Pubdate: Tue, 13 Mar 2018
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2018 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact: http://services.bostonglobe.com/news/opeds/letter.aspx?id=6340
Website: http://bostonglobe.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: Jessica Contrera, The Washington Post

TOP: DARE OFFICERS, THEIR RANKS THINNED, FACE LEGAL POT AND OPIOID
CRISIS

WEST BRIDGEWATER - The class had covered bullying, Internet safety,
and good decision-making, and by February, Officer Kenneth Thaxter
could see that the sixth-graders were ready.

The lights went off, and the projector went on.

"Today," the DARE officer said, "we're going to talk about marijuana."

For 16 years, every elementary school student in this small town has
learned about drugs from Thaxter. But this year, his lesson needed to
change, and he was about to find out whether the students knew why.

"What do you know about marijuana?" he asked.

"It's a drug," said a boy named Jack.

"There are different names for it," said Cassidy.

"There is medical and legal," said Luke.

"OK, very good," Thaxter said, and he began to explain.

Massachusetts had become one of eight states to legalize recreational
marijuana, and in a matter of months, anyone over 21 would be able to
purchase it at dispensaries nearby. This, he thought, was a confusing
message for kids. They'd grown up knowing that drugs are bad. Now they
were hearing from older siblings and maybe even their parents that
weed is just a plant, and plants are good. It was up to Thaxter to
convince them not to try it.

"People get high. That's the reason people like to smoke, because they
get a feeling of euphoria. That is what is reported to me - I don't
smoke," he told the class. "But there's also a bunch of other
short-term effects."

He pointed to a list on the screen. Difficulty concentrating. Trouble
with problem-solving. Loss of coordination and motor skills.

"You would get bad grades," said a student named James.

"Very good," Thaxter said. "You guys know Mrs. Wenzel's science class
is no joke. If you're not paying attention, you're going to miss out."

'It almost looks like we're at war. I don't ever remember seeing so
many obituaries for people in their 20s.'

It was exactly the kind of lesson that DARE has officially distanced
itself from. The police-run program on "Drug Abuse Resistance
Education" was seemingly everywhere in the 1980s and '90s. Then
multiple studies showed that it did nothing to stop kids from doing
drugs. In the 2000s, states slashed it from their budgets. It revamped
its curriculum to focus less on drugs and more on smart
decision-making. Still, it's a shadow of its former self. In
Massachusetts, which once had 800 DARE officers, about 140 remain,
including the one now clicking on a slide titled, "What is addiction?"

And here was the core of his job. Was he going to persuade the kids to
never smoke weed? To "Just Say No" forever? Unlikely. But there was a
far bigger drug problem outside these walls that he was hopeful -
desperate, really - to do something about.

"When your body needs and craves a drug, and doesn't get the drug, you
become sick," he explained.

Chelsea raised her hand. "Like if you use too much pills, you can
overdose?"

"Yes," Thaxter said. Prescription pills had started the problem. Then
it was heroin and fentanyl and carfentanil, the opioids that killed
1,997 people in Massachusetts last year, some of them here in West
Bridgewater. Overdoses had become an expected part of Thaxter's shifts
as a patrol officer. His colleagues had responded to one just the
night before. In the next 48 hours, there would be two more.

Another hand went up. He always encouraged the students to share
stories, as long as they said "someone I know" instead of the person's
name. This student wanted to tell the class how someone she knew had
stolen money to pay for drugs.

"Yes, people become desperate," Thaxter said.

"Someone I know, he overdosed and he killed himself," the next
sixth-grader said. Her dad had told her that his best friend was now
gone. She kept that part to herself.

"I know someone, and he did drugs and stuff, and now he is homeless,"
said another. Her parents had told her that she just wouldn't be
seeing her uncle anymore.

Thaxter nodded as he listened, saying "OK," and "Wow," and "That is
hard." He didn't actually think that they would be trying heroin
anytime soon. But marijuana, maybe. If a kid was willing to try weed
in the sixth grade, Thaxter worried, what would he be doing at 19 or
20?

