IS JOSEPH CALIFANO A GATEWAY DRUG?

What happens when America's most irresponsible flimflammers on teenage sex
(the Kaiser Family Foundation) and drug use (Joseph Califano Jr.'s Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University) team up? We get a
junk-science survey wildly exaggerating modest teen-risk percentages to 50
percent ...73 percent ... yes, even 89 percent!

Kaiser's survey for CASA found fewer than 5 percent of senior high school
students ever had sex after using drugs or alcohol. That makes teens safer
than grownups. Can't use that. So, Kaiser applied timeworn numbers-boosting
scams.

First: lump 15- to 17-year-olds with adults ages 18-24 (who are five times
more likely to have had boozy sex than high schoolers). Trumpet
married-couple and one-time behaviors (even years ago) as dire perils. And
the biggie: Highlight the youths' vague guesses as to whether "people my
age" (whoever that is) mix drinking and sex "a lot" (whatever that means).

Presto! Five percent (of 15- to 17-year-olds who admit having had
unprotected sex after using alcohol or drugs) balloons to 89 percent (of 15-
to 24-year-olds asked whether someone "my age" might).

As always, the press clarions the cooked-up numbers as "alarming teenage
risk." This is another institutional-media fraud in Califano's and Kaiser's
tireless crusade to convince youths that wanton drunkenness, drugging and
sex are perfectly normal adolescent behaviors. Which, if teens believe it
and initiate such "normalities," makes Califano a "gateway drug."

Yet … with record millions of intoxicated teens sexing up, how can the
National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy be crediting its client
programs' "strong 'abstinence first' message as well as information about
birth control" for the "record" decline in teen births? As the campaign and
fellow lobbies proudly announced, there were 51,000 fewer teen births in
2000 than in 1991. As they failed to announce, this decline consisted of
63,000 fewer births to married teens and 12,000 more births to unwed teens.
Adults were worse: marital births down 120,000, unwed births up 125,000.

To sex education programmers who lecture teens to wait until marriage and
welfare reformers who shame "illegitimate" childbearing: Please explain how
your get-tough policies and "strong abstinence" messages deterred married
couples from having babies while boosting unwed childbearing. The same
"personal responsibility" champions who lambasted 1.2 million unwed births
annually in the early 1990s as a catastrophic "epidemic" now smile on 1.3
million unwed births (a record high) in 2000 as success?

Speaking of character-challenged, the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy's (ONDCP) latest advertisements reviling teenage drug
experimenters as terrorist collaborators represent pure moral cowardice. If
ONDCP wants to demonize druggies for abetting assassins, it should stop
bullying 15-year-olds and pick on someone its own size. Vilify presidents
(starting with the incumbent), members of Congress and Supreme Court
justices who snorted or toked. Berate middle-aged, middle-American grownups,
our worst illegal-drug abusers. Remember: Silence is acceptance!

Televise ONDCP Director John Walters confessing: "I help fund terrorism! I
push disastrous polices fostering skyrocketing addiction and murder! In
1983, when the War on Drugs began, drug abuse sent 300,000 Americans to
hospital emergency rooms and 3,500 to morgues. After my calamitous 1980s
tenure as chief ONDCP strategist, drug abuse exploded to 400,000 hospital
emergencies and 8,000 deaths. In 2000, as Washington mindlessly perpetuated
my failed ideas, drug abuse surged to a record 600,000 hospital emergencies
and 12,000 deaths!

"Yes, I help keep addicts' and taxpayers' cash flowing to killers,
drug-thugs and fossilized drug-war interests (the real reason the drug war
persists) by concocting phony diversions attacking youngsters and
medical-marijuana patients."

Shameful? It's criminal. The United States suffers by far the worst health,
addiction and violence scourges of any Western nation. Our social policies
are a joke. Officials and selfish interests exacerbate these travesties by
peddling moralistic chicanery as science, foisting crowd-pleasing "messages"
instead of sound policy and beating up powerless scapegoats to hide
high-level derelictions.

Until we get serious by dumping the Califanos, Kaisers, drug czars, national
offices and campaigns, and the politically warped institutions exploiting
vital national issues as commodities and their junk-science road shows,
America will remain woefully weak within.

Mike Males, Justice Policy Institute senior researcher, teaches sociology at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales.