When Darlind Davis and her husband retired in 2004, they moved to Pinehurst, North Carolina (pop. 15,000), to enjoy their favorite hobby of golf. Pinehurst has eight golf courses—several of them ranked as among the world’s best—and Moore County, where Pinehurst is located, is known as “The Home of American Golf” because it has a total of forty-three golf courses, all within a fifteen-mile radius.

Although manicured fairways lend a bucolic feel to the area, Davis quickly realized that Moore County was struggling with the same social issues she had spent her career combating. “Pinehurst itself is upscale and lovely,” she said, “but the county as a whole is a mixture of rich and poor, young and old, and many ethnicities. It was struggling with growing numbers of minors abusing drugs and alcohol. I could hear alarm bells ringing.”

Davis was well acquainted with those bells. She had worked for thirty-five years in drug resistance education and was one of the country’s top experts. She had retired from her federal job in Washington, DC, feeling burned out and ready to slow down. But there was the reality that local citizens, who had formed Drug Free Moore County in 1989, had struggled ever since in their search for ways to stem the tide of teen drug abuse. Davis knew they could use her expertise.

She made the leap, signing on as a member of the board. “I found a wonderful, supportive group of people willing to do whatever it took,” she said. When the executive director became ill, Davis pitched in to help. And in 2008, when the executive director had to step down, she accepted the position. Retirement—and golf—would have to wait. 

Tackling the Problem

Drug Free Moore County is a coalition of thirty local agencies and organizations working to reduce underage abuse of alcohol and drugs. Coalition members include businesses, churches, civic groups, law enforcement, and community organizations. “We quickly identified prescription drug abuse as a major problem,” Davis said. “Teens went doctor shopping to get prescriptions and then sold the drugs, or they took drugs from the family medicine cabinet to use or sell. To call attention to the problem, we sponsored a take-back program for unused prescription drugs. In an eighteen-month period collected over two million pills—a simple but effective effort that allowed us to educate the public about the problem.”

The county also instituted local ordinances to help keep methamphetamine (meth) abuse at bay, for like much of the nation, Moore County was seeing an increase in its production and use, sometimes with deadly results.

Knowing that drugs and alcohol will always be present, and that teens, especially, are going to experiment, coalition members agreed that prevention education for middle school students needed to be next. In North Carolina, drug education in schools is included in comprehensive health education, but, said Davis, “not a lot of time is devoted to it. A distinct identifiable program does not exist.”

The first step for the local coalition was to identify the educational tool that best fit the county’s needs. Members formed a Prevention Task Force to systematically study ten of the top evidence-based prevention programs, including Project ALERT. “At the end of the day, we concluded that Project ALERT was the very best for our county,” Davis said. “It could be delivered outside the schools, at scout meetings, in the after-school programs, or at 4-H. It was economical, and, most importantly, it had the best outcomes.” Davis began working with Project ALERT Program Manager Leslie Thompson Aguilar to bring the program to Moore County.

Task Force members were pleased that lessons specifically addressed the problems associated with prescription drugs and meth, as well as other drugs, alcohol, and smoking. “Teen pregnancy and child obesity are also big problems here, so we also liked that lessons crossed over to other behavioral concerns, such as impulse control and decision making,” Davis said. “Kids need behavioral strategies and Project ALERT delivers them. Everyone got excited about the program.”

The Project ALERT Approach to Training

To fund Project ALERT, Davis helped get grants from the state and from the Moore County Community Foundation. When the first program materials arrived, the posters, videos, and three-ring notebooks attracted everyone’s attention. Then came training for both adult and youth leaders. Initially it was delivered by Project ALERT trainers. Later on, leaders were trained on line. Davis thought both ways were effective. “The trainers were top drawer,” she said, “and the on-line training is superior to anything I’d seen in my career.  I’m impressed that after you’ve had the training, you can continue to go to the website for updates at no cost, allowing teachers to stay current with new developments. It makes Project ALERT affordable to communities with limited budgets.”

What Davis appreciates most about the training is Project ALERT’s approach to teaching. “You ask the students questions and let them be the experts. You facilitate, instead of talking at them. Then you give them behavioral strategies to help them be self aware and stay safe. It’s much more effective than other methods.

“We know it’s working. The other day one of our presenters told me about a student who said the course had helped her refuse a friend’s offer of a cigarette because she knew the consequences--and because of Project ALERT, she knew how to say no.”

