THIS IS YOUR (FATHER'S) BRAIN ON DRUGS

A SPATE of news reports have breathlessly announced that science can
explain why adults have such trouble dealing with teenagers:
adolescents possess "immature," "undeveloped" brains that drive them
to risky, obnoxious, parent-vexing behaviors. The latest example is a
study out of Temple University that found that the "temporal gap
between puberty, which impels adolescents toward thrill seeking, and
the slow maturation of the cognitive-control system, which regulates
these impulses, makes adolescence a time of heightened vulnerability
for risky behavior."

We know the rest of the script: Commentators brand teenagers as
stupid, crazy, reckless, immature, irrational and even alien, then
advocate tough curbs on youthful freedoms. Jay Giedd, who heads the
brain imaging project at the National Institutes of Health, argues
that the voting and drinking ages should be raised to 25. Deborah
Yurgelun-Todd, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, asks whether
we should allow teenagers to be lifeguards or to enlist in the
military. And state legislators around the country have proposed
raising driving ages.

But the handful of experts and officials making these claims are
themselves guilty of reckless overstatement. More responsible brain
researchers -- like Daniel Siegel of the University of California at
Los Angeles and Kurt Fischer at Harvard's Mind, Brain and Education
Program -- caution that scientists are just beginning to identify how
systems in the brain work.

"People naturally want to use brain science to inform policy and
practice, but our limited knowledge of the brain places extreme
limits on that effort," Dr. Siegel told me. "There can be no
'brain-based education' or 'brain-based parenting' at this early
point in the history of neuroscience."

Why, then, do many pundits and policy makers rush to denigrate
adolescents as brainless? One troubling possibility: youths are being
maligned to draw attention from the reality that it's actually
middle-aged adults -- the parents -- whose behavior has worsened.

Our most reliable measures show Americans ages 35 to 54 are suffering
ballooning crises:

. 18,249 deaths from overdoses of illicit drugs in 2004, up 550
percent per capita since 1975, according to data from the National
Center for Health Statistics.

. 46,925 fatal accidents and suicides in 2004, leaving today's
middle-agers 30 percent more at risk for such deaths than people aged
15 to 19, according to the national center.

. More than four million arrests in 2005, including one million for
violent crimes, 500,000 for drugs and 650,000 for drinking-related
offenses, according to the F.B.I. All told, this represented a 200
percent leap per capita in major index felonies since 1975.

. 630,000 middle-agers in prison in 2005, up 600 percent since 1977,
according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

. 21 million binge drinkers (those downing five or more drinks on one
occasion in the previous month), double the number among teenagers
and college students combined, according to the government's National
Household Survey on Drug Use and Health.

. 370,000 people treated in hospital emergency rooms for abusing
illegal drugs in 2005, with overdose rates for heroin, cocaine,
pharmaceuticals and drugs mixed with alcohol far higher than among teenagers.

. More than half of all new H.I.V./AIDS diagnoses in 2005 were given
to middle-aged Americans, up from less than one-third a decade ago,
according to the Centers for Disease Control.

What experts label "adolescent risk taking" is really baby boomer
risk taking. It's true that 30 years ago, the riskiest age group for
violent death was 15 to 24. But those same boomers continue to suffer
high rates of addiction and other ills throughout middle age, while
later generations of teenagers are better behaved. Today, the age
group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including
illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

Strangely, the experts never mention even more damning new
"discoveries" about the middle-aged brain, like the 2004 study of
scans by Harvard researchers revealing declines in key memory and
learning genes that become significant by age 40. In reality, human
brains are highly adaptive. Both teenagers and adults display a wide
variety of attitudes and behaviors derived from individual conditions
and choices, not harsh biological determinism. There's no "typical
teenager" any more than there's a "typical" 45-year-old.

Commentators slandering teenagers, scientists misrepresenting shaky
claims about the brain as hard facts, 47-year-olds displaying far
riskier behaviors than 17-year-olds, politicians refusing to face
growing middle-aged crises ... if grown-ups really have superior
brains, why don't we act as if we do?