REVIVING THE LURE OF THE EVIL WEED

One day in 2010 or thereabouts, if all goes as current indicators suggest,
I will find tucked away in my boy Tom's sock drawer the great contraband of
his adolescent life, a pack of cigarettes. And when I go, pack in hand, to
confront my son, I will be muttering under my breath: God bless Bill
Clinton and Al Gore and John McCain and all the other visionaries of 1998.

It is a small point that seems to have escaped the great thinkers of our
statecraft, but teenagers have a certain affinity for bad behavior -- for
sin, for danger, for self-destruction, for outrageous acts and everyday
rebellions. And an American teenager is blessed in this regard, for
history's greatest consumer society offers as wonderful a variety in the
fashion of being bad as it does in every other.

There is alcohol, of course, but also marijuana and hashish and heroin and
cocaine and LSD; amphetamines and methamphetamines, barbiturates and
airplane glue, and animal tranquilizer and Ecstasy. There are the aesthetic
means of self-harm: tattooing, body piercing, scarification, anorexia,
bulimia. There is the outlaw life: gangs, guns, crimes, prison. In the area
of physical activity, there are many means of ensuring that one lives fast,
dies young and leaves a beautiful corpse, above all, the James Dean
perennial of fast dumb driving. And finally there is that most traditional
method of ruining one's young life, the love of someone much more bad than
you.

Tom will have the choice of all of these horrifying options, and doubtless
more. But thanks to the new Prohibitionists, I have hope he will have no
need for any of them. I have hope that he will be able to satisfy his wish
to be as bad as he can be not in the fashion of 1998 but of 1908, not in
the manner of Snoop Doggy Dogg but of Penrod Schofield. He will instead
sneak off in the alley to smoke the evil weed. Because the evil weed will
be the greatest evil, and the cheapest, and the most available, and the
easiest to master, with the least real short-term risk. The teen dream,
fulfilled.

Already, the signs are profoundly promising. Between 1991 and 1997, during
which time there was an unprecedented effort in America to both
propagandize and legislate against cigarettes, the Centers for Disease
Control found that smoking rates among high school students rose by nearly
one-third, going from 27.5 percent to 36.4 percent. Among white male high
schoolers, the smoking rate climbed to 51.5 percent; among white females,
it rose to 40.8 percent. Among black students, who have traditionally
smoked much less than their white counterparts, smoking increased by an
astounding 80 percent, with the rate rising from 12.6 percent to 22.7
percent.

These figures confused Michael Eriksen, the director of the CDC's Office of
Smoking and Health. "There's no way to take a good message out of this from
the data," Eriksen recently informed The Washington Post. "There's been
incredible rhetoric over the past few years, but very little has actually
changed." No, that's not quite scientifically correct. What's correct is
that there has been incredible rhetoric over the past few years and a great
deal has changed: Across sex, race and class lines, adolescents have chosen
to respond to the cigarette's newly enhanced status by smoking more.

Most parents (me too) would, of course, prefer that their children skip the
whole teen badness business, including smoking. But I suspect most also, if
they are honest about it, would admit that they would much rather their
children act out by means of an occasional sneaked cigarette than by taking
up drugs or booze or crime or by dropping out of school. For while most
forms of adolescent self-destruction are genuinely and immediately
threatening -- with the capacity to cripple a young life, or snuff it out
entirely -- smoking is not.

It is true that smoking often kills in the long term, and it is true that
90 percent of smokers start as teens. But smoking doesn't end anybody's
life at 15 or 18 or 21. And it is also true that two-thirds of teen smokers
will not go on to become long-term regular smokers. With tobacco the great
taboo, most will be forced to smoke in secret, which means relatively
rarely, and they will probably quit the vile habit fairly early in life.
Cigarette smoking will not have done them any good, but it won't have
killed them, or landed them in jail, or kept them out of college or
otherwise ruined their young lives. Which is not a bad deal, from a
parent's point of view. So keep it up, bluestockings, and here's a quiet
hypocritical hurrah for the new smell of teen spirit that is wafting across
the land.

Michael Kelly is a senior writer for National Journal.

) Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company