When you can’t win the debate, shift the argument.
That time-tested motto pretty well describes President Clinton’s strategic response to reports that drug use among teens has surged upwards during his four years in office.
According to the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, use of illegal drugs by teenagers has risen to almost 11 percent of those aged 12 to 17 since 1992 when it was only 5.2 percent, its lowest point since 1980.
So it did not seem altogether coincidental that a day after the report was released Clinton announced he would approve new federal regulations to crack down on the marketing and sales of another drug, cigarettes, to young people.
Predictably, some Republicans who live in tobacco states viewed that with alarm. Sen. Jesse Helms (R–N.C.) asserted that Clinton was “declaring war” on tobacco farmers who depend on the crop for their livelihoods. Another Republican, Elizabeth Dole, told reporters in her home state of North Carolina that the Clinton regulations were only a political stunt that would do little to curb teen smoking. And her husband, Bob Dole, clung to the tobacco industry’s line that research linking tobacco to bad health is “inconclusive.”
Who’s kidding who? I always find it amusing that the same social conservatives who want government to get into our lives on issues like drugs, abortion or pornography suddenly claim government intrusion doesn’t do any good at all in curbing teen smoking of tobacco.
As the young people say, let’s get real. Almost all marijuana smokers started as cigarette smokers, according to the Federal Drug Administration and almost all cigarette smokers–well over 90 percent of them–started in their teens.
The percentage of children in grades 9 through 12 who smoke has grown from 20 percent in 1991 to a whopping 35 percent today, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Among young African-American males, the percentage who smoke has doubled to 28 percent from 14 percent just five years ago.
“Since 25 percent of all adults smoke cigarettes, smoking actually is more of a problem among young people than among older people,” says George Dessart, chairman of the American Cancer Society.
Most of us don’t need fancy studies to figure this out. Yet, the tobacco lobby and its political minions continue to blow smoke over the obvious.
But since perceptions are nine-tenths of politics, Clinton is vulnerable on this issue because drug use rose while he occupies the biggest bully pulpit in America. If he is going to bask in the glow of the robust economy that just happens to be occurring on his watch, it is not going to be easy for him to wriggle out of some responsibility for the rise in drug use that also has happened on his watch–especially after he reduced staff by 75 percent at the Office of National Drug Control Policy three years ago.
Just ask Bob Dole. “Where were you, Mr. President, while teen drug use was going up and up and up?” Dole taunted last week on the campaign trail. “Where were you?”
Of course, one could just as easily ask, Where was Bob Dole?
The answer would be, “Taking tobacco money.” And lots of it.
Why do kids use drugs? The answer is much too complex to pin on any one presidential administration. An upswing in youthful marijuana use was beginning to appear in 1992, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Are we going to blame George Bush for that? How about the very appearance of crack and the epidemic in its use that appeared in the early 1980s? Are we going to blame Ronald Reagan for that?
One expert, David F. Musto, Yale professor of child psychiatry and the history of medicine, thinks the upsurge in drug use by teens in the 1990s, like the downsurge in the Reagan 1980s, follows the same long-term cycles of high and low consumption that have characterized alcohol and other drug use in America since at least the early 1800s.
It is too early to tell, Musto says, but the current upsurge may only be a short-term increase in a long-term cultural trend toward abstinence that began in the early ’80s.
Either way, each side in this political dispute should call a moratorium on blaming each other for a problem as complex as this one. Instead, Clinton and Dole should come to an agreement that neither cigarettes nor illegal drugs are good for teens and redouble their commitment to fight them.
But that’s not likely in this election year. Instead, they’ll probably just blow more smoke.
