Red Emma’s

Max Felker-Kantor has assembled the first history of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 as a joint venture between the police department and the unified school district. By the mid-90s, it was taught in 75 percent of school districts across the United States. DARE received near-universal praise from parents, educators, police officers, and politicians and left an indelible stamp on many millennial memories. But the program had more nefarious ends, and Felker-Kantor complicates simplistic narratives of the War on Drugs. He shows how policing entered US schools and framed drug use as the result of personal responsibility, moral failure, and poor behavior deserving of punishment rather than something deeply rooted in state retrenchment, the abandonment of social service provisions, and structures of social and economic inequality.

"Max Felker-Kantor's illuminating and highly original study demonstrates how the DARE program mirrored the LAPD's racialized practices and how the 'soft' war on drugs undergirded the expansion of the carceral state. DARE to Say No will forever change the way we think about the war on drugs."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Max Felker-Kantor is an associate professor of history at Ball State University. He teaches courses in twentieth-century American and African American history. His research explores policing, race, policing, politics, and cities since World War II. His first book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) explores policing and antipolice activism in Los Angeles from the Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion. He is currently working on a new project on the history of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart Scandal and the origins of twenty-first century policing.

Colette Shade’s writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Interview Magazine, The Baffler, and Gawker. She writes about the culture, politics, and history of the 90's and the 2000's. Her first book, Y2K, is out in January 2025 from Harper Collins.