DARE | 146

If you were a kid in the 80s or 90s chances are you’ve got some memories of the DARE program… and those memories might not be the best. Today I’m chatting about my experience with the DARE program, the changes they’ve made in recent years, and more.

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Colorful words may be used. don't be alarmed.

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TRANSCRIPTION

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the uncurated life podcast. Today is going to be kind of a shorter episode. Originally. I was going to do a deep dive, but I realized I don't really want to do a deep dive on this subject. What I would rather do is kind of tell you my experience. And then hear back from you, some of your experiences, and then perhaps I will do a follow-up episode sharing some of those experiences.

 

And the subject I'm talking about is the dare program. Now, if you grew up in the eighties, the nineties, you went to elementary school in those times in the United States, chances are, you have had experience with the dare program. So, what is it? Well from the Wikipedia, you know, the most solid source of information.

 

Dare program materials from 1991. Describe it as a drug abuse prevention education program, designed to equip elementary school children with skills for resisting peer pressure to experiment with tobacco, drugs, and alcohol. It was created as a part of the war on drugs in the United States with the intention of reducing the demand for drugs through education that would make drug use unappealing.

 

The program was conducted by uniformed police officers who visited classes. And so my memory of dare is exactly that, uh, uniform police officers coming into my elementary school classroom to scare the shit out of us when it came to drugs, tobacco, alcohol, et cetera. Now, aside from the fact that the war on drugs is based in some extreme bullshit, which can be an entire other podcast series on its own.

 

And I'm sure there is some. Th the concept of police officers coming into classrooms to scare the shit out of kids to, uh, not use drugs, not only was it scary, it also didn't work. Like one of the things that was seen with dare that I noticed in my research was that often it would go up with kids later.

 

Anyway. I had been thinking about doing an episode on the dare program for a while now. And then the other day I was walking to Ulta or something to pick up an order. And there were some people out there at a table, soliciting donations for dare, and they came up to me and they're like, hi, would you like to donate to dare?

 

And I'm like, dare. And she's like, the look on her face was like, oh God, not again. Like the, these were younger people. These people could have. More than like early twenties, but they were like, oh God, not another person who had a bad experience with dare, but she was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's better now.

 

It's different. And I'm like, ah, I'm going to pass anyone I kept going. Right. But it made me curious as to this new revamped version of dare. So looking online. I found this quote that said it's not an anti-drug program, says Michelle Miller day co-developer of the new curriculum and a communications researcher at Chapman university.

 

It's about things like being honest and safe and responsible. Even so keeping it real, which is the new name of dare has reduced substance abuse and maintained anti-drug attitudes over time among students in early trials and achievement that largely alluded the former iteration of the program. So maybe it's getting better.

 

I don't know, suffice it to say that when I mentioned a dare on live stream, relatively recently, a bunch of you popped in with your own experiences with dare. So, what I would love is for I'm going to, I'm going to give you my quick experience as to what happened with me with dare, and then I'm gonna end this.

 

It's going to be, like I said, a very short episode, but what I'm calling to you, your call to action. If you will, is to let me know, you can email me Cindy at Cindy Gunter, baldo.com, or you can message me or post to Instagram stories at Lama letters. You can. Let me know in the comments of any video that you want to just use hashtag dare podcast.

 

So I can find it, but let me know your experiences with dare and whether or not you're comfortable with me sharing them in an upcoming episode to talk about like how dare has impacted a lot of us, anecdotally speaking, just let me know. You'll find links and shit in the description box or the fucking show notes.

 

The thing the podcasts have. Without further ado. My tale of dare. I was a very neurotic kid that shouldn't surprise anybody, but I was very neurotic when I was kid my parents. And I can talk about them all I want to, because they're both dead. Now. My parents were super into smoking pot. They also tried other drugs as well, but pot was their main kind of situation.

 

And when I was a kid, I didn't really recognize what they were doing for the longest time. I knew they were smoking. I didn't know what they were smoking. I maybe I assumed it was tobacco. My grandpa smoked pipe out of a tobacco and my dad smoked cigarettes. So maybe it made sense that like the joints in the pipes, they were smoking out of what was tobacco, you know?

