An Explanation of The Safe & Drug Free Schools & Communities Act,

And Why Drug Policy Reformers Need To Know About It.

By Nicolas Eyle, ReconsiDer: Forum on Drug policy

The following article is based on some recent (Fall '99) correspondence and telephone conversations between Nicolas Eyle, executive director of ReconsiDer and Michael Roona, of ReconsiDer’s Albany chapter. Roona is a policy analyst who is currently working on a meta-analysis (a quantitative synthesis of evaluations) of drug education programs funded by the U.S. Center for Substance Abuse Prevention and the New York State Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services. Mr. Roona has previously conducted policy-driven scientific research into drugs, health, crime, education, and other social concerns for over a decade, first in the Center for the Study of Families, Children, and Youth at Stanford University, and later in the Western Center for Drug Free Schools and Communities. He has taught sociology and social research methods at Syracuse University and worked with both the National Center for Education Statistics and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Roona

The most noteworthy aspect of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act, also known as Title IV of the Educational Excellence for All Children Act of 1999 (which reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965) is that it incorporates the Principles of Effectiveness requiring that federal funds be spent only on effective substance abuse prevention programs. A request for public comments on the proposed Principles of Effectiveness was first published in the Federal Register on July 16, 1997. The final version of the Principles, which when into effect on July 1, 1998, was published in the Federal Register on June 1, 1998. For the past several months the Principles of Effectiveness have provided a mandate to those implementing federally funded substance abuse prevention programs but there was no mechanism for enforcement. By incorporating the Principles of Effectiveness into Title IV, the requirement that federally funded prevention programs be effective will be codified into law.

There are four Principles of Effectiveness.

The first requires "a thorough assessment of objective data about the drug and violence problems in the schools and communities served". Under the current circumstances, this is the most useful principle. As Barry McCaffrey and Donna Shalala have noted, marijuana use among youth is declining, as is other illicit drug use. But if we (the drug policy reform movement) point out that cocaine and heroin use among 8^th graders has remained stable over the past few years after rising steadily for the previous several years, we can drive home the point that the focus on marijuana use is misguided and target public attention, the political agenda, and public resources on compelling social problems by stressing, e.g., that the 3.1% of 8^th graders who used cocaine last year are likely the future crack heads of America who will define "the drug problem" in decades to come.

The second principle requires "a grant recipient … (to) establish a set of measurable goals and objectives, and design its activities to meet those goals and objectives" with "the assistance of a local … advisory council that includes community representatives". There is no reason why those community representatives can’t be drug policy reformers, refocusing public attention on the real drug problem in America (like cocaine, heroin, and inhalant use among 8^th graders) rather than simply focusing on tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana use. Also, we should be prepared to exploit the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation/ Institute for the Future, Forecast on the Health and Health Care in America predicting a new heroin epidemic by 2010 when it is released in December, 1999, to stress measurable objectives involving reductions in heroin use. It will be hard for our opponents to equate harm reduction with making it easier for kids to get drugs when we are actively engaged in trying to prevent a forecasted heroin epidemic from materializing.

The third principle requires a grant recipient to "design and implement its activities based on research or evaluation that provides evidence that the strategies used prevent or reduce drug use". This obviously is useful in the anti-DARE campaign. But the Safe and Drug Free Schools and Communities program, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and other federal agencies are now hyping Gil Botvin’s "Life Skills Training" program and want it to become the new DARE, so I’m not particularly concerned about DARE. Botvin never incorporated hard drug use into his LST program evaluations. If marijuana use is declining and we can convince the community at large (read: "parents") that drug education programs should target the new heroin epidemic and the (potentially fatal) use of inhalants, then there is no evidence that Botvin’s program (or DARE) is effective and a door is opened for us to introduce our own programs. (One caveat, however: A proposal to teach kids to "Just Say Know" is dead on arrival because everyone who has read a handful of evaluations of substance abuse prevention programs knows that programs emphasizing knowledge about drugs and their effects have minimal impact on substance use behaviors. We, the movement, need to get a grip on what the prevention field thinks before we enter the public arena with specific ideas, lest the Principles of Effectiveness be used against us.)

The final principle requires grant recipients to periodically evaluate their programs to assess progress toward achieving predefined goals and objectives and use the "evaluation results to refine, improve, and strengthen its program and refine its goals and objectives as appropriate". This provides us with a legal mechanism to constantly challenge what is happening in schools in the name of the war on drugs and to potentially win many voting, tax paying parents over to our side by demonstrating to them that we care deeply about their children’s health and well being.

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