Pubdate: Nov-Dec, 2000 Source: Extra! The Magazine of FAIR (US) Copyright: 2000 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting Contact: (212) 727-7668 Address: 130 W. 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 Website: http://www.fair.org/ Author: Mike Males Note: University of California, Santa Cruz, sociology instructor Mike Males' newest book is "Kids & and Guns": How Politicians, Experts and the Press Fabricate Fear of Youth (Common Courage Press). Cited: Partnership for a Drug-Free America: http://drugfreeamerica.org/ Related: http://www.pdfa.net/ Cited: DRCNet: http://www.drcnet.org/ DrugSense: http://www.drugsense.org/ Common Sense for Drug Policy: http://www.csdp.org/ Also: Links to some of the referenced items are at the end of this article. RAVING JUNK Few Outlets Dissent From The Latest Teen-Drug Hysteria The summer's teen-drug media frenzy couldn't decide whether the "dance club" designer drug ecstasy (MDMA) or that old standard heroin was killing more suburban kids. ABC News, a partner in the Partnership for a Drug-Free America's anti-dope crusade, faithfully hyped every official scare: "Ecstasy sweeping the country" (3/5/00); "Ecstasy use soars" (6/7/00); "Heroin ravages younger users" (7/10/00, 7/12/00). Officials pronounced that the "epidemic" of teens and young adults downing synthetic drugs at nightclubs and "rave" parties exceeded the crack cocaine scourge. "Dozens of people are reported to have died," ABC (7/26/00) breathed, failing to mention that the number bandied (100) was ecstasy's estimated worldwide death toll over the last two decades. Ecstasy, CBS's 60 Minutes II (4/27/00) quoted police, "is no different than crack or heroin." But the latest federal Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) report reveals one big difference: In 1998, coroners implicated heroin in 4,300 deaths, cocaine in 4,500 and alcohol mixed with drugs in 3,600. The entire family of "club drugs," from MDMA to GHB, accounted for a total of 15 deaths. Further, none of these designer drugs' victims were children: Seven were aged 18-34, eight over 35. Ecstasy abuse can lead to emergency room treatments for "dehydration, anxiety and exhaustion," 60 Minutes II added, citing DAWN figures. "In the last few years, 1,100 hospital cases have been reported." 60 Minutes II didn't mention that in 1998 alone, the same DAWN reports showed overdoses of Tylenol (a sponsor of CBS News' "Ecstasy Spreads" Web posting) contributed to 20,000 hospital cases and 36 deaths among persons 25 and younger. That's 20 times more ER cases and five times more deaths than blamed on ecstasy. For all designer drugs and ages, about 2,500 hospital ER cast's were reported to DAWN in 1998. Only one-tenth of these were youths, casting more doubt on the avalanche of scare-stories about kids expiring at raves and White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey's warning to parents that "their young people are at risk in that environment" (ABC World News Tonight, 3/5/00, CNN 8/2/00). Most of the media echoed official claims that at raves, "illegal drugs like ketamine, ecstasy, LSD and other drugs are offered as innocently as hors d'oeuvres" (Dateline NBC, 5/2/00). The official and media hyperbole obscured ecstasy's actual dangers. Law enforcement claims that ecstasy and GHB are "kill pills" are absurd; neither causes serious reactions except when taken in large quantities (DRCNet, 9/2/00). Some researchers have raised important questions about MDMA's long-term effect on brain functioning (ABC, 5/17/00), but the evidence is not nearly as damning or conclusive as ABC, Dateline and CNN presented it. Most deaths and hospital cases blamed on ecstasy resulted from contaminated drugs, prompting authorities in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and San Francisco to promote public-health approaches (such as relaxed penalties and providing free water at raves). Fortunately, two big magazines refused to join the rave-panic stampede. Time's cover story, 'The Lure of Ecstasy" (6/5/00), pointed out the clubdrug wave washed over Europe during the early 1990s, when millions of doses were taken every weekend, but now "the drug's sexiness has worn off." Only 5 percent of young European adults surveyed had ever tried ecstasy, and "the number of habitual users is small." Shockingly, most ravers go for the music and dancing, not drugs, Time reported. U.S. News & World Report (6/26/00) also lent perspective: "Kids are looking to raves to find a 21st Century community. . . . Indeed, every generation since at least the 1920s has had its narcotic and the music scene that revolved around it: The Jazz Age had liquor, the '60s its Grateful Dead shows, marijuana and hallucinogens, and disco was fueled by cocaine." And that about sums up the ecstasy panic: It's nothing new, it's nowhere near as lethal as heroin, cocaine or alcohol, but taken to excess or when adulterated, it can have damaging effects. Just like thousands of substances Americans buy from legal dispensers - including Tylenol. Three Decades Of Junk Journalism 1970: "Kids and Heroin: The Adolescent Epidemic," trumpeted Time (3/16/70). "A terrifying wave of heroin use among youth . . . has caught up teenagers and even pre-adolescent children from city ghettos to fashionable suburbs." Quoting unnamed "experts," Time predicted the number of teenage heroin addicts in New York "may mushroom fantastically to 100,000 this summer. . . . Disaster looms large." Although exaggerated, I 970's fears had some foundation. Coroner reports showed 125 teenagers died from heroin overdoses in New York City and 140 in California that year. By the late 1970s, teenage heroin abuse subsided and remains low to this day (the teenage heroin toll in 1998: two deaths in New York City, nine in California). Press fear, however, escalated. 