Open letter to Partnership for a Drug-Free America
(any Partnership response will be published when received)
To: Stephen J. Pasierb President and C.E.O. 24 August 2007
Partnership for a Drug Free
Dear Mr. Pasierb,
A colleague just forwarded your letter to the New York Times responding to my January 3, 2007, opinion column. Thank you for your response. Your statement that “drug abuse overwhelmingly begins with youth” clarifies how profoundly we disagree.
Drug abuse overwhelmingly begins with grownups. Societies with low rates of drug and alcohol abuse among adults do not have teenage drug or drinking problems. Adults set the pattern for drug and alcohol use that teenagers emulate.
I’m sure Partnership researchers are aware of the National Household Survey’s powerful state-by-state correlations, averaging around 0.80, between rates of older adults’ (age 26+) use and teenage use of illicit drugs, including a staggering 0.90 correlation between adult and teenage marijuana use. These would have less than 1 in 10,000 odds of occurring by chance. Nor, given Americans’ mobility, is it likely that teenage drug users growing up in a state would still be there 30 years later. Adult drug behavior predicts teen behavior—as it also does for alcohol and tobacco use.
Further, studies consistently show the unsurprising fact that teens whose parents drink, smoke, or use drugs are several times more likely to do likewise than children of abstaining parents. The eruption in parent-age drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, and crime over the last three decades has been followed by sharp increases in teenage and young-adult drug deaths in the last decade even amid relatively low rates of self-reported teenage drug use. Today's pattern is strikingly similar to that of the 1960s, when teens and young adults emulated their parents’ widespread pharmaceutical abuse.
Given these realities, I’m flabbergasted by your statement that drug abuse begins with youth. I know the rationale: people who don’t use drugs as teens usually don’t take the habit up in adulthood. Aside from ignoring the evidence that teens who don’t use drugs differ along many non-drug dimensions from teen abstainers (for example, teenage drug abusers are far more likely to come from families in which adults abuse drugs, abuse their children, have histories of mental illness, and create family instability), you could more justifiably say: if we could prevent parents and nearby adults from abusing drugs, abusing their kids, and creating conflicted families, teenage addiction would be vastly reduced.
Or, if we persuaded parents and adults around youths to stop using drugs, alcohol, and tobacco altogether in order to model abstinent behaviors, teenage use of these substances would drop enormously. Abstinence from all substance use is the single most effective action a parent can take (and one completely under the parent's control) to prevent their teenagers from acquiring these habits. The fact that no interest in the drug debate—not the Partnership, ONDCP, or CASA, or the reform/legalization groups such as NORML or DPA—would dream of emphasizing these crucial points even as modest advice to parents highlights how protecting adult substance use is paramount. Teenagers are well aware of how important alcohol use is to adults. Our society even permits adults with records of alcohol abuse to continue drinking legally.
Our differences, I think, boil down to this: you hold teenagers more responsible than adults. True, adults suffer a developmental disadvantage that renders those who use alcohol, drugs, or tobacco at greater risk of chronically abusing these substances than are teenagers, whose have more flexible control over their behaviors. That may contribute to the fact that teenagers generally use drugs and alcohol more safely than adults do, suffering fewer deaths, addictive behaviors, and other ills per user. But adults are not hopelessly helpless; societies that expect high standards from grownups get them. We however, instantly reframe every major social problem, no matter how firmy rooted in adult behavior, as just another youth problem and target adolescents for correction.
But even if the argument that teens must be “formed” because adults have great difficulty being reformed is accepted, it would argue for a very different strategy to counter drug abuse in teenagers than is now being advanced. First, if we followed that logic, we would openly acknowledge and confront adult substance abuse as a very serious problem and apply the strong measures necessary to redirect aging addicts. Second, we would forthrightly aim prevention efforts at teens whose family and adult models predict high risk in order to deter youths from emulating troubled elders.
But when I look at the Partnership website, advertisements,
and publicity—like that of every other group from prohibitionist to legalizer—I see mass indulgence of a pleasing pretense:
that
I can attest there is adamant resistance across the political spectrum to raising the middle-aged addiction issue. The Partnership’s website is just like that of other groups, including ONDCP, Drug Policy Alliance, NORML, Marijuana Policy Project, and DARE. All squabble over which drugs should be made legal for grownup partying—alcohol and tobacco only? add marijuana for more pleasure? Ecstasy perhaps?—and all feign overriding concern for “children.” Yet, that concern evaporates when it comes to confronting the aging illicit-drug overdose epidemic that has become our third leading cause of external death (behind only traffic fatalities and suicides, themselves harboring large drug/alcohol-abuse components), that creates massive drug markets that fuel urban violence, and that fosters family and community chaos and violence that profoundly endanger young people.
Teens who died from illegal-drug overdoses (numbering around 850 in 2004) are featured in drug policy interests’ websites and publicity, but teens who lost a parent to drugs (20,068 Americans ages 35-59 died from overdoses of illegal drugs in 2004) are absent. A Martian anthropologist would conclude that the groups governing discussion of drugs in this country are clinically insane, with a predictable result: after 30 years of drug debate and intensifying war on drugs costing hundreds of billions of dollars, the US continues to suffer a burgeoning drug abuse crisis measured in drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, persistent urban violence cycles, and middle-aged crime that is many times worse than found in any other Western nation.
I would argue that if we want to confront today’s record drug abuse crisis, American officials and leading lobbies should take exactly the opposite approach: admit openly that parent generations suffer by far the worst drug problems, advertise and provide extensive resources teens and young adults can avail to deal with parents and family members who abuse drugs, and candidly focus strategies on young people at risk of emulating the drug abuse of adults around them. I don’t mean by invoking this message via some obscure link or line buried on a website, but directly, openly, loudly. Does the Partnership plan any prominent ad, publicity, and web campaigns to publicize the middle-aged drug scourge and provide help for teens suffering drug-abusing parents?
Thank you again for clarifying in one brief phrase our
completely opposite views of the genesis of
best regards,
Mike Males
Drug Abuse And the Teenager
To the Editor: Among all the statistics that Mike Males cites in ''This Is Your Brain on Drugs, Dad'' (Op-Ed, Jan. 3), a crucial point is absent. Teenagers of the 1960s and 1970s did not have the benefit of the aggressive drug prevention and education efforts of the last ... Drug abuse overwhelmingly begins with youth, and when we successfully prevent teenagers from using drugs or tobacco, or abusing alcohol, they are far less likely to pick up the behavior later in life.
Stephen J. Pasierb President and
C.E.O., Partnership for a Drug-Free
To: Stephen J. Pasierb President and C.E.O. 24 August 2007
Partnership for a Drug Free