Francisco "Frank" Pegueros spent 26 years with the Los Angeles Police Department, retiring as a captain, and has spent the 30 years since as President and CEO of D.A.R.E. America. He has now been with the program longer than he was with the department. He told Dennis Collins, Craig Floyd and Bill Erfurth he has never had three bad days in a row — the standard he set when he took the job.
Most people's memory of D.A.R.E. is a T-shirt and an officer at the front of a classroom talking for 45 minutes about the evils of drugs. That version is gone. The original curriculum ran 17 lessons and worked as what one educator called "the sage on the stage." Today it runs ten lessons licensed from Penn State, the officer speaks for six to eight minutes, and the students work in small groups applying a four-step decision-making model to situations from their own lives. New topics arrive as enhancement lessons that slot in without breaking the sequence — which is how vaping, online safety and suicide prevention entered the program.
The threats have changed as much as the teaching. Pegueros describes a vaping industry that he says engineered its devices so illicit substances could be substituted in, then marketed bubblegum and soda flavors to children. He describes websites that publish dosing guidance for minors. He describes foreign actors extorting kids online, and a teen suicide crisis that D.A.R.E. now addresses in partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
What holds it together are two stories he tells almost in passing: a student who had not spoken in six years of school, who read her D.A.R.E. essay aloud at a full assembly; and an officer whose students' older siblings quietly decided to put themselves between her and a gang's retaliation plot. Every D.A.R.E. officer, he says, has one of those every semester.
Part 2 covers what police work costs the people who do it — and the academic whose research built the case against D.A.R.E., who now chairs its scientific advisory board.
Contains discussion of teen suicide, self-harm and online exploitation of children. If you're struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 in the US — call or text 988.
Learn more at https://behindbadge.org.
