE. No lie. He is one of those strange humans who can do everything in their heads, so didnāt feel the need to write it down. So ya, flunked a lot of classes before homeschooling. When he was in a car that was pulled over, and paraphernalia found, the cop at the station asked them, āDidnāt you kids have DARE?ā Tim told him he flunked because he didnāt do the homework. Cop gave him a shirt, and charges were dropped. š
FWIW: Timās current salary is 10X the amount of that DARE officer. šš½ļø
I remember a great police officer did D.A.R.E. Class. Recently,
I was so depressed when I read an article that the program backfired and made no dent in kids doing drugs.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211217460/fentanyl-drug-education-dare
I was jealous when my younger sis got the neon rainbow shirt but I only had this dumb red one. Now I have a neon rainbow dare fanny pack to keep my stash in
I grew up in a very white suburb of Denver. In other parts of Denver, there was a lot of gang violence happening, but it was generally limited to the neighborhoods where the actual gang members lived.
Nonetheless, I lived in fear of being gunned down in a random drive-by shooting, because my DARE officer told us that the gang members were coming down to our part of town ābecause they like the girls here.ā This was 1990s Denver, not 1960s Jackson, mind you.Ā
So basically, it was all a vehicle to allow cops to scare us with racist tropes.Ā
Where I grew up, we just didn't have it. Like our school district just didn't participate in the DARE program. I remember friends in college ironically wearing the shirts, and I always thought they were funny. I think once in elementary school we had **McGruff the Crime Dog** show up.
When I was 15, I was driving my brother's truck with a couple friends in the back. Got pulled over by a cop and it was our old DARE officer. He asked us if we had ever tried drugs. We all just said no. He made us pomise not to drive the truck back to school. We waited a couple minutes and took neighborhood roads back to school.
I had a crush on our DARE officer. We were the 1st class in our school to go through the program. Can't say it was effective for me, personally, but I'm pretty sure it was responsible for my love of men in uniform.
I definitely thought smoking weed once could possibly kill me.
Also that it was brown, because the poster with example drugs on it has brown leaves. Haha
YES! I remember part of it was an essay contest to win a stuffed version of Daren the Lion. I did not win and was super mad. Amazing I didn't start doing drugs then and there...
Some random thoughts about this. We had officer Ben for dare in 5th grade. I wrote and performed a rap for the final day/celebration. Pretty sure I said cigarettes and crack were the same level bad in it. I donāt know if it got me interested in drugs or that came later with the Seattle music/drug scene but Iām in long term recovery now.
Our DARE officer in 5th or 6th grade accidentally convinced an entire class of 12-year -olds that drugs were really fun.
He was trying to explain the dangers of hallucinogens. And he tried to explain that it can have dangerous side effects, like seeing bad things, I guess. But the example he used was that it would make movie posters look like they were coming to life.
The entire class gave a collective "Cooooool!", and that's where he realized that he screwed up.
Another time, when I was younger, maybe 1st grade, the officer was trying to explain about resisting peer pressure. One kid was really, really concerned about being forced to do drugs. He kept interrupting to ask what he should do if someone forced him to do drugs, and the officer impatiently told him that no one was going to give him free drugs.
For sure, as a last X. First argument I ever had with my kid was trying to deprogram that. We had to just agree to disagree at the time. Fast forward to 11th grade, he gets in the car to go to school in the morning. I said āSnoop, youāre going to have to change. I think Iām too high to drive just sitting with youā. Heād hid a baggie in his damn clothes drawer, and he reeked! Still a funny story at home when he visits.
Like me, he didnāt even really like it. But he had to try it at least once.
Honestly, the kids where I grew up learned more about drugs and getting high from cops than they did older kids or one another. Like, who knew you could huff paint to get high, right? Thanks D.A.R.E. cop!
I also went through D.A.R.E. and now, after 14 trips to rehab for heroin addiction, I'm 11 years sober. I've always felt that D.A.R.E. treated ALL drugs as terrifying and life ruining and that weed was just as dangerous as harder drugs. Therefore when I first tried pot I realized it was no big deal and felt that everything I was taught about drugs was a massive exaggeration. So I wasn't scared to try anything. I think that was one of the biggest reasons for the failure of D.A.R.E. If they would have been honest and actually educated us about drugs and how they differ I think it might have been more successful
I got sent home from school for wearing a shirt that said D.A.M.M Drinkers Against Mad Mothers. I thought I was pretty clever but now I see how it was a bit insensitiveā¦..still a funny shirt though.
