The above video is used to get your attention. You know that, but read the article to understand how bad this man's policies could be to the poor, non-whites or rebel thinkers. The following two articles were written by Christopher Ingraham and published in the Washington Post. Both highlight the failure's of the DARE program of the 80's and early 90's whereas the accomplished PR campaign for the program was more effective than the program which in hindsight was found to have no impact on the drug taking habits of kids.

A brief history of D.A.R.E., the ’80s anti-drug program Jeff Sessions wants to revive

PUBLISHED: JUL 13, 2017, 8:07 AM • UPDATED: 5 DAYS AGO COMMENTS (11) By Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post

Speaking at a D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) conference this week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the past work of the famous anti-drug program, saying it saved lives:

“I believe that D.A.R.E. was instrumental to our success by educating children on the dangers of drug use. I firmly believe that you have saved lives. And I want to say thank you for that. Whenever I ask adults around age 30 about prevention, they always mention the D.A.R.E. program. Your efforts work. Lives and futures are saved.”

Sessions may believe that the program saved lives but decades of evidence-based research, including some conducted by the Justice Department he now heads, has shown the program to be ineffective — and it might even make the drug problem worse. A little history:

D.A.R.E. was founded in 1983 as a partnership between the Los Angeles Police Department and L.A.’s public schools. The idea was simple: Officers would go into schools to talk to kids, “boosting the self-esteem of students so that they can resist the temptation to use drugs,” as the L.A. Times put it in a 10-year retrospective on the program written in 1993.

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Eventually, the program was put in place in up to 75 percent of the nation’s school districts, by D.A.R.E.’s own count. At its height, the group boasted an 8-figure budget, with much of that money coming from government sources. Individual state affiliates raised millions more.

But with success came scrutiny. Public health researchers started looking for evidence that the program was meeting its goals of reducing teen drug use. The first wave of studies, published in the early 1990s, didn’t find any.

“The effectiveness of D.A.R.E. in altering students’ drug use behavior has yet to be established,” concluded a University of Illinois at Chicago study in 1991.

Other research arrived at similar results. In 1994 the Research Triangle Institute, funded in part by the Department of Justice, conducted a meta-analysis of all the existing research on D.A.R.E. Its conclusion was withering: D.A.R.E. had little to no impact on rates of teen drug use.

“D.A.R.E.’s limited influence on adolescent drug use behavior contrasts with the program’s popularity and prevalence,” the authors wrote. “An important implication is that D.A.R.E. could be taking the place of other, more beneficial drug use curricula that adolescents could be receiving.”

The DOJ was so incensed by this unexpected finding that it refused to publish the study, according to contemporaneous news reports. “I don’t get it,” D.A.R.E.’s executive director at the time said of the RTI study’s findings. “It’s like kicking Santa Claus to me. We’re as pure as the driven snow.”

But the kicking had only just begun. More studies showing similar findings trickled out in the 1990s. One study even suggested that D.A.R.E. students were more likely than their peers to experiment with drugs and alcohol. The authors of that study chalked that up to a possible boomerang effect: “an attempt to persuade resulting in the adoption of an opposing position instead.” Telling a certain type of kid that he shouldn’t do drugs may simply result in him trying drugs out of spite.

By 2003 the Government Accountability Office launched its own D.A.R.E. study to see if the Department of Justice was getting a decent return on its D.A.R.E investment. The conclusion? “No significant differences in illicit drug use between students who received D.A.R.E.” and those who didn’t.

The GAO report was the beginning of the end of D.A.R.E. as most of us knew it. Funding started to dry up: in 2002, before the GAO report, D.A.R.E. had an annual budget of over $10 million dollars. By 2012, that figure had shrunk to $3.5 million.

By the late 2000s, D.A.R.E. was faced with a choice: change or die. They opted for the former. The group decided to cautiously embrace evidence-based research after decades of antagonism toward it. The most significant change was the adoption of a new curriculum, entitled “keepin’ it REAL.”

Cringeworthy title aside, some of the research on this program to date suggests it actually works. It was commended in the recent Surgeon General’s Report on drug addiction for demonstrating efficacy at preventing substance use. The secret? “It’s not an anti-drug program,” a co-developer of the new curriculum told Scientific American in 2014. “It’s about things like being honest and safe and responsible.”

If it almost seems like D.A.R.E. isn’t really an anti-drug group anymore, that’s because it isn’t. The group explicitly spells this new reality out in its tax filings. Prior to 2009, D.A.R.E. stated on its 990 IRS filings that its mission was “to implement and support drug abuse resistance education and crime prevention programs in the USA.”

