But any researchers considering such a radical deed might remember what happened to their colleague, Dr. Michael Newcomb.

Newcomb's 1988 book, Consequences of Adolescent Drug Abuse had an innocent enough conclusion: there was no evidence that low levels of drug use had any detrimental long-term effects -- that occasionally smoking a few joints did not lead to a lifetime of marijuana addiction.

It seems like an innocent message, but it was big news in the last summer of the Reagan administration, when "use" and "abuse" were synonymous. The story made the front page of the New York Times and many other newspapers. Newcomb was soon told that his funding was in jeopardy: the White House was pressuring the agency where he worked, wanting to know why money was being spent on research that ran counter to the government's stance.

One of his supervisors -- who insisted upon anonymity because of continuing employment in a government drug-research agency -- recalls that Dr. Ian McDonald, then Director of White House Drug Abuse Policy, was "very in-tune with the zealots" who didn't like the message in the book. "It is very likely that [Macdonald] reacted or someone from a prevention group called him and asked, 'what's going on down there?' Prevention groups tended to see things in black and white."

And this wasn't the only time in that period when a researcher was threatened with a cutoff of funds. "One of the unfortunate things about drug abuse is that it's enormously visible and politicized. The problem was that these groups viewed it as politics, not science...the wheels of science ground to a halt while we had to fight fires."

Still, Newcomb was lucky that the book was even printed: other critical reports -- often costing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars -- simply never appear.

An August, 1991 report for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation looked at the most popular drug-ed programs and found none successful. The report also pointed out occasions where researchers had falsified their claims. But the report was not published -- according to one of the authors, because "it was too controversial." Even years later, another of the authors became quite agitated when learning that this reporter had obtained a copy.

Not always is a controversial book or report supressed outright; increasingly, government agencies simply refuse to publicize the document's existance. As documented in the DARE article, the Department of Justice made a hefty report critical of the program available to anyone who asked -- but only distributed a misleading summary to thousands of educators.

In March, the California Department of Education thanked a researcher for his $100,000 study that found state programs ineffective, but now claims that the report was commissioned "for internal use" only. Other, less critical reports have been distributed widely.

Some researchers claim to have been blackballed, and are unable to find grants to continue research -- and this at a time when unprecedented amounts of monies are being spent on drug-ed programs. And at least one has reported threats. After returning from a recent conference, a researcher discovered about thirty messages on the answering machine. Five were anonymous and threating; some callers were from Washington, promising that he would never get another grant. Others were more ominous. Perhaps because of the enormous influence of DARE, a few of the callers claimed to be police officers, warning him that he better look out.