THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON DRUGS, DAD

WHEN releasing last week's Monitoring the Future survey on drug use,
John P. Walters, the director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, boasted that "broad" declines in teenage drug use promise
"enormous beneficial consequences not only for our children now, but
for the rest of their lives." Actually, anybody who has looked
carefully at the report and other recent federal studies would see a
dramatically different picture: skyrocketing illicit drug abuse and
related deaths among teenagers and adults alike.

While Monitoring the Future, an annual study that depends on teenagers
to self-report on their behavior, showed that drug use dropped sharply
in the last decade, the National Center for Health Statistics has
reported that teenage deaths from illicit drug abuse have tripled over
the same period. This reverses 25 years of declining overdose
fatalities among youths, suggesting that teenagers are now joining
older generations in increased drug use.

What the Monitoring the Future report does have right is that
teenagers remain the least part of America's burgeoning drug abuse
crisis. Today, after 20 years, hundreds of billions of dollars, and
millions of arrests and imprisonments in the war on drugs, America's
rate of drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, crime and social
ills stand at record highs.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the
number of Americans dying from the abuse of illegal drugs has leaped
by 400 percent in the last two decades, reaching a record 28,000 in
2004. The F.B.I. reported that drug arrests reached an all-time high
of 1.8 million in 2005. The Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal
agency that compiles statistics on hospital emergency cases caused by
illicit drug abuse, says that number rose to 940,000 in 2004 -- a huge
increase over the last quarter century.

Why are so few Americans aware of these troubling trends? One reason
is that today's drug abusers are simply the "wrong" group. As David
Musto, a psychiatry professor at Yale and historian of drug abuse,
points out, wars on drugs have traditionally depended on "linkage
between a drug and a feared or rejected group within society." Today,
however, the fastest-growing population of drug abusers is white,
middle-aged Americans. This is a powerful mainstream constituency, and
unlike with teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the
government or the news media to present these drug users as a grave
threat to the nation.

Among Americans in their 40s and 50s, deaths from illicit-drug
overdoses have risen by 800 percent since 1980, including 300 percent
in the last decade. In 2004, American hospital emergency rooms treated
400,000 patients between the ages 35 and 64 for abusing heroin,
cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, hallucinogens and "club drugs"
like ecstasy.

Equally surprising, graying baby boomers have become America's
fastest-growing crime scourge. The F.B.I. reports that last year the
number of Americans over the age of 40 arrested for violent and
property felonies rose to 420,000, up from 170,000 in 1980. Arrests
for drug offenses among those over 40 rose to 360,000 last year, up
from 22,000 in 1980. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that
440,000 Americans ages 40 and older were incarcerated in 2005, triple
the number in 1990.

Yet drug officials seem fixated on paper-and-pencil surveys of drug
use by teens. In releasing its survey last week, the Office of Drug
Control Policy trumpeted that "America's balanced strategy to reduce
drug use is working." Representative Mark Souder, an Indiana
Republican who has been a top supporter of federal antidrug efforts,
says "the Bush administration is doing very well" on this front
because "drug use, particularly among young people, is down."

But, some may say, don't teenage drug use rates predict future drug
problems? To the contrary: 30 years of experience shows that
fluctuations in the percentage of youths who report using drugs on
surveys has almost nothing to do with the harm that drug abuse causes
(addiction, disease, injury, death, crime, family and community
distress), either in adolescence or later in life.

I compared teenage drug use trends reported annually by Monitoring the
Future since the 1970s with trends for other behaviors and with
federal crime, health and education statistics. In years in which a
higher percentage of high school seniors told the survey takers they
used illicit drugs, teenagers consistently reported and experienced
lower rates of crime, murder, drug-related hospital emergencies and
deaths, suicides, H.I.V. infection, school dropouts, delinquency,
pregnancy, violence, theft in and outside of school, and fights with
parents, employers and teachers.

The data also contradict Mr. Walters's claim that generations
reporting lower rates of drug use enjoy "less addiction, less
suffering, less crime, lower health costs and higher achievement." For
example, baby boomers rarely used illegal drugs as youths.

In 1972, the University of Michigan researchers who carry out
Monitoring the Future found that just 22 percent of high school
seniors had ever used illegal drugs, compared to 48 percent of the
class of 2005. Yet as that generation has aged, it has been afflicted
by drug abuse and its related ills -- overdoses, hospitalizations,
drug-related crime -- at far higher rates than those experienced by
later generations at the same ages.

It's time to end the obsession with hyping teenage drug use. The
meaningless surveys that policy makers now rely on should be replaced
with a comprehensive "drug abuse index" that pulls together largely
ignored data on drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, crime,
diseases and similar practical measures.

A good model is the California Department of Alcohol and Drug
Programs' fledgling drug abuse index, which I helped compile and which
aims to pinpoint which populations and areas are most harmed by drugs,
both legal and illicit.

Few experts would have suspected that the biggest contributors to
California's drug abuse, death and injury toll are educated,
middle-aged women living in the Central Valley and rural areas, while
the fastest-declining, lowest-risk populations are urban black and
Latino teenagers. Yet the index found exactly that. These are the
sorts of trends we need to understand if we are to design effective
policies.

The United States' drug abuse crisis has exploded out of control.
Scientifically designed strategies are urgently needed to target the
manifest drug-caused damage that current policies are failing
miserably to address.

Mike Males is a senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and
Criminal Justice.