RAVING JUNK

Few Outlets Dissent From The Latest Teen-Drug Hysteria

The summer's teen-drug media frenzy couldn't decide whether the "dance
club" designer drug ecstasy (MDMA) or that old standard heroin was killing
more suburban kids. ABC News, a partner in the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America's anti-dope crusade, faithfully hyped every official scare:
"Ecstasy sweeping the country" (3/5/00); "Ecstasy use soars" (6/7/00);
"Heroin ravages younger users" (7/10/00, 7/12/00).

Officials pronounced that the "epidemic" of teens and young adults downing
synthetic drugs at nightclubs and "rave" parties exceeded the crack cocaine
scourge. "Dozens of people are reported to have died," ABC (7/26/00)
breathed, failing to mention that the number bandied (100) was ecstasy's
estimated worldwide death toll over the last two decades.

Ecstasy, CBS's 60 Minutes II (4/27/00) quoted police, "is no different than
crack or heroin." But the latest federal Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN)
report reveals one big difference: In 1998, coroners implicated heroin in
4,300 deaths, cocaine in 4,500 and alcohol mixed with drugs in 3,600. The
entire family of "club drugs," from MDMA to GHB, accounted for a total of
15 deaths. Further, none of these designer drugs' victims were children:
Seven were aged 18-34, eight over 35.

Ecstasy abuse can lead to emergency room treatments for "dehydration,
anxiety and exhaustion," 60 Minutes II added, citing DAWN figures. "In the
last few years, 1,100 hospital cases have been reported." 60 Minutes II
didn't mention that in 1998 alone, the same DAWN reports showed overdoses
of Tylenol (a sponsor of CBS News' "Ecstasy Spreads" Web posting)
contributed to 20,000 hospital cases and 36 deaths among persons 25 and
younger. That's 20 times more ER cases and five times more deaths than
blamed on ecstasy.

For all designer drugs and ages, about 2,500 hospital ER cast's were
reported to DAWN in 1998. Only one-tenth of these were youths, casting more
doubt on the avalanche of scare-stories about kids expiring at raves and
White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey's warning to parents that "their
young people are at risk in that environment" (ABC World News Tonight,
3/5/00, CNN 8/2/00). Most of the media echoed official claims that at
raves, "illegal drugs like ketamine, ecstasy, LSD and other drugs are
offered as innocently as hors d'oeuvres" (Dateline NBC, 5/2/00).

The official and media hyperbole obscured ecstasy's actual dangers. Law
enforcement claims that ecstasy and GHB are "kill pills" are absurd;
neither causes serious reactions except when taken in large quantities
(DRCNet, 9/2/00). Some researchers have raised important questions about
MDMA's long-term effect on brain functioning (ABC, 5/17/00), but the
evidence is not nearly as damning or conclusive as ABC, Dateline and CNN
presented it. Most deaths and hospital cases blamed on ecstasy resulted
from contaminated drugs, prompting authorities in the United Kingdom,
Switzerland and San Francisco to promote public-health approaches (such as
relaxed penalties and providing free water at raves).

Fortunately, two big magazines refused to join the rave-panic stampede.
Time's cover story, 'The Lure of Ecstasy" (6/5/00), pointed out the
clubdrug wave washed over Europe during the early 1990s, when millions of
doses were taken every weekend, but now "the drug's sexiness has worn off."
Only 5 percent of young European adults surveyed had ever tried ecstasy,
and "the number of habitual users is small." Shockingly, most ravers go for
the music and dancing, not drugs, Time reported.

U.S. News & World Report (6/26/00) also lent perspective: "Kids are looking
to raves to find a 21st Century community. . . . Indeed, every generation
since at least the 1920s has had its narcotic and the music scene that
revolved around it: The Jazz Age had liquor, the '60s its Grateful Dead
shows, marijuana and hallucinogens, and disco was fueled by cocaine."

And that about sums up the ecstasy panic: It's nothing new, it's nowhere
near as lethal as heroin, cocaine or alcohol, but taken to excess or when
adulterated, it can have damaging effects. Just like thousands of
substances Americans buy from legal dispensers - including Tylenol.

Three Decades Of Junk Journalism

1970: "Kids and Heroin: The Adolescent Epidemic," trumpeted Time (3/16/70).
"A terrifying wave of heroin use among youth . . . has caught up teenagers
and even pre-adolescent children from city ghettos to fashionable suburbs."
Quoting unnamed "experts," Time predicted the number of teenage heroin
addicts in New York "may mushroom fantastically to 100,000 this summer. . .
. Disaster looms large."

Although exaggerated, I 970's fears had some foundation. Coroner reports
showed 125 teenagers died from heroin overdoses in New York City and 140 in
California that year. By the late 1970s, teenage heroin abuse subsided and
remains low to this day (the teenage heroin toll in 1998: two deaths in New
York City, nine in California). Press fear, however, escalated.

1980: The Washington Post's front-page profile (9/28/80) of "Jimmy," a
black eight-year-old junkie, ignited pandemonium. Mayor Marion Barry
ordered police and teachers to inspect children's arms for needle holes.
Despite a $10,000 reward and intensive searches, neither Jimmy nor any
other child addict was found. "Jimmy" did not exist, Post reporter Janet
Cooke later confessed.