 

Cause I was also clueless, but the point is. It's when I was in fifth graders. So the dare officers came to my elementary school and they told us about how, if you smoke pot, you're going to go to jail. Like kids get separated from their parents. It was, I don't remember exactly what they said and I could be over-exaggerating this in my mind, but the impression that it left on a very neurotic fifth grader who had recently discovered that while her parents were smoking was actually.

 

I was terrified. I went home, I cried myself to sleep. I was horrified that my parents were going to get taken away from me because they smoked pot. I thought there was no way I was going to be able to talk them out of it because they liked doing it. So the only thing I could do is take matters into my own hands.

 

So I poured bleach on their pot pled. I never told them it was me. My mom found out it was me years later when certain ex husbands of mine told her. But. Uh, I poured bleach and killed their pot plant. And for the rest of my school career, up until up like way up until I was too terrified of alcohol, of, of pot, of everything to even think about going near any of them.

 

Now you might say, well, Cindy, isn't that the point of dare to help people resist peer pressure. It wasn't about resisting peer pressure. It was about being terrified that I was going to get sent a fucking prison over it. And knowing what I know now, not only about marijuana, but knowing what I know now about alcohol, about cigarettes, about addictive substances substances in general, like that's some fucking bullshit, like somebody shouldn't get sent to jail for using pot, like of all goddamn things.

 

So to have a utterly terrified kid, Who had no real reason to be that terrified. Like I wasn't going to go and like smoke pot to begin with. I wasn't interested in it. Like I never was. Even when I found out my parents smoked it, it wasn't like, oh my God, my parents smoked pot. It must be so cool. No, no, no, no.

 

My parents smoked pot. That's the least cool thing I've ever heard of. That's how you keep your kid from smoking pot in high school is to have your parents do it that way. They're like you that's what old people do. It's like Facebook, right? I'm not condoning any parenting decisions here. I'm just joking.

 

But like the idea here is that what dare did was leave a strong enough impression on me about how scary. The police would be if ever I or someone I love was caught smoking pot, I don't think is the impression they were going for, but I'm fairly certain that that's the impression. A lot of people, I knew hat and looking back on it.

 

And now thinking about the new dare, the keeping it real people asking for donations. All I can think about is fucking no, even if you've improved the program, even if you have improved the program, the roots in the program are in the racist war on drugs to begin with. And secondly, like I have real like, issues that came from that.

 

Like they took something with no thought, no talking, they developed it with police officers. They didn't develop it with psychologists. They didn't develop it with anybody like that. They left some, a real, like amount of scarring on me when it came to how I approach the world for a long time. And while the net result of that was me not smoking pot, like the result of me being fucking terrified and paranoid and like afraid of police officers afraid of what was gonna happen to my parents.

 

Like that sucks, dude. It sucks. And I do not endorse. So now that you've heard my, my history with the dare program and how I feel about it. I would love to know from you in the comments or not in the comments, but like, like I said, you can email me, you can message me if you're patron, you can let me know on Patrion on the, um, the sneak preview of this post, your experiences with the dare program, how you feel about it, how it made you feel about drugs, about police officers, whatever the case may be.

 

And then let me know if you're okay with me sharing this later and I will compile them and we will revisit dare with some more research and so on. And so. In an upcoming month in the upcoming months because I'm right now, I'm too fired up to really do a lot of research. But I really want to tell you how dare made me feel, because to this day, if you can't tell, I'm still resentful of it and I'm fucking almost 42.

 

So. That should tell you a lot. Anyway, thanks again to my patrons for sponsoring this episode. I don't think, I think that first of all, in this episode, but they, they deserve my thanks. They do, because they're awesome. They make these episodes possible and you should thank them too. And if you're interested in becoming one, check out www.patreon.com/cindyguentertbaldo to find out more my friends, whether you were traumatized by dare or not as a kid, I hope you have a fantastic day.

 

I'd love to hear from you. So be sure to let me know your thoughts and until next time, peace.