DECOYS IN THE DRUG WAR

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 were for adolescents. Of 4,800 Americans who died from
heroin abuse, only 33 were under 18 years old. Media panics over supposed
teen-age heroin outbreaks in Portland and Seattle last summer collapsed
when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the average
overdoser was 40 years old.

Teen-age 'heroin epidemics' in some California cities are refuted by
hospital records. 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 in the
previous year. Nor are the few heroin initiators getting younger -- most
remain over 21.

There are preppie kids who smoke heroin, as "Traffic" depicts, but their
numbers pale beside the tens of thousands of baby boomers whose addictions
are rooted in the Vietnam era. Four-fifths of California's heroin decedents
are over 30, and three-fourths of them are white, a quintessentially
mainstream demographic neither drug warriors nor drug reformers wish 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 drug, 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.

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.

The Netherlands' reforms stressing public-health strategies to contain
hard-drug abuse, coupled with tolerance for marijuana use by adults and
teen-agers, has produced a spectacular benefit: a 65 percent decline in
heroin deaths since 1980 (while U.S. heroin death rates doubled).

Whether or not Dutch-style reforms are feasible here, 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.