America's news media, experts, and cops demonstrate--again--the incompetence and denial that team up that created the world's worst drug abuse crisis                                            August 16, 2007

CBS News, the Center on Addiction on Substance Abuse at Columbia University led by the tirelessly senseless Joseph Califano, the police, and "experts" teamed up again to run the same "teens and drugs" story they've been running for 25 years on drug issues--one that has nothing to do with the real crisis. 

In its August 16 "Study: 'Drug Infested' Schools On Rise, CBS Evening News' Byron Pitts uncritically reported an absurd CASA "study" which found that schools, like everywhere else in American society, contain people who use illicit drugs. The show journeyed to Georgia to proclaim "drug problems at school are getting worse" and "parents are in denial"--the same report recycled for decades.

Yet again, American authorities and media continue their incredible denial that the real drug abusers ARE the parents. Below are the ages of the 4,424 Georgians who died from overdoses of illicit drugs--led by heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and pharmaceutical abuse, often mixed with alcohol--in the last five years. Teens comprised less than 2%. Nearly 80% are over age 35.

In the two Georgia counties CBS used to illustrate the school "drug epidemic," Cherokee and Fayette, CDC figures show 112 people have died from overdoses of illegal drugs in the last five years. Of these, 3 were teenagers and 85 were age 35 and older. Amid a burgeoning middle-aged drug crisis that is causing epidemic crime and menaces young people with family abuses and breakup, and sets the stage for later drug abuse by youths (the biggest predictor of teenage drug abuse is a family history of parental drug/alcohol abuse, violence, and instability, see details), CBS, Califano, and a host of authorities repeat the same tiresome clichés that the whole problem is just teens, high school culture, and a modern crisis that never happened in past generations.

In 2004, 31,000 Americans died from illicit drugs and 900,000 went to hospital emergencies for drug abuse, both skyrocketing records--and the vast majority were over age 35. The experts and media's dereliction on drug issues has gone beyond denial of the older generation's drug abuse epidemic. The callous popularity and scapegoating crusade by the powerful Drug War authorities and their media stenographers is endangering young people far more than drugs themselves. 

Califano and CASA are wildly popular with an uncritical news media (both corporate and "alternative") because they flatter the powerful, pick only on powerless groups, and ask broad questions designed to produce the most exaggerated numbers ("The study has found that eight in 10 high schoolers and 44 percent of middle schoolers have witnessed illegal drug use, dealing or possession, or have seen students high or drunk on school grounds," CBS reported, though only "13 percent of teens said they had tried marijuana" ever themselves.) CASA has never issued a study on the epidemic of middle-aged drug abuse.

The next dismality will be for drug legalization lobbies to join in the mass deception by exploiting Califano's phony demagoguery on teens (again) to claim that if drugs were legalized and regulated for grownup partying, teens could never get them. (Every survey shows teens get legal alcohol and tobacco far easier than any illicit drugs, and the issue isn't important anyway.) More proof that none of today's drug-policy lobbies on any side care about young people and none of the tiresome drivel they repeat from each other can be believed.

Mike Males, YouthFacts.org