After two years of ground work, Project ALERT is firmly in place in Moore County. Currently, twenty different youth organizations offer it, including 4-H clubs, the Boys Club, and the Girls Club. Pinehurst’s parochial school system has integrated it into their health classes. It’s not yet in the public schools, but that’s the eventual goal.  Altogether Project ALERT is reaching about 200 young people in the county at any given time.

At the end of 2011, Davis resigned as executive director of Drug Free Moore County.  “I felt I had done my thing. I told them I would stay involved on an ad hoc basis, and I still get calls. But I’m also playing golf, so it’s okay.”

After Pennsylvania native Darlind Davis finished her master’s degree in elementary guidance and psychology, her first job was with Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, working in the field of child development. Two years later, in 1972, she returned to Pennsylvania to become chief of the state’s drug and alcohol prevention programs.  

“Moving into prevention felt natural to me. Because of my background in human development, I understood what constituted normal and abnormal behaviors,” she said. “And because my work had been with families and children at Hopkins, I knew how huge the drug problem had become.” 

In 1982 Davis was elected the first chairperson of the National Prevention Network (NPN), an organization comprised of all state prevention directors. “We had few standards at that time,” she said. “Everything was hit or miss. Mostly we just talked about the problems.” 

That began to change in 1983 when Nancy Reagan, then the First Lady, hosted a two-part landmark show on PBS called “The Chemical People.” Focusing on the seriousness of drug and alcohol abuse among young people, the program sparked national interest in community-centered efforts to combat these issues. “’This television show became an important milestone in the war on drugs,” Davis said. “Mrs. Reagan’s leadership helped focus public attention on the drug problems we faced as a nation.  It was during the Regan administration that organized approaches to drug prevention came into prominence.”

In 1982 Davis became Assistant Director for Prevention with the Maryland Alcoholism Control and Drug Abuse Administration. Among her new duties was administering state grant funding for alcohol and drug abuse prevention. She was also still chair of the NPN, a position she held for three years, and it was during this time that the organization started an annual conference to inform practitioners about new methodologies and evidenced-based drug prevention programs.

Not Enough to ‘Just Say No’

“In the 1980s, D.A.R.E. and Nancy Regan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign were out there,” Davis said, “and we had a few evidence-based programs like Project SMART.  Project ALERT was in development, but we wouldn’t have it until 1990. However, coalition approaches were growing. The Hilton Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation were important participants in looking at ways to involve the whole community. We also started questioning how the government and the private sector could work together, and who was responsible for what. We learned that everyone has roles to play. It was very positive.”  

A turning point occurred in 1986 when college basketball great, Leonard Bias, died of a cocaine overdose two days after he was signed to the Boston Celtics. “The nation was shocked that this could happen to such a fine athlete. His death turned everything upside down,” Davis remembered. “That was a very important year for drug prevention, because the government became fully committed to addressing the growing drug crisis. The result was the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), which we still have today.”

Davis moved to the Washington, DC area in 1987 to work for the Department of Education as a senior project officer for drug prevention programs in higher education. This began a seventeen-year stretch of working for the federal government in drug prevention. From 1988 to 1997 she worked as a deputy division director at CSAP, working with various coalitions on drug prevention. She served as liaison to several foundations, including the Hilton Foundation and the BEST Foundation, which they support. Ever since she has had an ongoing relationship with the BEST Foundation and Project ALERT.


Working Under Presidents Clinton and Bush

Her final position was with the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. She worked in an office building next to the White House from 1997 to 2004, during both the Clinton and Bush administrations.

The highlight of Davis’s tenure there was creating an interagency document titled Evidence-Based Principles of Prevention, which summarized the most important criteria for effective drug prevention. “My responsibility was to define what works, in line with what the research was showing. By then we had probably 25 different federal agencies with drug prevention programs, including HUD, the office of Juvenile Justice, and the Department of Education, and each agency had its own language and buzz words and we had to cut through all of that. We wrote the document in very simple language, saying that if you’re going to do drug prevention, here’s what it should look like.”

Today Davis looks back on her long career with a sense of satisfaction. But she knows there’s much work yet to do.

“We can’t stand still,” she said. “A new drug of choice is always going to come along, young people are always going to experiment, and we have to be on guard.

“Many times in my career I wondered if we were actually making progress. But I can see how far we’ve come. None of it happened easily. Many committed people have been involved through the years. Looking back, I’m very proud of all we’ve done.”

Davis and a Drug Free Moore County board member recently staffed an informational booth at a fall festival.