Cynicism Inducing Item

This is just a little tidbit that reminds us just how evil the US government can be. This time it’s from the Republicans.

Timeline: The DARE Program was born in Los Angeles in 1983, tasking LAPD street officers to show up at local public schools and teach some of what they had learned about the awful effects drug abuse has on people’s lives. Special Agent (DEA) Kiki Camarena was executed in 1985 in Mexico; the Red Ribbon Week program started in 1988 in his name. Right away, the DARE Program began using his name and embraced Red Ribbon Week. The DARE Program was injected into the US Department of Defense about 1989, first as a test pilot program. I was pulled into the program the next year, and the program was massively expanded over the next few years with the DoD.

Back in the late 1980s I was serving in the US Army Military Police in the Netherlands. Orders came down to put one of our patrolmen into the DARE Program. It put an experienced policeman into the school classroom to teach kids how to avoid getting involved in drug abuse. You can bet our station had experience with drug busts; we covered two international borders. The program was just a few years old back then, with big promotion from then President George Bush Sr. I was one of a handful to be in the first wave thrust into the plan to put troops into the DARE Program with Department of Defense Dependent Schools the year after a test run.

I got the job for my unit and went directly to the LAPD for training, where the program was born. I ended up taking the DARE Program to our local AFCENT School (including UK and Canadian kids), another school attached to a remote site in Coevorden, the small airbase at Kleinebrogel in Belgium, and the American Embassy High School in Bonn, Germany (with kids from other countries — Israel, Middle East, India, etc.). I loved doing that work. The kids appeared to think it was a big deal and I got lots of appropriate good vibes from the multiple command and support agencies above my unit. I believe I was the only MP in Europe working with international kids. Generals knew my name, and I had to be very careful setting precedents.

Part of the propaganda for the DARE Program was to mention Kiki Camarena. It really boosted the attention to the DARE Program. Camarena was a DEA agent who was tortured to death in Mexico while performing what amounted to spying on the drug trade sources there. The Red Ribbon Week is still pushed in schools in his name today.

Now, we need to remind ourselves that President Bush Sr. was head of the CIA before he was Regan’s VP. Then he succeeded Regan as POTUS. In other words, Bush was simply promoted to successively higher offices over the CIA, and still deeply involved the whole time. Well, it turns out Kiki Camarena was tortured and executed by the CIA. It seems the DEA discovered that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of drugs coming into the US. Think about it: The President that started the DARE Program knew that the execution of that DEA agent was at the hands of his own CIA people when he made an executive order to boost the DARE Program.

Bush Sr. was hardly alone in this. I don’t doubt the program did some good; I saw the results first hand with those kids in the same small community over several years. I’m still proud of my involvement. But tell me that cynicism isn’t justified.

Addenda: If I were boasting, I would include all the awards, and list the hobnobbing names, and all the peripheral accomplishments. I mentioned only enough to give the context of my involvement in the timeline, and to indicate I knew what I was talking about. This thing reached an awful lot of kids. And I’ll tell you that the DARE curriculum is crappy. The only reason the program did any good at all is because of the people. Sometimes a police station would send their best, not simply their most expendable.