DRUG WAR SCAPEGOATS TEENS, OVERLOOKS BOOMERS' ABUSE

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.

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 teenagers menaced by inner-city youths' habits.

It's The Parents, Not The Kids

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

The ''teenage 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. Media panics over supposed teenage 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.

Records Refute The Headlines

Teenage ''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 teenagers, 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).

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 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.

Discard Old Images

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. 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 teenagers, 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.