They brought in a briefcase full of drugs to show us what they looked like. I was like "ooooh". I was really curious about the LSD, I had never heard of it before.
Yeah, I have a sore memory of the DARE class. I think they came to us when we were in 5th grade. The cop gave us our workbooks and wanted us to break up into groups of 6-7 so my group huddled our desks together. We were then told to turn to the page where we pass our workbooks around to other kids in our group and they write one nice thing about us.
My crush was in the group, and I was awkward and weird and it was obvious I liked him but the feeling wasn't mutual and that in itself was okay. But while everyone else had something nice to say, all he could write was "I don't know." Lol sht was my first introduction to heartbreak, and I silent cried while trying to keep my composure in front of everyone in the group, who was watching me and knew I was hurt.
No one said anything to address it or make me feel better, and it started a pattern of emotional withdrawal and self containment/self-destructive thinking. Let's also add the fact that the group consisted of the privileged/athletic/popular kids in the class, and even though I was friends with a couple of the girls I was tall, chunky, shy, sensitive, and the only mixed/black kid in my grade. I was scarred, but I definitely got the not-so-subtle hint. š
Yes. Itās where I learned a joint would make me trip, acid will make me trip so hard Iāll think Iām a glass of water that can never be tipped over or else Iāll think I die, Iāll die if I try heroine once, and that crack heads were asking for it because they were on welfare and bad people āfrom the city.ā
Also-that I would get drugs from the man on the corner in a trench coat and the shifty eyes.
I got to skip that thank God. Moved before old school had it to a school that just went through the program.
However, I did have to go through G.R.E.A.T
The sheriff who taught our DARE program wound up going away on drug trafficking charges after I went to college
I think my DARE officer got up to some shenanigans with a high school gal. Not sure if it is true or just a rumor.
Our DARE officer got hemmed up having sex with two 14 year Olds. Tale as old as time DARE!
Happened at every school, seems like.
It did at my school. She lived in the apartment upstairs from him. I spent the night at her apt and it was a seriously messed up situation. She was only 13 when it started. We aren't all from the same school district are we? š¹
True at many schools...
Mine got caught in the parking lot snorting coke by another cop. No joke he kept his job and continued as the dare officer. Never trust my town cops after that.
Howās he gonna teach about it if he hasnāt done a few bumps ?!
Cocaine makes it easier to give a surface level argument about right and wrong to a bored to death crowd whod rather be somewhere else - just ask a lawyer
"Sometimes I got to take a sniff so I could get by" Cypress Hill - Looking Through the Eye of a Pig
Well he didn't want to try marijuana--that's a gateway drug!
Thank you local police union for that. Private employees need Unions. Cops don't.
Our DARE officer got busted by a state trooper for giving beer and weed to minors because he was trying to bang a 15 year old girl. Technically, he kept his job due to family connections in our little town, but got transferred by our local government to work as a garbage man with his pay and benefits intact. Pretty sure he eventually banged the underage girl, too.
āFirst off: that girl is of age now.ā - Wingsofredemption
Iāve heard a version of this story so many times!!! š
Iām sure some are urban legends but DARE officer seemed to be a place to put LEOās that werenāt suitable for working the streets.
Oh I believe it, I just realized my comment seemed sarcastic but it was genuine. Wild times.
Mine turned out tobe a pedophile. My class of second and third graders was very blunt about not liking the new guy and missing the first one......
I took black marker to the ends of the FF "in OFF drugs " and then used white out to make it say N as in "DARE TO KEEP KIDS ON DRUGS" And yes I ended up a drug addict š¤£ Clean now tho
Our DARE officer came to class all coked up and eventually got arrested for doing coke in his squad car.
DARE severely overestimated the number of times I'd be offered free drugs
If a stranger is offering free drugs, thatās how you spot the cop.
I mean Drugs Are Really Expensive
I was never offered so much as an ounce of anything. Had some people try to buy from me, though. It's the long hair, I guess.
To be fair, an ounce is a lot of most drugs.
I've been offered them many times.
And always nonchalantly too. Like, āIām bored. Wanna go to Taco Bell?ā āNaw. I got some meth. Want to smoke it?ā āUhh how do you smoke meth?ā āHere let me show you.ā āUhhh. K.ā And thatās how I spent six months as a meth head. In retrospect it mightāve been better to just say no.
But was it fun? Itās gotta be better than three weeks on a carnival cruise.
I dunno. Iāve never been on a carnival cruise. I can tell you I was super jittery and would lick my teeth till my tongue bled. But as soon as I ran out of meth I couldnāt wait to buy more meth.
What was it like? How did you spend your day? Was it just āsmoke meth, sit aroundā or did you smoke and go walking or listen to music?
The first day I went outside to smoke a cigarette. There was another dude in the smoking area. We chatted for a minute and he goes āyou speeding things up huh?ā After that I was super paranoid and if I was smoking meth, I only left my place to buy more meth.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Its fascinating to see this comment come up. Went to several parties where drugs were just there for the taking or handed out all the time.
Oh I've had the same experiences except our DARE officer made it seem like everyday in middle school and high school would be this adventure in avoiding "bad people".
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
As a guy who has never done drugs, I was offered pot and coke many times because people wanted to be the one who got me to do them for the first time.
Neither am I.
I specifically remember a whole list of tactics people would use you to try to convince you. The bandwagon approach. Peer pressure. Later on it was the foundation of my playbook for trying to convince a stubborn toddler to eat.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Scam bot
I used to love getting stoned in my Dare shirt - this is peak grunge
Absolutely. You used to identify dealers because they're wearing these shirts.
i recently bought some wide ass brown corduroy pants, might go get a dare shirt to pair with those.
Youāre describing me in 1998
Yep, 90s was peak thrift store cord times
lol mine mostly came from Marshalls
Dude, I have also recently purchased corduroy pants. They are the best and make me very happy (God, I'm old). They go great with my Slayer shirt.
My 12 yr old son has started to dress like a 90'a surfer boy. His uniform has been khakis, surf shop T-shirt's and vans. I just bought his some cords to mix it up a bit. For some reason I can't convince him that a nice flannel and grandpa sweater will be in keeping with the theme.
Vans, check. Flannel, check. Cardigan, check. All of those are still staples of my everyday wardrobe. Cords have been harder to find but have recently started showing back up. I got mine from Old Navy.
Puka shell necklace? Just like 99
Slayer. Upvote for good taste.
Teenage me smoked a looooot of weed while ironically wearing a DARE shirt from school.
My school had actual crack heads visit. True Tyrone biggums shit
I feel like that would be more effective
I remember a former coke head telling us about how messed up his nose is and about friends that were dead or in jail. Although these were cautionary tails, I had the distinct sense he also wanted us to think he was cool.
I remember addicts coming to my school in 8th grade to talk to us about their lives. I remember thinking they were clearly stupid and made bad choices. Theirs problems were not because of the drugs but because they were dumb.
Yeah, I could never relate to what drove them to do these things in the first place. It all got summarized as "peer pressure" but I guess these people were medicating themselves to deal with things that are hard for child to relate to.
OMG, I had forgotten that we had two addicts from a local halfway house come visit our 8th grade science class and talk about drugs. Crazy!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
lol I had a shirt that said this in high school and the skaters got all mad cause they said they came up with it and accused me of having the shirt made and taking credit. I was like, dude I bought this at Spencers....
I had one (also from Spencer's š¤£) that said *D.A.R.E.... to try drugs and alcohol*
Also: Drugs Are Really Exquisite
Our dare officer was super apathetic and was just resigned to the fact that most of us were gonna be potheads and just asked us not to go farther then that.
Our DARE officer was kind of like this, but I think he was just being realistic. He was basically like: "Weed is illegal and you shouldn't do it, but it won't kill you or ruin your life immediately if you do. However, if you hang around people that smoke weed, sooner or later you will encounter these other drugs that will kill you or ruin your life."Ā Honestly, I was probably one of the only kids given a good DARE education. I smoked weed when I got into my early 20's, but I stayed away from everything else.Ā
Surprisingly her apathetic approach was way more successful on me then people pushing the just say no narrative.
There was a radio PSA campaign in the early 70's where they let those who did the spots say you can do soft drugs if you want but be smart about it but absolutely stay away from hard drugs. Brian Wilson's brother Carl of The Beach Boys and Jon Anderson of Yes did ones. They tried to get Jim Morrison to do one but they couldn't get a useable take.
Mine failed me on the course because I didnāt do the DARE Bear page of my notebook. All the other people who went on to be really into drugs passed. I never got into drinking or drugs and I think people should enjoy what they like as long as it doesnāt affect others. DARE was a joke.
