Page 424 - NIXBOOK

For the rest of my police career I would occasionally run into former DARE students, and/or their parents. As the years went by
they got older (of course) and eventually some started balding in middle age, which always startled me a little bit when a bald
man told me “Hey you were my DARE Officer twenty years ago!” One of my former DARE students grew up to become a lawyer,
and work for the law firm that contracted with our municipal court to provide public defender services. Whenever I ran into
him in court I’d good naturedly tell him “You know your clients are all guilty, right? You should just tell them all to plead guilty
and save us a lot of time, yeah?”

And yes, there were also about a dozen or so former students that I eventually wound up arresting for drug or alcohol issues. I
almost never remembered them but they’d bring it up to me first. “Hey you used to be my DARE Officer in 5th grade..” And
then I’d have to say something like “Well I guess maybe you should have paid more attention to what I was trying to share with
you back then.”

The DARE curriculum for each class was about 3 months long, and I’d conclude it with a big graduation ceremony for the
students. The ceremony would be in the gym or the school auditorium, with 3 or 4 classrooms of the 5th and 6th graders and
their parents in attendance. To graduate, each student had to write an essay about drugs and what they’d learned. The best essay
from each class was read out loud by the winning student during the ceremony; it was not uncommon to hear a kid describe
their family’s personal challenges with drugs as being an influencing factor in those kids’ attitudes against drugs. Then each kid
got their name read out loud and they came on the stage to get a certificate and shake hands with the police chief and school
district Superintendent and they all got black or red or white DARE t shirts beforehand and then it finished with cake and drinks.
Every ceremony also included a couple hundred helium balloons for decoration; usually I had to prepare those myself. I am real
good at quickly tying off helium balloons in quantity now. There were also DARE bumper stickers; it was cool to see some of
those on local cars, and some of the kids proudly kept wearing their DARE t-shirts even throughout high school.

Tragically though, back in those years the D.A.R.E. curriculum did not address what was going to be the biggest drug scourge
to come yet: prescription pill overuse. Specifically; opiate drugs like OxyContin and oxycodone that led to so many people
getting addicted to heroin later. In the 1980’s and 1990’s everybody was still focused on cocaine, and then crack cocaine and then
methamphetamine. Absolutely nobody saw the tragedy of the coming pharmaceutical opioid epidemic looming in the future,
followed by heroin, of all things.
Here’s a sample page of my schedule from one year; only two schools then; the third one had me show up in the spring. Some
years I had all three schools going at one time; my schedule was crazy then!