Opened -- well, clicked on -- today's New York Times and was surprised to see a massive op-ed under the byline "Mike Males." Males was a former instructor of mine at UC Santa Cruz, and is memorable for a very convincing, the-kids-are-alright perspective on the world. Good to see he's keeping the faith:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 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. The F.B.I. reported that drug arrests reached an all-time high of 1.8 million in 2005. The Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal agency that compiles statistics on hospital emergency cases caused by illicit drug abuse, says that number rose to 940,000 in 2004 — a huge increase over the last quarter century.
Why are so few Americans aware of these troubling trends? One reason is that today's drug abusers are simply the “wrong” group. As David Musto, a psychiatry professor at Yale and historian of drug abuse, points out, wars on drugs have traditionally depended on “linkage between a drug and a feared or rejected group within society.” Today, however, the fastest-growing population of drug abusers is white, middle-aged Americans. This is a powerful mainstream constituency, and unlike with teenagers or urban minorities, it is hard for the government or the news media to present these drug users as a grave threat to the nation.
And it gets worse. Not only are the Baby Boomers bankrupting our entitlement programs, they're packing our prisons:
[G]raying baby boomers have become America's fastest-growing crime scourge. The F.B.I. reports 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.
Oh boomers, whatever will we do with you? Males goes on to argue that the hype around teenage drug use is focusing on a relatively low risk population where the trend lines are good and obscuring the needs of other, more ravaged demographics. "Few experts would have suspected," he writes, "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."
Meanwhile, Mark Kleiman, who could've been a past professor of mine but whose class I never took, has an article in the latest American Interest mapping out a new strategy for the War on Drugs. And in yet other drug news, the DC smoking ban just went into place, and I'm looking forward to a bright future of smoke-free clothing. Sorry, Mt. Pleasant Dry Cleaners.