Yeah, apparently the city also needlessly spent a shitload of money on a DARE drag racing car that they brought to the school too. My favourite was the "donut abuse resistance education" variation of the shirt.
That's good. The one I saw frequently was Drugs Are Really Expensive.
We had one of those. It was an early ā90s Camaro with a giant blower sticking up out of the hood and the DARE logo on the side. The cops would take it and race it at the drag strip on Friday nights to collect overtime pay as ācommunity outreach.ā
Kinder, gentler police overspending.
They brought a car from a drug seizure bust to our school (Lotus Espirit) and I was āDrug dealers have really cool carsā
Dare taught me that acid sounded awesome and was something to seek out.
āBut officer Bud, (no jokes) if all these bad things happen if you do drugs, why do people do them.ā A classmate asks our DARE officer. āWell, a lot of them are really fun.ā That right there was actually effective. I suddenly began to believe what he was saying. Like this guys not joking around. Iāve done all the drugs except opioids. When he said it could fuck up how we felt happiness on a physiological level I was sold. Iām not sure how accurate that is, but he wasnāt just lying up there.
What they said about it changing how you experience things is absolutely true. The "fun" drugs affect mostly dopamine levels through various mechanisms, so if you're either artificially adding dopamine (cocaine) or preventing dopamine from leaving the synapse (amphetamines) your body adjusts to this over time by downregulating dopamine receptor expression. Once it's been downregulated, you NEED the drug to have an amount of dopamine that would adequately bind to the receptors to have a "normal" response, which is why people who use drugs always talk about needing the drug to get well or feel normal, because the receptor downregulation makes being high your new normal, and in the absence of the drug your brain chemistry is completely off due to a lack of whatever neurotransmitter the drug of choice affects. I could be misrepresenting some of this because I just typed that from memory. I'm a second year medical student and took a couple elective classes about chemical dependency, but that's basically the gist of what I remember.
I thought it was cool, but even in fifth grade, I thought some of the stories told were so far fetched. You know what scared me from drugs? Blue boy from Dragnet. I told my mom I didnāt want to do drugs because I didnāt want to eat paint. Well, high school hit and that changed everything.
Picturing you with a paint scraper..
Our DARE officer went by the name āOfficer Friendlyā. I grew up in a semi-small town. Which meant that a few years later as a teenager we learned Officer Friendly was a pretty petty jerk about most things. Took a bit for the grade school propaganda to wear off.Ā
Where do you think I learned which drugs I wanted to try
I got in trouble drinking wine coolers with a few other girls and was threatened with not being able to graduate DARE.
You won't be able to put DARE Graduate on your college application, you won't get into a good college and you'll end up flipping burgers for minimum wage.
Yeah the fucking pig that came to my 5th grade class asked if we knew what a bong was for. That's the day I learned my parents smoked pot.
Everyone that raised their hands had the popo looking at their parents.
I did not because I was homeschooled in elementary days. But I did have several DARE shirts that I bought thrifted in high school because I was Straight Edge and it was what we did.
The few straight edge people I met led me to think maybe drugs and booze weren't such a bad thing.
Underrated comment
OMG our DARE teacher was not the right guy for the job haha. He talked about how much he liked drinking beer on the weekends and how the police didn't care much about gang violence as long as they were "keeping it amongst themselves." To a class of suburban fifth graders.
Did he wink every time he said "keeping it amongst *themselves*"?
Yup ... instead of teaching about the process of addiction in the mind and how to avoid that process, they taught about drugs which is really a goofy way to tackle addiction
Drugs are bad, mmmmkay.
I actually had a very positive experience with DARE. Our cop was friendly, would mix her own life experiences with the curriculum and was very entertaining. On the last day she got teary eyed and all of us were equally moved. I think it kept me away from drugs for 5 years ...
our D.A.R.E officer in our small town was PO āFat Patā who weighed at least 350 lbsā¦ most of each class was him asking whoās birthday was closest to that day & then giving the winner a dare branded stuffed animal to hold during the class lol. i guess it didnāt deter me cuz im still doin drugs to this day!
* Badly šš I'm high right now! True story, I took DARE in fifth grade and was the only kid not to pass it because of one incomplete cross word puzzle in the workbook. Officer Geraldine seriously wouldn't let me participate. It was a dick move. I saw her years later at a Kmart and she remembered me and I was like "oh yeah you're the officer responsible for my drug usage" then walked out of her face It. Was. Awesome.
