Just say no again.

Although Renee Moilanen's article on the "new" anti-drug education ("Just Say No Again,"January) was interesting and enlightening, and I'm no fan of the war on drugs, I'm not convinced by her negative appraisal of the Life Skills Training program.

Any study of a program's efficacy has to cut out participants who don't complete enough of the program for it to be effective. If a high school student shows up for class only three days a week, every week, and then gets a poor grade at the end of the year, the course material seems a poor starting point for troubleshooting.

It may be that the kids who do barely hall the training tend to be the same ones who use drugs, but the program designers don't know whether that's true at the outset, and they have to draw a line somewhere. Without a separate study to first determine what percentage of students tend both to do drugs and to skip out of anti-drug training, the researchers can't take such associations into account.

It's certainly possible (and maybe likely) that the study's authors chose the most favorable cutoff point. I wonder what it would have looked like if they'd chosen only kids who'd completed 80 percent of the coursework. If the numbers didn't look good from that angle, it would be more damning than the criticism offered by Moilanen. Too bad we'll probably never see the raw numbers required to draw our own conclusions.

Dan Hull

Antelope, CA