America's "Just Say No" Addiction

Early Programs, Early Failures

Like other no-use programs, they found it had the strongest effects on kids that needed it least	Beginning in 1981, SMART was one of the earliest "just say no" programs taught in schools. The approach used seems valid: over the course of several sessions, kids were taught to resist peer pressure, interpret ads for booze or cigarettes, and practice saying no through role-playing and other exercises. To evaluate how well the program worked, the children were tested one year and two years later. The first follow-up found the children still doing well, at least in resisting cigarettes. But at the end of the second year, almost all positive effects had faded away, and the kids in the study were now smoking cigarettes and marijuana to the same degree as those not in the SMART program. Worse yet, they lost track of over half the kids before the follow-ups were completed. As a result, one reviewer of SMART comments "even the modest effects reported by the investigators are debatable." Researchers suggested that SMART's weakness was that it didn't go far enough. Classroom teaching can only be part of the answer, they said: you have to get the family and community involved too. Again, a sensible idea. Out of this approach grew Project STAR, now taught in 500 schools, primarily in the Midwest. According to Mathea Falco, author of The Making of a Drug-Free America, STAR is "one of the most effective prevention programs in the country." The results seemed remarkable: an across-the-board 30 percent reduction in alcohol, marijuana, and cigarette usage by kids in the program. But after a few years, the effects began to fade, as they did with SMART. By the fifth year follow-up, the STAR kids were only slightly behind their friends in using cigarettes and marijuana, and the positive effects on alcohol were almost totally gone. Did the experiment fail? It depends who you ask. No, says Dr. Suzanna Montgomery, Assistant Project Director for STAR. "No one program is going to inoculate a person forever: to expect it to work forever is naive." But others think the whole experiment was flawed from the beginning. The strong positive results at the start of the program appeared only because the schools chosen for the test weren't equivalent. Critics point to an attempt to reproduce STAR in another city, where researchers found results that weren't nearly as dramatic. Curiously, the authors of STAR, who eagerly published several papers boasting of their early success, seem to have fallen silent when it comes to reporting less-than-wonderful results. One anti-drug program that has had a thorough examination is ALERT, done by RAND and funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Like other no-use programs, they found it had the strongest effects on kids that needed it least. Children who had puffed on just one or two cigarettes came out of the program with a strong distaste for l'air de Marlboro. ALERT also delayed many kids from trying marijuana, and found modest effects on their use of alcohol -- a benefit that disappeared the next year. According to Dr. Phyllis Ellickson, the primary investigator for the project, this shows "if you make even a little dent, it's hard to maintain it."

Like other no-use programs, they found it had the strongest effects on kids that needed it least

Beginning in 1981, SMART was one of the earliest "just say no" programs taught in schools. The approach used seems valid: over the course of several sessions, kids were taught to resist peer pressure, interpret ads for booze or cigarettes, and practice saying no through role-playing and other exercises. To evaluate how well the program worked, the children were tested one year and two years later. The first follow-up found the children still doing well, at least in resisting cigarettes. But at the end of the second year, almost all positive effects had faded away, and the kids in the study were now smoking cigarettes and marijuana to the same degree as those not in the SMART program. Worse yet, they lost track of over half the kids before the follow-ups were completed. As a result, one reviewer of SMART comments "even the modest effects reported by the investigators are debatable."

Researchers suggested that SMART's weakness was that it didn't go far enough. Classroom teaching can only be part of the answer, they said: you have to get the family and community involved too. Again, a sensible idea. Out of this approach grew Project STAR, now taught in 500 schools, primarily in the Midwest.

According to Mathea Falco, author of The Making of a Drug-Free America, STAR is "one of the most effective prevention programs in the country." The results seemed remarkable: an across-the-board 30 percent reduction in alcohol, marijuana, and cigarette usage by kids in the program. But after a few years, the effects began to fade, as they did with SMART. By the fifth year follow-up, the STAR kids were only slightly behind their friends in using cigarettes and marijuana, and the positive effects on alcohol were almost totally gone.

Did the experiment fail? It depends who you ask. No, says Dr. Suzanna Montgomery, Assistant Project Director for STAR. "No one program is going to inoculate a person forever: to expect it to work forever is naive." But others think the whole experiment was flawed from the beginning. The strong positive results at the start of the program appeared only because the schools chosen for the test weren't equivalent. Critics point to an attempt to reproduce STAR in another city, where researchers found results that weren't nearly as dramatic. Curiously, the authors of STAR, who eagerly published several papers boasting of their early success, seem to have fallen silent when it comes to reporting less-than-wonderful results.

One anti-drug program that has had a thorough examination is ALERT, done by RAND and funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation. Like other no-use programs, they found it had the strongest effects on kids that needed it least. Children who had puffed on just one or two cigarettes came out of the program with a strong distaste for l'air de Marlboro. ALERT also delayed many kids from trying marijuana, and found modest effects on their use of alcohol -- a benefit that disappeared the next year. According to Dr. Phyllis Ellickson, the primary investigator for the project, this shows "if you make even a little dent, it's hard to maintain it."

Albion Monitor December 3, 1995 (http://www.monitor.net/monitor)

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America's "Just Say No" Addiction

Early Programs, Early Failures

Like other no-use programs, they found it had the strongest effects on kids that needed it least

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