PRESS, OFFICIALS IGNORE EXPLODING DRUG ABUSE                   FEB. 2, 2008

Ten days ago, YouthFacts sent out the following press statement to all major media alerting them of a major Centers for Disease Control Report and testimony showing drug abuse exploding to record peaks in 2005. The press response, like the official response: utter silence.

This is terrifying. Erupting drug abuse centered in middle-aged America is killing tens of thousands and hospitalizing hundreds of thousands every year, destroying families and communities, subjecting hundreds of thousands of children to abuse and neglect and packing foster care systems to unmanageable peaks, fostering gun violence among inner-city drug dealers, inciting an epidemic of middle-aged crime and imprisonment costing Americans tens of billions of dollars annually, and now creating a spinoff drug abuse epidemic among teens and young adults. Yet, because today's drug epidemic is mainly white middle-aged adults--a powerful population that is "not supposed to abuse drugs"--the media and officials can't talk about it. The rigid media and official rule: drugs can ONLY be discussed as crises of youth and minorities.

Are today's aging officials, institutions, interest groups, and news media capable of facing our most pressing social problems? The answer is simply NO.

Drug Abuse Deaths Explode in 2005                                                     24 Jan. 2008

Drug overdose is now second leading cause of non-natural death, CDC says. But since the worst prescription drug abusers are not teens, but parents, the White House and media will not mention this crisis in upcoming statement on prescription drug abuse. 

A record 33,500 Americans died directly from abusing illicit drugs in 2005, the Centers for Disease’s just-released death tabulations show, a 61% increase over the previous five years, making drug abuse the second leading cause of non-natural death after traffic crashes (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_10.pdf, Table 22).

Drug deaths have rocketed upward from 19,700 in 2000 and nearly tripled since 1990, when 10,500 died from illicit drugs, CDC figures show. Another increase in drug deaths (whose official tabulations do not include deaths from drugged driving, drug-related homicide, or other deaths other than direct drug poisoning), is forecast in 2006, a top CDC epidemiologist said (http://www.hhs.gov/asl/testify/2007/10/t20071024a.html).

But despite ominous warnings from the CDC back in October, Congress, federal agencies, interest groups, and the press continue to turn a blind eye to the burgeoning drug death epidemic that now claims more lives than AIDS and gun homicides together.

Drug poisoning “rates are currently more than twice what they were during the peak years of crack cocaine mortality in the early 1990s, and 4 to 5 times higher than the rates during the year of heroin mortality peak in 1975,” Leonard J. Paulozzi, Medical Epidemiologist for the National Center for Injury Prevention, Control Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Committee back on October 24, 2007. “Over the past ten years they have reached historic highs,” Paulozzi told Congress. “Unintentional poisonings,” 96% of which involve drug overdoses, “are now the second leading cause of unintentional injury death, exceeded only by motor vehicle fatalities,” he said.

But no one appears to be paying any attention, and Paulozzi’s testimony may have revealed the reason—the worst drug abusers are not a group officials or various interests in the drug debate (least of all the White House, which is planning a press statement on prescription drug abuse) want to talk about.

“The group at highest risk for drug poisoning death is middle-aged men, the same demographic group that historically has had high rates of fatal heroin overdoses,” Paulozzi testified. “…Rates were higher for whites (7.2 per 100,000) than for African Americans (6.6 per 100,000).” Drug death rates were lowest for teenagers.

Ominously, the most recent death figures through 2004 and preliminary 2005 numbers indicate that the drug death epidemic is spreading from middle-agers to younger ages, with illicit-drug death rates now soaring among both over-25 and under-25 age groups and both sexes.

Unfortunately, most of the recent discussion about drugs in the press and popular forums has concerned relatively trivial issues—surveys, sports stars, and teenage drug use, and other diversions from America’s real drug crisis. Teenagers remain most at risk of harm from their parents’ drug abuse, which increases the likelihood teens will abuse drugs due to family instability and emulation of adult examples.

For the last 30 years, the percentages of teenage or adult Americans who report using illicit drugs on self-reporting surveys has had nothing to do with levels of drug-related crime, deaths, hospitalizations, or other troubles, a study published in the Journal of School Health found.

TMike Males, www.YouthFacts.org