cannabisnews.com: DARE To Kill Families DARE To Kill Families Posted by CN Staff on July 13, 2004 at 19:00:57 PT By Joel Miller Source: LewRockwell.com For their role in cuffing dope pushers and supporting the DARE program, cops in one Massachusetts town were recently awarded a $1,000 by a local drug-abuse prevention organization. A job well done: Only part of which involved undermining the family and the relationship between parent and child – but an important part. While the DARE program has come under intense criticism in the state, resulting in drastic funding cuts, Marshfield, Massachusetts, Police Lieutenant Phil Tavares has been fulsome in praise for the anti-drug school program. Reports the July 8 Boston Globe, "Tavares said he has received only positive feedback about the program and he firmly believes it's a needed resource. As an example, he talked about the recent case of a DARE graduate who called the police on his mother after finding marijuana in the house." Oh yeah. That's good: Fink on your mom. It's nothing new. DARE has always warred on the family, pitting kids against parents. Writes Diane Barnes in the Detroit News, "Children are asked to submit to DARE police officers sensitive written questionnaires that can easily refer to the kids' homes. And you might be surprised by a DARE lesson called 'The Three R's: Recognize, Resists, Report,' which encourages children to tell friends, teachers or police if they find drugs at home." As I point out in my book, Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America, drug arrests in a number of states have been tied directly to children ratting on parents. The reason is simple enough: DARE classes are taught by cops, who are duty-bound to follow up on tips from kids. The Wall Street Journal reported two Boston cases in which "children who had tipped police stepped out of their homes carrying DARE diplomas as police arrived to arrest their parents." If we are keen enough to see them for what they are, we should be thankful for such horrifying news items. For all its destruction to families, the DARE program tips the hand of the drug-war establishment in one important regard: It brilliantly highlights the fact that the State will tolerate no competing authority. Its goals are absolute. Writes Oxford Don C.S. Lewis in one of my favorite essays of his, "The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good – anyway, to do something to us or make us something." We, in this scheme, have no right to make ourselves something or do things for ourselves unless our aims fit within those of State's, for as Lewis continues, "We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business." No uppity slaves will be tolerated. For the State, the province of our very will and desires are seen as under its jurisdiction. They only wait to be conquered – along with the other intermediary authorities that stymie the State's advance, which is why down through the years ambitious governments have warred on churches, businesses, communities, and families – precisely because it they will allow no other competing loyalties. It doesn't matter what the agenda is; the State wants total support and involvement from its subjects. Divided loyalties must be squashed, even if it means, in the case of the drug war, ratting on a parent or finking on a friend. The State's word is both law and final. And that means, however much you may love your mother, if you find a doobie in her drawer, you call the cops. ''Having teenagers feel comfortable talking about problems with police – you can't beat that," said Travers to the Globe. Translation: Replacing parents as the confidants of their children is key to the State's absolutist goals. The child must be taught to see his true loyalties in the camp of the police, not his parents. He must be taught to come to the police with any infraction of his parents', so the true object of his loyalties can mete out the proper punishments for nonsubmission to the goals of the State. Of course, the drug-war's undermining of parental authority started long before DARE, and the program is not the ultimate focus of this discussion. We are looking at how the drug war as a State project undermines rival authorities. Go back to something foundational to the both the war on drugs and the undermining of parents: The moment the government took parents out of the position of training children in the proper use of intoxicants – i.e., by banning particular substances across the board, regardless of the user's age or the drug's purpose – it began chipping away at its rivals and their authority over children. For the State this is paramount. We must never forget what children are for the State: both potential tools and threats. Because just as children are subject to their parents, they are also subject to the State and someday, once mature, will be primarily subject to it. If children are raised by parents to value individual freedom and choice, the rival authority of parental control is simply exchanged for self-control and the State's domain is not much increased. If their parents encourage them to extreme levels of individuality, their resultant autonomy can lead directly to decreases in state power; ergo, they become a threat. To gain substantial control over the individual (turn him into an ally and stifle the threat his autonomy represents), the State must assert control early and broadly – removing from parents the ability to properly empower children with much sense at all of self-determination and autonomy. The child must learn to see the State as the final authority, period. "Today the state controls not merely the individual's body but as much of his spirit as it can preempt," writes social critic Christopher Lasch in his 1977 book, Haven in a Heartless World. "The citizen's entire existence has now been subjected to social direction, increasingly unmediated by the family or other institutions to which the work of socialization was once confined. Society itself has taken over socialization or subjected family socialization to increasingly effective control. Having thereby weakened the capacity for self-direction and self-control, it has undermined one of the principal sources of social cohesion, only to create new ones more constricting than the old, and ultimately more devastating in their impact on personal and political freedom." The drug war and its ancillary programs like DARE are only part of this undermining of the family, but everyone concerned about the State's intrusion into the private lives of individuals and families must see the attack on all fronts. So when you next spy a DARE bumper sticker or T-shirt, remember that the Statist usurpers of parental authority are afoot and, whether you use illicit substances or not, they distrust and oppose your role as parent. As we all know, these days it takes a village to raise a child, and sometimes you've got to throw a few moms and dads in prison for the kid to grow up properly servile. Contact: jmiller wnd.comJoel Miller is the author of Bad Trip: How the War Against Drugs is Destroying America.Newshawk: cloud7Source: LewRockwell.comAuthor: Joel MillerPublished: July 13, 2004Copyright: 2004 LewRockwell.comContact: lew lewrockwell.com Website: http://www.lewrockwell.com/CannabisNews -- Dare Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/DARE.shtml Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help Comment #9 posted by psthbng on July 17, 2004 at 08:32:49 PT: DARE Any follow up on the kids who ratted out their parents? The lucky ones move on to relatives, what of the ones that go into State Custody? Thx. [ Post Comment ] Comment #8 posted by global_warming on July 14, 2004 at 09:25:39 PT Deeper and deeper It started out with drugs and now, if you mutter your'e thoughts about the current administration in front of the children...Most of you can fill in the blanks, it doesn't matter whether its drugs or something else, remember "you are either with us or against us",...the warriors will always be looking for some reason to unleash their violence...sure wish they would have some weed, maybe it would calm them down.. [ Post Comment ] Comment #7 posted by mamawillie on July 14, 2004 at 07:55:19 PT TAP? I wonder if teachers against prohibition merged with another group or something.. their web site isn't working. That's too bad.. they had some good information on there about DARE and drug testing, etc. [ Post Comment ] Comment #6 posted by mamawillie on July 14, 2004 at 07:51:11 PT Sheep! The problem here lies with the parents. Really. Parents have the ability to speak out at school board meetings, they have the ability to opt their children OUT of the DARE program, and they have the ability to challenge the failure statistics of the DARE program.I've seen this mentality even on Overgrow. Parents who smoke and use MJ are so desperate for their children to NOT use the hard drugs that they think DARE will help.http://www.teachersagainstprohibition.org > has some good information on why DARE shouldn't be taught in the school systems. There are no statistics to show it helps anything, it is expensive, and the LEO who teaches it belongs on the street fighting crime.Personally, I believe drug use and abuse is a medical issue. LEO in NO WAY should be teaching what to do about drug addicts. If people are truly hooked on Coke or Meth, they belong in a detox program, NOT IN JAIL!Thankfully, DARE is not taught in the school where my children attend. But if it did, I would actively fight to get it out of the school, and if that was unsuccessful, then I'd opt my kids out.The more people who actively choose to opt their kids out, the less sheep. The less sheep, the more expensive DARE becomes for that school. [ Post Comment ] Comment #5 posted by kaptinemo on July 14, 2004 at 05:16:56 PT: And I am not engaging in hyperbole Because something like this has already happened, in America. It started out as a social studies experiment, and became a very ugly reality:About Morton Rhue and 'The Wave' http://library.trinity.wa.edu.au/subjects/english/fiction/rhue.htmfrom a link on the page: http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/3145/wave.html#nofiction*No fiction ... The Wave is based on the real experience of a high school class in Palo Alto, CA (USA), in April 1967. History teacher Ron Jones came up with a seemingly innocent classroom experiment to explain his students why in the 1930's and 40's many (young) Germans were so under the spell of Adolf Hitler that they allowed or even helped the systematic murdering of millions of innocent Jews. The experiment was successful beyond expectation: after only a few weeks, a movement called 'The Wave' had been founded, whose members at first sought for community-feeling and a healthy working-discipline, but soon after started to see the movement and it's mysterious leader as purposes in themselves. Those opposing the movement became enemies, life-long friends were seperated from each other. Worse still, criticism was met with aggression and intimidation. For some time, it seemed that Jones had lost control of his experiment, and was caught in it's momentum himself. Finally, he ended the nightmare by confronting the students with their leader, the man they had been following with such vigour. Many cried and all were shocked when they learned that it was Hitler, or Mussolini, or any other dictator responsible for many deaths...