Recently there has been an increase in Australian public funds for drug education. The accompanying rhetoric asserts that it is to facilitate and advance abstinence among young people. This contradicts some State Government education guidelines endorsing harm minimization. A literature search of the key electronic databases, drug agency libraries, the Internet, and reference lists provided evaluation research in school-based drug education. There is little evidence to support the claim of abstinence as a consequence of drug education. The predictors of adolescent drug use are social and personal; schools can have little effect on those. The article describes four models of drug education. However, schools mix activities from different models, and exposure is too slight for major effects on behavior. The article concludes that, although methodological difficulties affect findings, none of the models shows consistent behavioral effects over time, and there is a mismatch between the public rhetoric and the evaluation research literature. The paper explores reasons for this, including the existence of two stakeholder groups, one with exaggerated ideological anti-drug messages and one with more realistic perspectives on what schools can reasonably achieve. The paper observes that the rhetoric is needed to generate continued funding, yet this same rhetoric sets up criteria which doom drug education to failure. Figures, references