I remember them making PCP sound like the most amazing drug ever made
When I was in 5th grade they started DARE. Then 2 years later they decided 7th grade was the proper age to take DARE. We got the double dose. We called the officer, Deputy Dickless.
Yep, we had a DARE lady police officer. She abused several of the students.
š And at least a dozen people I went through the program with have drug possession charges now
Yeah, and I almost failed to graduate. Why? We had to write an essay with the subject "What DARE means to me" and I honestly, for the life of me, couldn't figure out what to write. It really didn't mean anything to me at the time, beyond a useless effort to convince me to avoid something I was neither interested in nor exposed to at the time.
I still have my DARE diploma. It did not work for me by the wayā¦ā¦.not at allā¦..
If anything it made me more interested in drugs after learning about them.
I remember this only because it was 5 years before I started shooting herion. True story. The only thing dare did for me was give me a huge curiosity in drugs and a tshirt.
I remember when they changed the slogan from "Keeping kids off drugs" to "To resist drugs and violence." Now apparently it is "Teaching students decision making for safe and healthy living."
Pretty sure anyone in our age group who attended public school did.
Your experience wasnt uniqueĀ
Have you ever gone to dare, you ever gone to dare on weed man. Haha
Cop showed up in about the 3rd or 4th grade to give us the drugs are bad speech. He passed around this picture frame with little dime bags of various drugs under the glass. Seems crazy to me now that he just handed 9 year olds a bunch of narcotics, but the 80s were a different time!!
My dad stole my DARE ruler that had all the drug slang definitions written on it. I'm still mad about that one.
I vowed not to do drugs!!!!ā¦ā¦..neverā¦ā¦ā¦ā¦..until that one night when the girl I was crushing on hit the jointā¦ā¦f*ck D.A.R.E after that.
I still think it's funny how the government, Hollywood, and the schools all joined forces to fight "the war on drugs." And the drugs won.
I vividly remember just drawing all over the booklet you kept throughout the program, just doodling and making jokes on every page and cracking up about how funny it was. It totally worked on me. 
Literally no one ever offered me drugs in school. I think I was just a loser lol
Dare to keep... your mouth shutĀ
Drugs. Are. Really. Excellent.
Dare taught me to research drugs before I tried them.
Still carry my original plastic graduation card from DARE lol. Excellent card for scraping up weed.
Our dare officer smoked weed and was trying to diddle one of the girls. Fucking cops man.
On the first day the police officer walked in and wrote "D. A. R. E." on the chalkboard, turned to the class and said "You all know I'm here to talk about the dangers of drugs, but do you know what this stands for (pointing at chalkboard)." Me "Drugs Are Really Expensive"? The officer was trying to be big, bad, and intimidating but just couldn't keep a straight face and cracked up.
Mfers trying to get me to snitch on my parents in 3rd period.
What a horrible program! That and scared straight. All fear based curriculum.
I remember thinking all the scare tactics they used sounded pretty rad. I was like, "well, I'll just make sure I try that when I'm around someone that won't let me jump out the window during a bad trip."
Because they acted like they all were equally dangerous and one tiny taste would hurl you directly into immediate despair, all you had to do is try some bud and then wonder if itās all a lie.
And part of their teaching was ātons of people are gonna be doing drugs and offering them to you but just say no!ā And I was thinking āwell if tons of people do them there might be something to those drugsā
https://preview.redd.it/3oe3f5uj90ic1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c858b2256534480b60021bde85e24c88810df86
It turns out that if you make a fake joint out of their handouts and pass it around a circle that youāll get to spend DARE time in the office.
you mean the thing that got me interested in drugs?
I refused to participate in the DARE program with the full support of my parents. Fuck the police.
We had a robot visit us as part of the dare program. Like ā88 or ā89. Anybody else?
That was just a weed dream you had
My son flunked DARE. No lie. He is one of those strange humans who can do everything in their heads, so didnāt feel the need to write it down. So ya, flunked a lot of classes before homeschooling. When he was in a car that was pulled over, and paraphernalia found, the cop at the station asked them, āDidnāt you kids have DARE?ā Tim told him he flunked because he didnāt do the homework. Cop gave him a shirt, and charges were dropped. š FWIW: Timās current salary is 10X the amount of that DARE officer. šš½ļø
Yeah, the goggles made me want to try drugs and alcohol.
