In middle school we had a DARE cop with a sketchy mustache and who drove a low rider. He liked to play around with kids and handcuff em to stuff. He gave me a piece of sugar free candy one day saying it would help me "get over the hump." It was probably a Wednesday but still weird. All the kids clowned this DARE cop. He was the only sworn officer I've ever known of to be a full on rent a cop. The resource officers we had, all had way more self respect than this guy.

Well before that there was the elementary DARE program. I feel like somehow teachers could tell who likely future drug users were by about 4th grade. In 4th grade I was selected to be the DARE rep for my class. We met with kids from other schools like twice a month or so. My district was about 40% white 40% black and 30% Hispanic or Asian. The vast majority of the DARE kids were non-white. There were about 30 kids in the DARE program and maybe 5 or 6 white kids. They taught about drugs in the way a school kid could understand, like Tyrone Biggums did, about hallucinating cartoon characters and laughing on LSD for hours. It was eerily similar to that sketch. Very adult problems about withdrawal weren't something a kid can fully understand but all kids understand fun. DARE made drugs seem fun, equally dangerous, and all very dangerous, and also very very cool. They made it seem like all the cool kids in middle and high-school used drugs. They wanted us to be good kids but they were speaking in front of a room of students with disciplinary problems and either considered cool in elementary school or at least insecure about how cool they were.

Just about all the DARE kids I met later on in school smoked weed in middle or high school. Some of them sold weed. I often met the other DARE kids for the first time in years by sharing a blunt with them. Only one kid I met later on didn't smoke weed. A lot of the DARE kids were fucking around with pills in high-school too. These were mostly the white kids. I think there was a sorta stigma about pill popping in the black community at the time. A lot of the times black kids got over prescribed amphetamines for ADHD instead of the educational supports white kids got for their learning disabilities. The Black community is and was more distrustful of Big Pharma, with good reason.

We all later learned that DARE was a miserable failure. Do you think it was just tone deaf like just say no, or are you conspiracy minded to where the DARE program wanted us to use, abuse and potentially get addicted to drugs. Not the teachers, administrators or anyone on a local level but those that created the curriculum. Speaking again of the black community, they think the CIA invented and distributed crsck cocaine on a massive scale and at the very least Iran Contra showed us that the CIA was running interference for drug traffickers to fight socialism in Latin America, so there was a definite connection between the CIA and drug trafficking.

For many kids DARE was only a twice a year assembly or they'd send a rep to talk to the class. For me in 4th grade I had DARE education a lot more than that. Did anyone else here go through that? I got into drugs early and often. I've been an addict in some way or another for about two decades, since highschool and I'm tired of it. For a long time I was high functioning. Now less so. I really hope I get the job I have an interview for. It's not a job in my field of journalism but I haven't done much formal journalism too recently. I lucked into journalism too. I didn't go to school for it.