The Cleavers & America's Hidden Epidemic

"Because something is happening here, But you don't know what it is, Do you, Mister Jones?"

-- "Ballad of a Thin Man" (Bob Dylan)

As anyone on the business end of a hospital emergency room will tell you, there is a hidden drug epidemic in the U.S. that grows larger and more ferocious by the year.

What they also will tell you is that many of the "victims" of this epidemic are not rebellious teenagers from suburban McMansions or potty-mouthed rappers from inner city neighborhoods who have OD'd on illegal drugs like methamphetamine or heroin, as is commonly assumed and relentlessly portrayed in the news media, but "respectable" middle-aged and middle-class men and women who have OD'd on legal drugs like painkillers and antidepressants.

This disconnect is brought home by what the latest "Monitoring the Future" survey on drug use doesn't say. This exercise in politically motivated claptrap boasts of broad declines in teenage drug use for which we can thank all those family values Republicans who support the War on Drugs.

But wait a gosh-darned minute. The survey fails to take note of the elephant in the room:

The parents of those teens. Millions of Ward and June Cleavers -- a goodly number of whom most certainly are God-fearing, George Bush-loving Republicans -- who are getting their stomachs pumped in ERs or their innards autopsied in morgues not because they took one toke over the line, Sweet Jesus, but because of their abuse of the very drugs that we see advertised on primetime TV and pharmaceutical companies relentlessly push physicians to prescribe -- and over prescribe -- by the billions.

I gave the "Monitoring the Future" survey a look-see after watching John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (read drug czar), hoodwink a CNN reporter.

But it was a guy by the name of Mike Males, a senior researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, who really nailed the hypocrisy of the survey, which he (but not Walters) noted is entirely based on "self-reporting." In other words, submissions by earnest teens whom I daresay more closely fit the profile of Up With People sycophants than a latter day James Deans.

Males, writing on the New York Times op-ed page, notes that:

* While the survey asserts that teenage drug use dropped sharply in the last decade, the National Center for Health Statistics reports that teenage deaths from drug abuse have tripled over the same period.

This period would be the second decade of the War on Drugs, an extraordinary exercise in hypocrisy and waste of money and lives (take that you pot smokers!) that I blogged about here.

* The number of Americans dying from the abuse of illegal drugs has leaped by 400 percent in the last two decades, reaching a record 28,000 in 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The FBI reported that drug arrests reached an all-time high of 1.8 million in 2005. The Drug Abuse Warning Network says that number rose to 940,000 in 2004 , which is a huge increase over the last quarter century.

* The fastest growing group represented in these staggering numbers are folks like Ward and June Cleaver, whom Males characterizes as

"A powerful mainstream constituency [which] unlike teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the government or the news media to present . . . as a grave threat to the nation."

* Graying baby boomers have become America's fastest-growing crime group.

The FBI reported that last year the number of Americans over the age of 40 arrested for violent and property felonies rose to 420,000, up from 170,000 in 1980. Arrests for drug offenses among those over 40 rose to 360,000 last year, up from 22,000 in 1980. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 440,000 Americans ages 40 and older were incarcerated in 2005, triple the number in 1990.

Says Males:

"It’s time to end the obsession with hyping teenage drug use. The meaningless surveys that policy makers now rely on should be replaced with a comprehensive 'drug abuse index' that pulls together largely ignored data on drug-related deaths, hospital emergencies, crime, diseases and similar practical measures."

He says that a good model is the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs’ new drug abuse index, which he not coincidentally helped start and pinpoints which populations and areas are most harmed by illegal and legal drugs.

Males concludes that:

"Few experts would have suspected that the biggest contributors to California’s drug abuse, death and injury toll are educated, middle-aged women living in the Central Valley and rural areas, while the fastest-declining, lowest-risk populations are urban black and Latino teenagers. Yet the index found exactly that. These are the sorts of trends we need to understand if we are to design effective policies.

"The United States’ drug abuse crisis has exploded out of control. Scientifically designed strategies are urgently needed to target the manifest drug-caused damage that current policies are failing miserably to address."