Buzzkill!

When you're an 18-year-old blonde in Lee's Summit, getting out of a speeding ticket is so incredibly easy.

Buying drugs is even easier. But it takes a special talent to get out of a ticket and buy drugs at the same time.

As Laura tells it, she was doing 55 in a 35 mph zone, just like she always does, when the very same cop who always pulls her over stopped her again. She waited in her convertible while the Lee's Summit officer returned to his vehicle to run her driver's license information.

Laura was just minutes from her house, in the well-groomed neighborhood where she grew up. In a few weeks, she would leave it for the first time to attend college at a big state school.

While she waited on the policeman, Laura waved at her friend Dan, who was in his yard, shouting distance away. He walked over and leaned into her window.

"Laura, what are you doing?" he asked.

"I need to buy from you," she said.

"All right, when you're done with him, pull around," he told her.

Fifteen minutes later, Laura was blazing down the road again, glancing in her rearview mirror through Chanel sunglasses to make sure that the officer was out of sight. The cop let her off with a warning, but her wallet was $20 lighter thanks to the small wad of decent-grade pot that Dan had tucked into her purse.

Marijuana barely registers as a drug for Laura and her friends. It's just so routine, especially now that they've experimented with much more serious shit, such as cocaine. She knows kids who blew a couple of lines before accepting their diplomas at graduation.

Compared with some people she knows, Laura only dabbles in drugs. She cut back on the coke after one of her friends had a major freakout in class last semester and had to go to the hospital, then to therapy.

So there's a little pot in her purse, and a bottle of Smirnoff Ice barely out of sight between the toilet and the counter in the bathroom, which she has all to herself. Her bedroom is two full floors away from her parents; she and her brother control the whole basement. A screen door in Laura's room leads to the backyard, where a kidney-shaped pool overlooks a view of boats on a lake adjoining the property, their masts sticking out of the water like white straws. The privacy afforded to Laura and her friends Iris and Quinn means they're free to smoke Marlboro Lights poolside while their last high school summer drifts away.

Back in grade school, these girls -- Laura, Iris and Quinn aren't their real names -- would not have been considered at "high risk" for drug use. But in fifth grade they found themselves along the first line of defense in the war on drugs.

The DARE program.

The Lee's Summit Police Department was the first in Missouri to adopt the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, in 1987. The program, started by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1983, sends officers into fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms to instruct students on how to make good choices, build good self-esteem and say no to drugs.

But ask middle schoolers to explain what DARE is all about and they're likely to respond with shrugs, if not outright laughter.

DARE draws giggles from these Lee's Summit girls who can more readily list the drugs they've tried than the names of the boys they've kissed.

"You go first," says Iris, bumping Quinn with her shoulder.

"Ecstasy, 'shrooms. I've smoked, and I drink. That's pretty much it for me," Quinn says.

Iris counts off on her fingers, "Cocaine, Ecstasy, mescaline, 'shrooms, pot, opium -- "

"When did you do opium?" Quinn asks.

"Two weeks ago."

All three burst out laughing.

"With who?"

"My friend from work."

"Oh, shit!"

Laura glances at her friends with a guilty smile. "I've done cocaine ..." She corrects herself. "I do cocaine occasionally. It's, like, something fun that I do. I don't purchase it, but a lot of my friends will have it, and we'll do it occasionally. And, like, Xanax."

Ponytails nod all around. Everyone's tried Xanax, dipping from one friend or another's prescription.

A slew of studies in the mid-'90s showed that DARE had little or no impact on kids' drug use. In the corporate world, when your marketing strategy fails this badly, you change the company's name.

Instead, DARE just gets more funding.

Jackson County's DARE program is paid for by COMBAT (the Community Based Anti-Drug Tax), a quarter-cent sales tax that voters agreed to renew in August 2003. DARE consumes a relatively small portion of the overall COMBAT fund: DARE administrators expect to receive $1.29 million of 2004's estimated COMBAT intake of $19,650,000.

Imagine that Laura's newly purchased pot represents the money generated from the COMBAT sales tax. Of the green stuff in the baggie, 33 percent goes to law enforcement and corrections. Prosecutors get 22 percent. Treatment providers take 21 percent. Prevention programs, including but not limited to DARE, get 24 percent.

The people who decide how to spend the treatment and prevention money are the COMBAT commissioners -- Nancy Seelen of St. Luke's Health System; Dorothy Kennedy, a retired teacher; Aasim Baheyadeen, a longtime activist; Darrell Curls, chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Committee; Manuel Perez Jr., an administrator from the Kansas City, Missouri, Health Department; Gregory Grounds, a lawyer and former mayor of Blue Springs; and John Readey III, a partner with the Bryan Cave law firm. Four other members attend meetings but cannot vote because their programs receive COMBAT funds: Jackson County Prosecutor Mike Sanders; Independence Police Chief Fred Mills; Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department Major Gregory Mills; and Jackson County Sheriff Tom Phillips.