He remembers the first overdose he responded to with Narcan, the nasal
spray hailed as a lifesaving antidote to opioid overdoses. It was five
years ago, when rampant abuse of the drugs still felt like something
that only happened in big cities. The woman lying unconscious at his
feet was a respected health care provider at the local hospital.

"What happened?" he remembers her asking when she was revived.

"Hon," he said, "you overdosed."

Now every police cruiser and fire truck in town is equipped with
Narcan, and soon it will be in all the schools. That's how a drug
epidemic feels in West Bridgewater, population 7,000. It isn't junkies
on the side of the road, or skyrocketing crime - but if you know where
to look, it's everywhere.

Thaxter's colleagues come back from their days off with stories of
trying to go about their lives - getting gas, picking up their dry
cleaning - when they glance into the cars in the parking lot and
realize that they need to rescue someone.

Thaxter has made a habit of reading the obituary pages, looking for
young faces.

"It almost looks like we're at war," he says. "I don't ever remember
seeing so many obituaries for people in their 20s. The picture, you
can tell, they're totally healthy and vibrant, and then it will say,
'Died suddenly at home.' ''

When one of his former students overdoses, he visits Schools
Superintendent Patty Oakley. "Guess who," he'll say.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, they were really successful kids in
school and had a bright future," Oakley says. Some are buried near her
husband, who died a few years ago at 50. That no longer seems to her
to be a young age to go.

"You want to blame something, blame MTV," the president of
Massachusetts DARE told a Boston Herald reporter in 1997. The country
was in the middle of a contentious debate over its best-known
drug-reduction effort. Various public health studies had concluded
that DARE did not decrease drug use among students and may have even
increased it. Politicians and police argued that the program's
benefits, such as familiarizing students with law enforcement,
couldn't be quantified.

By 2002, Massachusetts had eliminated $4.3 million in funding for the
program.

Nationally, the program scrambled to fix itself. The curriculum was
overhauled. DARE's mascot, Daren the Lion - chosen in the 1990s, when
"The Lion King" was really popular - stayed the same, but what he
preached changed. By 2010, DARE had taken the word "drugs" out of its
mission statement; the program's goal is now to "teach students good
decision-making skills to help them lead safe and healthy lives."

But last summer, when DARE leaders met in Texas, their highest-profile
speaker was fonder of what the program used to be. "DARE is the
best-remembered anti-drug program," Attorney General Jeff Sessions
told the officers. "Your DARE team is ready to meet this next
challenge. Just like you did in the 1980s and '90s."

Dominic DiNatale, the current head of Massachusetts DARE, heard about
the speech. In the past year, his state has been working to introduce
marijuana retail sales and combat the opioid epidemic all at once.
Some districts that had eliminated their DARE programs contacted him,
asking what it would take to get it back.

With no state funding, he answers, it frequently requires a local
police department, which may already be low on resources, to be
willing to forgo a patrol officer. It requires principals who are
under pressure to get students to pass standardized tests to give up
teaching time.

The glory days of DARE, it seemed to DiNatale, were long gone. The
program's success would come down to the DARE officers who were left.

"Here's the problem," Thaxter told the students at the end of his
lesson. "You're at a party. Some of the kids there are smoking
marijuana. OK? Nobody has really asked you to try it, but it's
available. What do you do?"

"I would run for the hills," a boy named Josiah told a group in the
corner of the classroom.

"What if it's like, the last-day-of-school pool party?" asked
Chelsea.

"Push them into the pool," Josiah said.

"They're high," said Rachel. "They wouldn't be able to swim, and they
would drown, and then you just committed a murder."

It was best, they decided, either to leave the party or just hang out
with the kids who weren't smoking. Thaxter flipped the lights on and
off to tell them time was up.

"OK," he said. "What are you going to do?"

He posed the question to three more sixth-grade classes that day, 92
students in all. "All right, guys, you did a great job," he told the
last class, and then the bell rang and the students ran for the buses
that would take them to places where, one day, they would make a
choice about what parts of DARE they would listen to, and what they
would ignore.

Thaxter left the building. From the front door, he could see three
houses where he had responded to overdoses. He got into his car. In
three weeks, he would be back for another lesson.
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MAP posted-by: Matt