Letters

From the June 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

I object to Mr. Elliott's portrayal of me as the Great Defender of DARE who ignores overwhelming evidence to the contrary and says DARE works. What I do say is that RTI's meta- analysis study has limitations of its own, which RTI wrote about in the American Journal of Public Health but glossed over in an attention- grabbing press release.

Mr. Elliott decries DARE's hamhanded efforts to protect its good name, but all of the actors involved in this story have an agenda: DARE wants to shine. RTI wants news media attention. And Jeff Elliott wants to be the Great Muckraker. Unfortunately, nobody's agenda included an objective search for the truth.

William DeJong, Ph.D.

Lecturer

Department of Health and

Social Behavior

Harvard School of Public Health

Boston, MA

Mr. Elliot responds: While William DeJong's 1987 article does list some of the study's limitations, his colleagues have pointed out much more serious flaws with his research, and further noted that his claims of improvement were exaggerated. Example: Dr. DeJong states that "DARE students reported significantly less use of cigarettes and hard liquor." Only by carefully reading the table is it apparent that the improvement by DARE students was barely measurable. No difference at all was found for use of marijuana, speed, downers, inhalants, or PCP.

Worse, the DeJong study downplayed the "boomerang effect," where DARE seems to have encouraged some of its students to experiment with drugs. When the results were analyzed by gender, DARE boys showed a slight improvement in drug use, knowledge, and attitudes. DARE girls, however, became worse by almost exactly the same degree. But in his discussion, Dr. DeJong emphasized the good news and hid the bad: "Boys who had DARE showed much less substance use, whereas girls displayed few differences between the DARE and NO DARE groups."

At the end of Dr. DeJong's paper he makes a pitch for DARE funding. While he concedes that "DARE represents a major investment," he adds, "Public officials are convinced, however, that this cost is inconsequential when compared to the price their city pays each year in ruined lives and street crime caused by substance abuse...the preliminary results of this short-term evaluation indicate that this investment in Project DARE has a good chance of paying dividends." A footnote even includes an address for DARE to write for further information. Such a naked endorsement makes Dr. DeJong's complaint that "nobody's agenda included an objective search for the truth" all the more interesting.

Movie Time

Charles Oliver, comparing the running times of modern movies to those of older movies ("Epic Burnout," Mar.), did not look up enough older movies to make his conclusions valid. Had he looked up the running times of films from just after WWII, he would have encountered more running times comparable to those that he complains about in today's films.

The running times for such contemporary entertainments as True Lies (138 minutes) compare with those of such 1945-1946 non-epics as Rhapsody in Blue (139 min.), The Jolson Story (128 min.), Mr. Skeffington (146 min.), and Humoresque (125 min.). The lengths of such recent Academy Award winners for Best Picture as Dances With Wolves (181 min.) and Schindler's List (192 min.) compare with the 1946 and 1948 Best Picture winners, Best Years of Our Lives (178 min.) and Hamlet (153 min.), and all four are a half-hour shorter than 1939's Best Picture, Gone With the Wind (222 min.).

Mr. Oliver says that audiences would not miss the alleged "fat" in movies were they to be shorn of 15 minutes, and yet some failed in pre-release screenings precisely because their makers were deprived of the opportunity to properly tell their stories. Los Angeles Times critic Charles Champlin once wrote of seeing The Godfather before release in a 2 1/2-hour cut that was not as emotionally moving as the release version, which benefited from a half-hour of additions that fleshed out subjects that had previously been unclear or without motivation. James Cameron (director of True Lies) added a half-hour back to his The Abyss for video and theatrical re-release, winning converts from those previously unenthused about his movie. I was astonished to learn what vital scenes had to be excised from the 173-minute version so the title could be booked into theaters as a 145-minute film.