1996: Trainspotting panic erupted. In a story that would shame the National
Enquirer. USA Today (7/19/96) declared "smoking or snorting smack is as
commonplace as beer for the younger generation." Rolling Stone (5/13/96)
branded Seattle "junkie town." Citing anecdotes, the article blamed
Seattle's tripling in heroin deaths from 1986 to 1994 on "young people"
from "white suburban backgrounds."

In fact, nearly all of Seattle's increase in heroin fatalities was among
aging baby boomers, not kids. The average age of Seattle's 500 heroin
decedents from 1995 through 1999 was 40. Only 1 percent were teenagers
(Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 7/21/00). Out of 2,500 Seattle
residents treated for heroin overdose in 1999, DAWN reported just seven
were adolescents.

Reporters stampeded to Plano, Texas, spotlighting its 19 teenage and
young-adults deaths from heroin overdoses in two years as the tip of a
national youth smack epidemic (L.A. Times, 11/30/97). As it turned out, the
Plano victims didn't know the "chiva" the smoked contained heroin. More
crucial, the national media herd never pondered why, if smack was sweeping
the young, they had to journey to Plano to find a teen-heroin crisis.

Later, DAWN reports showed 1996's teen-smack panic was another media
chimera. Of 8,500 heroin deaths in 1996 and 1997, just 48 were teenagers -
and one-forth of these were Plano's. Of 145,000 hospital treatments for
heroin, fewer than 1,000 were youths.

2000: The suburban-teen-heroin hoax resurges, more fraudulent than ever.
"Teen heroin use is taking place under their parent's noses," CNN blared
(5/9/00). "The drug has moved into the middle class suburbs with
devastating effects."

"Teenagers and young adults are finding the drug more attractive," ABC News
declared (7/10/00), blaming the supposed outbreak on the War on Drugs' two
favorite scapegoats: suburban teens and minorities. ABC's follow-up
concerned Native American heroin abuse in New Mexico (7/12/00).

The simple truth officials and the media refuse to discuss: Today's chief
abusers of heroin are not kids or minorities, but white middle-agers.
DAWN's latest reports show four-fifths of over-dose death and hospital
cases in 1999 were over age 30. Fewer than 1 percent were teenagers; just 5
percent were under age 25.

Since 1980, the number of Americans imprisoned for drug offenses has soared
more than tenfold, reaching 458,131 in 1997. In California (which now
spends $1 billion per year to imprison drug offenders), adults of color
under age 30 are just one-sixth as likely to die from drug abuse as white
middle-agers, but are twice as likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses
(Justice Policy Institute, 8/00).

Why are so few teenagers dying from heroin? They're not using it. The 1999
National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported that of 25,000 12- to
17-year-olds surveyed, just 100 had ever used heroin; only 75 had tried it
in the previous year.

Drug-Reform Groups Join In

Both drug-war and drug-reform interests exploit the fiction of a rising
teen-drug crisis in order to blame each other for it. McCaffrey and other
drug warriors parade the image that "substance abuse among young people has
grown" in their crusade to suppress all "material legitimizing drugs … in
music, film, television, the Internet and mass market outlets" (L.A. Times,
1/2/97).

Groups seeking to reform drug policy counterclaim that "it is the drug war
which [McCaffrey] so ardently supports that is responsible for the increase
in heroin use among our youth" (Drug Sense Weekly, 5/12/00). The reformist
Common Sense for Drug Policy (www.cspd.org) even charges that McCaffrey
"failed to mention … a continuing rise in hard-drug use by our youth," and
therefore understated "the dimensions of adolescent drug use"! A CSDP ad
campaign, charting the sharp increases in drug imprisonments and overdose
deaths from 1980 to 1996, declared, "The more we escalate the drug war, the
more young people and others die."

The true "dimensions of adolescent drug use" CSDP itself "failed to
mention" consist of vanishingly low levels of teenage hard-drug use and
casualties, and teenage overdose rates no higher today than in 1980; it's
middle-agers who suffer skyrocketing drug demise. Why are reformers silent
on this damning reality while helping McCaffrey misrepresent young people
as the nation's biggest drug problem?

"With horrifyingly generic teen-pop acts blaring out from MTV day in and
day out, it's a wonder more kids haven't turned to drugs to escape the
awful racket," Time's balanced story on ecstasy ended. The same amen could
be applied to the horrifyingly generic racket about "teens and drugs"
blaring from Washington, most of the press, and even drug-reform groups
that should know better.

Some of the referenced items:

Time's cover story, 'The Lure of Ecstasy" (6/5/00):
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n713/a04.html

L.A. Times, 11/30/97 Old Enemy Stalks Kids of Privilege:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v97/n637/a01.html

DrugSense Weekly, 5/12/00:
http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2000/ds00.n149.html#com4

Common Sense for Drug Policy ad "The more we escalate the drug war, the
more young people and others die."
http://www.csdp.org/ads/themore.htm