Republicans like to talk about the limits of what the federal government can do. But when Bob Dole hears of a teenager in Phoenix or Atlanta lighting up a joint, he immediately concludes that it’s Bill Clinton’s fault for letting it happen.
Drug use is rising among adolescents, and as with everything else that has gone wrong lately, the GOP is sure it knows the source of the malady. When the latest statistics were released last week, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R–Utah) lamented the “upward spiral of drug abuse since President Clinton took office.” An aide to Dole told Newsweek the issue makes a perfect weapon against Clinton: “(He) slashed the drug czar’s budget. Drug use is up. That’s all that people need to know.”
What Hatch and Dole overlook is that the big jump came in 1995, which just happened to be the same year that Republicans gained control of Congress. Does that mean the GOP caused it? Maybe so. Seeing Newt Gingrich become Speaker of the House could have driven a lot of people to seek a chemically induced escape from reality.
But the whole exercise in tracing blame is the moral equivalent of astrology. Fashions in youthful rebellion don’t take their cues from the rhetoric, or even the policies, emanating out of Washington. Teenage drug use rose back in the Nixon-Ford years–presumably not because the two presidents were such mellow guys. This latest increase began not under Clinton but under George Bush. Drug use waxes and wanes for reasons that no one really understands.
The Republican charge that Clinton gave up the fight against drug abuse fails on two counts. First, he didn’t. Under his last budget proposal, federal spending on all drug-control efforts would be one-fifth higher than it was in Bush’s final budget. Second, the GOP Congress made its own cuts in prevention programs authorized by the 1994 crime bill, giving the President far less money than he asked for.
Nor can the trend be ascribed to lax law enforcement or a failure of national will. Since 1992, the number of people in federal prison for drug crimes has increased by 20 percent, while state prisons have seen a 17 percent increase. We are still locking up drug offenders as fast as we can turn the key, but a lot of kids pay no mind.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans would admit it, but the truth is that even with the recent rise, juvenile drug abuse is hardly an epidemic. In 1979, 14.2 percent of kids aged 12 to 17 used marijuana at least once a month. Today, the figure is just 8.2 percent. Cocaine use remains exceedingly rare, with only one teenager in 125 using it monthly–compared with one in 52 in 1982. The percentage of kids who have ever tried illicit drugs has also plummeted over the last two decades.
Another fact that neither Clinton nor Dole chooses to publicize is that the destructive drug most popular among American teenagers is alcohol. More than one out of five 12- to 17-year-olds drinks at least monthly–and 7.9 percent of kids get drunk that often.
People tend to minimize the occasional teenage beer blast as kids being kids. But as drug policy scholar Mark Kleiman of the University of California at Los Angeles notes, alcohol is the drug on which kids “are most likely to get pregnant, commit crimes, get in fights or drive recklessly.” No one wants to acknowledge that it’s more dangerous for teenagers to get drunk than to smoke marijuana. But it is.
Nor does anyone want to say something else that is obviously true: The vast majority of kids who experiment with dope will not become drug addicts. Republicans think kids are encouraged to use marijuana when they hear that the President’s press secretary–not to mention the President–tried it when he was young. But Republicans from Gingrich to New York Rep. Susan Molinari have made similar disclosures.
The real lesson of these confessions is not that drug use is morally acceptable. It’s that, contrary to anti-drug propaganda, you can experiment with illicit drugs and still go on to live a successful and productive life. Contemplating this latest report, we ought to keep in mind the reassuring certainty that most of the teenage users won’t still be using drugs a decade from now.
Certainly, kids ought to be discouraged from using illicit drugs, just as they should be discouraged from having sex, guzzling beer, driving fast and doing other things that can have terrible consequences. But that doesn’t mean the kids will be listening.
No one truly knows the secret for keeping teenagers on the straight and narrow. But here’s some advice that Republicans like to give and that, in this case, they need to take: Grow up and stop expecting Washington to solve the problem.