*I repeat, this is the logical direction of programs like DARE which encourage children to become informants. It has already happend. It is the reason why I keep harping about the dangers to the present parental generation that allows such humiliations of forcing children to urinate in front of strangers for testing purposes; they will someday reap what they sow when their 'properly indoctrinated' children apply their lessons to their own parents. The parents of the child who ratted them out have only learned what far too many have discovered to their own sorrow: as Hitler once said to his detractors: "We don't need you; we already have your children!"The DARE officer has YOUR children, Mr. and Ms. America. But it's not too late to teach them what freedom means, before both they and you lose yours through apathy and ignorance... [ Post Comment ] Comment #4 posted by kaptinemo on July 14, 2004 at 04:49:14 PT: Dammit, I wish Mr. Miller would stop it (Chuckling) At this rate, I won't have any more thunder. He keeps spiriting it all away.But the core of his thesis can't be denied; the DrugWar is like many other wars if only in one respect: it needs 'intelligence'.By 'intelligence', I am of course not referring to rational application of native mental ability to derive a sensible course of action. It doesn't require a Cray computer-like mind to figure out the DrugWar is a hopeless botch that should be mercifully put down like a rabid dog. I mean 'intelligence' as the simple gathering of facts to enable them to do their jobs.In war, there are two types of 'intel': SIGINT and HUMINT. SIGINT or Signals Intelligence, is entirely technology oriented. For DrugWarriors, that's tapped phones, snitches wearing wires, laser/sound recordings, FLIR infra-red detectors to spot grow-ops, etc.But HUMINT? "Human Intelligence?" That requires the old fashioned way of doing things.With spies.Sometimes it means 'undercover' police. But usually that HUMINT means informants. Most of whom are only in it either to dodge the worst aspects of their own getting caught, or for the money. Neither sort is reliable. So the DrugWarriors have done, just as the Nazis in Germany, the Fascists of Italy and the Communists in Russia did and those putative Communists ruling China are doing: using children as their sources of HUMINT.In short, the DrugWarriors are engaging in behavior every bit as despiccable as those late and unlamented blights on humanity did. I thought that what's we supposedly fought WW2 and the Cold War to prevent from happening to our shores?I half expect the DARE officers to teach a salutation to their charges. Nothing so foreign sounding or as obvious as "Sieg Heil!". Something more Americanized, like, "With uhs or aginst uhs!". It's coming, sportsfans, it's coming... [ Post Comment ] Comment #3 posted by billos on July 14, 2004 at 03:07:23 PT Speaking of the Devil......................... We as a nation have become such a phony society it’s no wonder people don’t trust anyone anymore.Most of us typically go to work at the same time 5 days a week. We make sure that when we are at work every hair is in place and we are on our best behavior.Behind the scenes shows us a very different America. Folks from all walks of life seem to be getting themselves in hot water during their free time.We have domestic abuse, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, child abuse, road rage, murders, shootings, stabbings, drinking and driving, hazings, car-jackings, rapes, all being done by folks from all walks of life. They are not isolated incidents either. They are common everyday occurrences. People involved are senators, businessmen, congressmen, doctors, talk show hosts, radio personalities, cops, mayors, governors, even our own president. Teenagers do daring stunts only to be killed or maimed. Ten year olds are killing ten year olds with guns and mock wrestling. Mothers are throwing their new born children into dumpsters while others drown their kids. Husbands are killing their pregnant wives. Violence is a very big part of our society. Our government continues to ruin lives in the name of saving them. They have outsourced our nation’s resources while plundering its citizens into record debt and wasting our soldiers’ lives for a grave mistake committed by our Faith based Christian president. Could the prophets be right? [ Post Comment ] Comment #2 posted by global_warming on July 14, 2004 at 01:11:50 PT Global Prison "No uppity slaves will be tolerated"-It looks like we are already in a prison. I wonder if they will let one out early for good behavior? And where is out? [ Post Comment ] Comment #1 posted by Treeanna on July 13, 2004 at 19:29:41 PT Speak of the Devil And up he pops.Nice highlight to the earlier story. 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