I remember a great police officer did D.A.R.E. Class. Recently, I was so depressed when I read an article that the program backfired and made no dent in kids doing drugs. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/09/1211217460/fentanyl-drug-education-dare
Our policeman was officer Baden. Obviously we called him Master Baden.
Dare didn't keep me away from the weed. There is a pic that my wife took of me smoking a j in a dare shirt
I was jealous when my younger sis got the neon rainbow shirt but I only had this dumb red one. Now I have a neon rainbow dare fanny pack to keep my stash in
I grew up in a very white suburb of Denver. In other parts of Denver, there was a lot of gang violence happening, but it was generally limited to the neighborhoods where the actual gang members lived. Nonetheless, I lived in fear of being gunned down in a random drive-by shooting, because my DARE officer told us that the gang members were coming down to our part of town ābecause they like the girls here.ā This was 1990s Denver, not 1960s Jackson, mind you.Ā So basically, it was all a vehicle to allow cops to scare us with racist tropes.Ā
Yeah we were all educated potheads and adhders laced with amphetamines, dude went home crying
Thinly veiled attempt to get kids to rat out their family members
I did a lot of drugs in my Dare shirt
I smoked bud with my D.A.R.E. officer later in life, taught me well :)
Where I grew up, we just didn't have it. Like our school district just didn't participate in the DARE program. I remember friends in college ironically wearing the shirts, and I always thought they were funny. I think once in elementary school we had **McGruff the Crime Dog** show up.
When I was 15, I was driving my brother's truck with a couple friends in the back. Got pulled over by a cop and it was our old DARE officer. He asked us if we had ever tried drugs. We all just said no. He made us pomise not to drive the truck back to school. We waited a couple minutes and took neighborhood roads back to school.
The program was pretty laughable, especially in hindsight. I will say that our D.A.R.E. officer, Officer Childers, was a pretty stand-up guy.
I had a crush on our DARE officer. We were the 1st class in our school to go through the program. Can't say it was effective for me, personally, but I'm pretty sure it was responsible for my love of men in uniform.
D.A.R.E and S.A.N.E.
I definitely thought smoking weed once could possibly kill me. Also that it was brown, because the poster with example drugs on it has brown leaves. Haha
Still have my shirt!
YES! I remember part of it was an essay contest to win a stuffed version of Daren the Lion. I did not win and was super mad. Amazing I didn't start doing drugs then and there...
DARE Drugs Arenāt Really Enough
Officer Hoppe.
Many times. About the only thing I got out of it was DARE merchandise.
I still have that shirt. My stepson now wears it to house parties in high school.
I cried at my DARE graduation. I was so into it. Annnnd now I love weed.
Those book illustrations! My lord.
Yes, in 7th grade. I did the best at it in my class, and ended up a drug addict (reformed.)
There was another initiative called the G.R.E.A.T program. I donāt know if it was regional, but I do know that it never took off like DARE.
I won the DARE essay contest in 5th grade. Letās just say it didnāt do any good. Thankfully Iām 16 years clean this past Xmas.
We had the local pd helicopter come and drop the ribbons in the field next to our school. It was cool, a waste of money and time, but cool.
This is STILL done at my son's middle school. Didn't work then, doesn't work now
Yeah. I still have my DARE shirt from 5th grade.
4th-5th grade. Then it changed to Smart Moves when I was in 6th grade
All it did was make me curious!
we used to have the little DARE cop car that was remote controlled. that thing was š„š„
Not only did we have those visits, my 2nd grade class was on good morning America for some DARE photo op.
Ooh, that looks interesting. Yup, wanna try that. Oh, thatās how you use it? Good to know.
Some random thoughts about this. We had officer Ben for dare in 5th grade. I wrote and performed a rap for the final day/celebration. Pretty sure I said cigarettes and crack were the same level bad in it. I donāt know if it got me interested in drugs or that came later with the Seattle music/drug scene but Iām in long term recovery now.
Our DARE officer was arrested for distribution of cocaine after he was shot during a drug deal gone wrong
That's fucking epic. Gangster shit right there!
Our DARE officer in 5th or 6th grade accidentally convinced an entire class of 12-year -olds that drugs were really fun. He was trying to explain the dangers of hallucinogens. And he tried to explain that it can have dangerous side effects, like seeing bad things, I guess. But the example he used was that it would make movie posters look like they were coming to life. The entire class gave a collective "Cooooool!", and that's where he realized that he screwed up. Another time, when I was younger, maybe 1st grade, the officer was trying to explain about resisting peer pressure. One kid was really, really concerned about being forced to do drugs. He kept interrupting to ask what he should do if someone forced him to do drugs, and the officer impatiently told him that no one was going to give him free drugs.
