COCAINE AND WHITE TEENS

Last month, President Bush touted the results of a
government-sponsored study by the University of Michigan called
Monitoring the Future. It reported a broad decline in drug use among
young people since 2001. This included a 24 percent drop in the
overall use of illicit drugs. There was one exception he said: abuse
of painkillers. But, one important metric that wasn't mentioned, and
that stubbornly resisted the downturn, was the use of cocaine.

According to data from the group that produced the report, the
percentage of both black and white 12th graders who confessed to
using cocaine in the past 30 days has essentially stayed flat since
2001. The major difference is that white usage outweighs black usage
4 to 1. (If you take a longer view back to 1991, when cocaine usage
bottomed out following the outrageous '80s, usage among white 12th
graders since then has nearly doubled, while usage among black 12th
graders has fallen a bit.)

While we turned our attention to pills being swiped from parents'
medicine cabinets, the number of youngsters snorting white lines
continued virtually unabated, producing a striking consequence.

According to the most recent data from the Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration, admissions of white teenagers to drug
treatment centers for crack and cocaine abuse soared 76 percent from
2001 to 2006. Crack and cocaine was the only illicit drug category in
which the number of admissions for white teens grew over this period,
and in 2006 the number was at its highest level since these data have
been kept. By contrast, admissions among black teens for crack and
cocaine over the same period held steady. By 2006, white admissions
outnumbered those for blacks by more than 10 to 1. (It should be
noted that admissions for white youths abusing painkillers in 2006,
while growing, was still less than half the number of admissions for
those abusing cocaine that year.)

And there are ominous signs. According to the Monitoring the Future
study, the risk of using crack and cocaine, as perceived by
teenagers, is going down. The newly released 2009 National Drug
Threat Assessment puts it this way: "The decrease in perceived risk
suggests that adolescents are becoming less wary of trying cocaine,
which may sustain demand for the drug in the near future."

But, in a phone interview, David Murray, chief scientist in the White
House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, insisted that there
was good news: a sharp rise in the price of cocaine and a drop in its
purity since 2006, among other things, have cut into overall usage.

So, I thought, until policy makers put more of a focus on this issue
and figure out how to reach these students, should we just hope that
teens are too broke for this weak coke? I don't think so. We need a
real strategy, right now.