Another Heroin Hoax?

Honest: I’d planned to shift gears, write a happy column on wonderful programs that do kids good without terrifying the public. But, unfortunately, the scaremongers are up to shenanigans again. Now it’s the “suburban teen heroin crisis” — the dozenth hoax in a long line:

1970: Time magazine and “experts” clarion 100,000 teenage heroin abusers in New York. Never existed.
1980: The Washington Post profiles eight-year-old junk addict, igniting official pandemonium. Total fabrication.
1996: Mass media and “experts” scream that Los Angeles eighth graders routinely smoke smack, heroin’s more popular than beer. Complete crock.
2000: “Heroin’s back!” It’s killing white suburban kids, “even girls!”

The latest facts: Of 4,300 heroin deaths in 1998 and 38,000 hospital emergency cases in the first half of 1999, as reported by the Drug Abuse Warning Network, fewer than 1 percent were teens. Of 200,000 admittees to heroin treatment, 3 percent were under age 20 (including inappropriate commitments). Of 6,800 12-to-17-year-olds participating in the 1998 National Household Survey, 20 had used heroin in the past year (two-tenths of 1 percent). Among the 4,000 high-risk teenage arrestees drug-tested in 1998 in the Department of Justice’s 12 drug abuse monitoring sites, fewer than 1 percent tested positive for heroin.

The evidence is overwhelming: There is no appreciable teenage heroin problem. If there were, reporters would have been covering their own cities’ crises, not flocking thousands of miles to Plano, Tex., in 1997 to hype the sad fates of two dozen kids unaware the supposedly harmless “chiva” they smoked contained pure heroin.

There’s a huge, white, middle-aged heroin epidemic, but few people talk about that. Instead, this summer’s press splashes in Portland, Ore., and Seattle followed standard teen-hoax procedure usable in any town:

• Human interest: Clean-cut, white junkie kid implicates legions of privileged classmates as dragon-chasers with clueless parents. Remember journalists’ teen-alarm ethics: one case equals “terrifying epidemic.”
• Twisted statistics: Last year, 221 people died from heroin in Portland and Seattle. Lying “experts” insinuated they were young. (The truth: none were youths; four-fifths were over age 30).
• Color: Excitable treatment folks bewail, “more kids get addicted younger every year!” (Treatment folks always say that). As a journalist, I visited clinics first-hand and found the “teen scourge” wildly exaggerated. “Scores of new teenage heroin addicts!” on news at 11 turned out to be two or three in reality, plus a dozen in for beer or pot, a dozen more coping with addicted parents, several dozen more “youngsters” over 35, the rest just made up. Treatment records show that heroin admittees are getting older — averaging 40 today.
• Dire “experts”: Quote the Drug Enforcement Administration’s George Foster or Phoenix House’s Terry Horton that young people shoot up because of “generational amnesia.” (Unlike Baby Boomers, kids today supposedly don’t know heroin’s evils.) What mean-spirited malarkey. Today’s kids, as dozens of kids in Chicago’s juvenile jail emphatically informed me, shun cocaine and heroin because they see thousands of adults around them strung out, dying or dead — a reality experts cannot face.

Drug-war and drug-reform groups squabble over the messages sent to kids by movies, music, abstinence education, Partnership for a Drug-Free America ads, heroin chic fashion and decriminalization proposals. They need not fret. Across Western nations, youths are ignoring popular and official exhortations and creating their own low-risk drug policy. Teenagers in the pot-tolerant Netherlands and zero-tolerance U.S. display virtually the same behaviors: weekend beer or wine drinking, some cigarette smoking, occasional marijuana use, almost no hard drugs.

Current teenage styles are much healthier than those of Baby Boomers, which is why modern kids aren’t dying from drugs like their parents did and still do. The behavior of today’s kids predicts low rates of future drug abuse, which has powerful implications for prevention and policy. But major drug-war interests, treatment industries, academic sycophants and the press remain addicted to whipping up baseless scare campaigns for politics and profit.

Imagine an America where young people and supportive adults understand the middle ground between “zero-no-nothing-never” and “party, puke, and die.” You’re not the only one.

Males, Mike. "Another Heroin Hoax?." Youth Today, September 2000, p. 62.

©2000 Youth Today. Reprinted with permission from Youth Today. All rights reserved.