Post-2009, its mission is to simply “teach students good decision making skills to help them lead safe and healthy lives.”

Not everyone in the public health community is convinced the new D.A.R.E. is any better than the old D.A.R.E. A peer-reviewed study published last year found that the specific versions of the keepin’ it REAL curriculum used by D.A.R.E. haven’t been tested for efficacy.

“The systematic review revealed major shortfalls in the evidence basis for the KiR D.A.R.E. programme,” that study’s authors conclude. “Without empirical evidence, we cannot conclusively confirm or deny the effectiveness of the programme. However, we can conclude that the evidence basis for the D.A.R.E. version of KiR is weak, and that there is substantial reason to believe that KiR D.A.R.E. may not be suited for nationwide implementation.”

There’s no doubt, however, that D.A.R.E. is currently making an effort to adopt more of an evidence-based approach than in prior years, when the program’s practices were largely driven by the belief that they were “pure as the driven snow.” This brings us back to the central irony of Jeff Sessions’ remarks yesterday, when he yearned for a return to the D.A.R.E. of “the 1980s and the 1990s.”

Decades of research are unequivocal: the D.A.R.E. of yesteryear didn’t work, and it may have actually made the drug problem worse. Instead of embracing D.A.R.E.’s new evidence-based practices, Sessions offered up a return to the bad old days of drug policy, when decisions were driven by gut feeling and political expediency.

We already know how that story ended: billions of dollars spent, millions of people imprisoned, and stronger, cheaper drugs. D.A.R.E. is already trying to turn the page on the harsh and ineffective drug policies of the past. At the moment, it appears the Justice Department is trying to revive them. http://www.thecannabist.co/2017/07/13/dare-anti-drug-program-jeff-sessions/83646/

Sessions’ plan to make street drugs less potent and more expensive is deeply flawed

The steepest decline in street drug prices happened in the "tough on crime" era of the late 80s and early 90s PUBLISHED: JUL 12, 2017, 10:47 AM • UPDATED: 5 DAYS AGO COMMENTS (18) By Christopher Ingraham, The Washington Post

Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a lengthy speech on drug policy today at a conference for DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), the anti-drug program that was big in the 80s and 90s.

While much of the speech was Sessions’ standard law-and-order messaging, one line, about the role of the Justice Department in decreasing illicit drug use, really stood out:

“Now, law enforcement is prevention. And at the Department of Justice, we are working keep drugs out of our country to reduce availability, to drive up its price, and to reduce its purity and addictiveness.”

This is a standard supply-side anti-drug mantra: make drugs illegal, drive up their price, make them harder to manufacture and harder to get.

Let’s just check in on how that’s going.

According to federal data, the inflation-adjusted price per pure gram of heroin fell nearly tenfold from 1980 to 2012. The steepest declines happened in the late 80s and early 90s — the “tough on crime” era that Sessions yearns so strongly for in his speeches.

The data shows that the prices of other drugs, like cocaine and methamphetamines, fell similarly during this period.

You see a similar, though less-pronounced trend when examining illicit drug purity.

The average purity of street-level heroin seizures rose from 10 percent in 1981 to 31 percent in 2012, a threefold increase. Again, most of that increase in purity happened during the tough-on-crime era of the 80s and 90s.

In fact, heroin purity showed a steady decline throughout most of the 2000s, right when policymakers were starting to abandon the harsh rhetoric for more treatment-based options.

By Sessions’ goalposts of raising price and reducing purity, the Justice Department has been failing miserably at its job for much of the past 30 years.

Now granted, giving Sessions the benefit of the doubt perhaps he’s aware of these trends and wants to reverse them going forward. But his constant invocation of the harsh drug rhetoric of yore suggests that’ll be an uphill battle.

Numbers like these are why a number of reform groups, including the ACLU and the Drug Policy Alliance, say an enforcement-centric approach to drug policy, like the one Sessions advocates for, is incapable of dealing with an increasingly deadly national opiate epidemic. They’d rather decriminalize personal drug use to get drug users out of prisons and into the treatment they need.

Many advocates point to Portugal, which decriminalized the use of all drugs in 2001 and saw drops in rates of illicit drug use and drug overdose as a result, as a model for the U.S.

But with Sessions at the helm of the Justice Department, such policy is further away than ever. “It is not enough that dangerous drugs are illegal,” Sessions said before the DARE conference today. “We have to create a cultural climate that is hostile to drug abuse.” http://www.thecannabist.co/2017/07/12/jeff-sessions-illegal-drugs-potency-cost/83556/

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