1980: The Washington Post's front-page profile (9/28/80) of "Jimmy," a black eight-year-old junkie, ignited pandemonium. Mayor Marion Barry ordered police and teachers to inspect children's arms for needle holes. Despite a $10,000 reward and intensive searches, neither Jimmy nor any other child addict was found. "Jimmy" did not exist, Post reporter Janet Cooke later confessed. 1996: Trainspotting panic erupted. In a story that would shame the National Enquirer. USA Today (7/19/96) declared "smoking or snorting smack is as commonplace as beer for the younger generation." Rolling Stone (5/13/96) branded Seattle "junkie town." Citing anecdotes, the article blamed Seattle's tripling in heroin deaths from 1986 to 1994 on "young people" from "white suburban backgrounds." In fact, nearly all of Seattle's increase in heroin fatalities was among aging baby boomers, not kids. The average age of Seattle's 500 heroin decedents from 1995 through 1999 was 40. Only 1 percent were teenagers (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 7/21/00). Out of 2,500 Seattle residents treated for heroin overdose in 1999, DAWN reported just seven were adolescents. Reporters stampeded to Plano, Texas, spotlighting its 19 teenage and young-adults deaths from heroin overdoses in two years as the tip of a national youth smack epidemic (L.A. Times, 11/30/97). As it turned out, the Plano victims didn't know the "chiva" the smoked contained heroin. More crucial, the national media herd never pondered why, if smack was sweeping the young, they had to journey to Plano to find a teen-heroin crisis. Later, DAWN reports showed 1996's teen-smack panic was another media chimera. Of 8,500 heroin deaths in 1996 and 1997, just 48 were teenagers - and one-forth of these were Plano's. Of 145,000 hospital treatments for heroin, fewer than 1,000 were youths. 2000: The suburban-teen-heroin hoax resurges, more fraudulent than ever. "Teen heroin use is taking place under their parent's noses," CNN blared (5/9/00). "The drug has moved into the middle class suburbs with devastating effects." "Teenagers and young adults are finding the drug more attractive," ABC News declared (7/10/00), blaming the supposed outbreak on the War on Drugs' two favorite scapegoats: suburban teens and minorities. ABC's follow-up concerned Native American heroin abuse in New Mexico (7/12/00). The simple truth officials and the media refuse to discuss: Today's chief abusers of heroin are not kids or minorities, but white middle-agers. DAWN's latest reports show four-fifths of over-dose death and hospital cases in 1999 were over age 30. Fewer than 1 percent were teenagers; just 5 percent were under age 25. Since 1980, the number of Americans imprisoned for drug offenses has soared more than tenfold, reaching 458,131 in 1997. In California (which now spends $1 billion per year to imprison drug offenders), adults of color under age 30 are just one-sixth as likely to die from drug abuse as white middle-agers, but are twice as likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses (Justice Policy Institute, 8/00). Why are so few teenagers dying from heroin? They're not using it. The 1999 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported that of 25,000 12- to 17-year-olds surveyed, just 100 had ever used heroin; only 75 had tried it in the previous year. Drug-Reform Groups Join In Both drug-war and drug-reform interests exploit the fiction of a rising teen-drug crisis in order to blame each other for it. McCaffrey and other drug warriors parade the image that "substance abuse among young people has grown" in their crusade to suppress all "material legitimizing drugs … in music, film, television, the Internet and mass market outlets" (L.A. Times, 1/2/97). Groups seeking to reform drug policy counterclaim that "it is the drug war which [McCaffrey] so ardently supports that is responsible for the increase in heroin use among our youth" (Drug Sense Weekly, 5/12/00). The reformist Common Sense for Drug Policy (www.cspd.org) even charges that McCaffrey "failed to mention … a continuing rise in hard-drug use by our youth," and therefore understated "the dimensions of adolescent drug use"! A CSDP ad campaign, charting the sharp increases in drug imprisonments and overdose deaths from 1980 to 1996, declared, "The more we escalate the drug war, the more young people and others die." The true "dimensions of adolescent drug use" CSDP itself "failed to mention" consist of vanishingly low levels of teenage hard-drug use and casualties, and teenage overdose rates no higher today than in 1980; it's middle-agers who suffer skyrocketing drug demise. Why are reformers silent on this damning reality while helping McCaffrey misrepresent young people as the nation's biggest drug problem? "With horrifyingly generic teen-pop acts blaring out from MTV day in and day out, it's a wonder more kids haven't turned to drugs to escape the awful racket," Time's balanced story on ecstasy ended. The same amen could be applied to the horrifyingly generic racket about "teens and drugs" blaring from Washington, most of the press, and even drug-reform groups that should know better. - -------------------------------------------------- Some of the referenced items: Time's cover story, 'The Lure of Ecstasy" (6/5/00): http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n713/a04.html L.A. Times, 11/30/97 Old Enemy Stalks Kids of Privilege: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v97/n637/a01.html DrugSense Weekly, 5/12/00: http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2000/ds00.n149.html#com4 Common Sense for Drug Policy ad "The more we escalate the drug war, the more young people and others die." http://www.csdp.org/ads/themore.htm - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake