MYTH OF TEEN-AGE DRUG ABUSE SHIELDS ADULTS

REMARKS by retiring drug czar Barry McCaffrey and accolades for the Steven
Soderbergh film "Traffic" by drug-policy reform groups frame a vigorous
drug-war debate -- circa 1970.

Thirty years ago, McCaffrey's goal to save our children from their own drug
use might have been relevant. So, too, "Traffic's" scenes of the daughter
of the film's drug czar sampling heroin in response to the hypocrisies of
liquor-swilling and pill-popping grown-ups.

But these vintage baby-boom notions have little to do with today's drug
realities. On one side, the rhetorical distortions and misdirected policies
of the Office of National Drug Control Policy squandered billions of
dollars and locked up millions of drug users -- and the United States is
enduring the worst drug-abuse crisis in its history.

As McCaffrey leaves office, the federal Drug Abuse Warning Network reports
that drug abuse soared to record peaks in 1999: An estimated 555,000
Americans were treated in hospitals for drug-related visits; at least
11,600 died from overdoses.

On the other side, reformers seeking to decriminalize marijuana and relax
drug policies perpetrate so many drug-war myths that they reinforce
hard-line attitudes even as they win minor improvements.

The chief drug-war myth is the "demographic scapegoat." Wars against drugs
(including Prohibition) always seek to link feared drugs to feared
populations: the Chinese and opium; Mexicans and marijuana; black musicians
and cocaine; and Catholic immigrants and alcohol. Today's war on drugs
sustains itself by depicting white suburban teen-agers menaced by
inner-city youths' habits.

No matter who peddles it, this image is unreal. In truth, the drug-abuse
crisis chiefly concerns aging baby boomers, mostly whites. A high schooler
is five times more likely to have heroin-, cocaine-or
methamphetamine-addicted parents than the other way around; far more senior
citizens than teen-agers die from illegal drugs.

Accordingly, a war on drugs that truly cared about protecting children
would make treating parents' addictions its top priority.

The teen-age heroin resurgence repeatedly trumpeted in headlines and
drug-war alarms is fabricated; it shows up nowhere in death, hospital,
treatment or survey records. The Drug Abuse Warning Network's most recent
hospital survey reports 84,500 treatments for heroin abuse nationwide in
1999; just 700 of these were for adolescents. Of 4,800 Americans who died
from heroin abuse, only 33 were under 18 years old.

Teen-age heroin epidemics breathlessly clarioned in some California cities
are refuted by hospital records that show just nine of San Francisco's
3,100 emergency treatments for heroin overdoses in 1999 were teen-agers, as
were 17 of San Diego's 1,100 and two of Los Angeles's 2,950.

Why aren't there more teen heroin casualties? Few use it. The National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse, released in September 2000, showed that .2
percent of 12- to 17-year-olds had used heroin at any time in the previous
year. Nor are the few heroin initiators getting younger (most remain over 21).

Four-fifths of California's heroin decedents are over the age of 30, and
three-fourths of them are white, a quintessentially mainstream demographic
neither drug warrior nor drug reformer wishes to target. Thus, policy
debate and cinematic representations promote a comfortable myth: Baby-boom
drug days are behind us.

Similarly, drug-reform publications such as DrugSense Weekly allege an
"increase in heroin use among our youth" to indict the drug war. Mike Gray,
author of "Drug Crazy," and other reformers claim decriminalizing and
regulating marijuana for adults would make it harder for teen-agers to get.
Ridiculous. The 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reports 12- to
17-year-olds use legal, adult-regulated cigarettes and alcohol 100 times
more than they use heroin; two to three times more teens drink or smoke
than use the most popular illicit, marijuana.

Teen-agers can get alcohol and drugs whenever they want them, yet suffer
very low casualties. Drug reformers' own research gospel, the Lindesmith
Center's exhaustive "Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts," finds no scientific
reason why teen-agers should be banned from using marijuana that would not
also apply to adults. In short, teen-agers are not the issue.

Drug policy will change only when compelling new information is introduced.
That means discarding first-wave baby-boomer drug images and moving toward
second-generation realities.

Throughout the Western world, young people are reacting against their
parents' hard-drug abuse by patronizing softer drugs such as beer and
marijuana. It's understandable that baby boomers would indulge moral panic
over any drug use by kids while denying their own middle-aged drug woes,
but these illusions should not govern 2000-era drug policy.

The Netherlands' 1976 Dutch Opium Act reforms recognized that modern
soft-drug use by young people is separate from the midlife hard-drug
crisis. Dutch studies showed that marijuana and hashish use was unrelated
to hard-drug abuse, except among a small fraction already inclined to
addiction. These conclusions were confirmed by the National Household
Survey on Drug Abuse analysts and long-term studies by University of
California researchers.

True, most drug abusers first tried drugs in their youth, as did most
nonabusers. But 90 percent of the 160 million American adults who used
marijuana or alcohol during adolescence did not find them "gateways" to
later addiction.

Whether or not Dutch-style reforms are feasible here, t-The United States
will not reduce its worst-ever drug-abuse crisis until politicians
radically revamp the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the facile
demographic scapegoating of young people. Yet, because drug reformers,
copying drug-war hard-liners, increasingly promote their agendas by
exploiting youth as fear-invoking symbols in today's anachronistic
"debate," genuine reform seems remote.

Mike Males is a Justice Policy Institute senior researcher and sociology
instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.