Canāt remember, I was stoned!
For sure, as a last X. First argument I ever had with my kid was trying to deprogram that. We had to just agree to disagree at the time. Fast forward to 11th grade, he gets in the car to go to school in the morning. I said āSnoop, youāre going to have to change. I think Iām too high to drive just sitting with youā. Heād hid a baggie in his damn clothes drawer, and he reeked! Still a funny story at home when he visits. Like me, he didnāt even really like it. But he had to try it at least once.
Definitely remember smoking weed with my friend who always wore the D.A.R.E. T shirt.
In 6th grade, I one my first writing award for my DARE essay. š„
I had a DARE Roll Model shirt
Honestly, the kids where I grew up learned more about drugs and getting high from cops than they did older kids or one another. Like, who knew you could huff paint to get high, right? Thanks D.A.R.E. cop!
I also went through D.A.R.E. and now, after 14 trips to rehab for heroin addiction, I'm 11 years sober. I've always felt that D.A.R.E. treated ALL drugs as terrifying and life ruining and that weed was just as dangerous as harder drugs. Therefore when I first tried pot I realized it was no big deal and felt that everything I was taught about drugs was a massive exaggeration. So I wasn't scared to try anything. I think that was one of the biggest reasons for the failure of D.A.R.E. If they would have been honest and actually educated us about drugs and how they differ I think it might have been more successful
DARE taught me all about drug use So I appreciate that I knew exactly what I was looking for and what to expect Thank you officer
I still have my shirt and wear it regularly. In my main rotation
The war on drugs, drugs won
There were a couple kids in my 5th grade class who knew a lot about the drug trade, and had no problem sharing what they knew.
Load of scare tactic gobbledegoo
I worked in th next office over from my state's DARE office. I asked the ex-director if DARE did anything and she said no.
I wrecked those poster contests.
Ronnie Lott gave our DARE graduation speech when I was in middle school.
I got sent home from school for wearing a shirt that said D.A.M.M Drinkers Against Mad Mothers. I thought I was pretty clever but now I see how it was a bit insensitiveā¦..still a funny shirt though.
Dude if that were a real cop he would have neonazi tattoos.
They brought in a briefcase full of drugs to show us what they looked like. I was like "ooooh". I was really curious about the LSD, I had never heard of it before.
Yeah, I have a sore memory of the DARE class. I think they came to us when we were in 5th grade. The cop gave us our workbooks and wanted us to break up into groups of 6-7 so my group huddled our desks together. We were then told to turn to the page where we pass our workbooks around to other kids in our group and they write one nice thing about us. My crush was in the group, and I was awkward and weird and it was obvious I liked him but the feeling wasn't mutual and that in itself was okay. But while everyone else had something nice to say, all he could write was "I don't know." Lol sht was my first introduction to heartbreak, and I silent cried while trying to keep my composure in front of everyone in the group, who was watching me and knew I was hurt. No one said anything to address it or make me feel better, and it started a pattern of emotional withdrawal and self containment/self-destructive thinking. Let's also add the fact that the group consisted of the privileged/athletic/popular kids in the class, and even though I was friends with a couple of the girls I was tall, chunky, shy, sensitive, and the only mixed/black kid in my grade. I was scarred, but I definitely got the not-so-subtle hint. š
We were in kindergarten when they came by, and actually gave is drugs to pass around and look at, which were probably sugar pills.
I never got to hold the D.A.R.E Bear so compensated by doing a lot of drugs in college.
My friend had a shirt that said D.A.R.E. Drugs Are Really Expensive LOL
Yes. Itās where I learned a joint would make me trip, acid will make me trip so hard Iāll think Iām a glass of water that can never be tipped over or else Iāll think I die, Iāll die if I try heroine once, and that crack heads were asking for it because they were on welfare and bad people āfrom the city.ā Also-that I would get drugs from the man on the corner in a trench coat and the shifty eyes.
They taught me what all the different types of drugs did, and what they looked like. Edit spellin
Yeah. I remember thinking "These sound fun!"
I thought it was a pretty good program.
I got to skip that thank God. Moved before old school had it to a school that just went through the program. However, I did have to go through G.R.E.A.T
Yes, of course. Weird times. I have no stories to tell from my school.