THE RETURN OF REEFER MADNESS

...What occurred during the decade-long period when drug overdoses were doubling and drug-related murders quadrupling...

...Even among juvenile delinquents, the nation's highest-risk youth, a 1992 Bureau of Justice Statistics study found that young arrestees were the least likely of any age group to test positive for drugs...

...on her own time, no hassle...

...And it has downplayed studies by the psychology departments at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Berkeley that suggest that moderate pot smoking has no long-term effects and does not correlate with personality problems in teenagers...

...Drug-related suicides doubled...

...Teenagers made up only 3 percent of 36,000 emergency-room treatments during 1993 for drug-related injuries...

...Teenagers in the 1960s, he declared, "didn't really believe drugs were dangerous until it nearly destroyed a generation...

...Or take the Newport-Costa Mesa, California, school district, where officials also claimed extensive student drug activity...

...Whereas the Drug War of the mid-1980s focused on drug sellers and interdiction, the new Drug War of the 1990s increasingly busts casual drug use and drug possession...

...They found none...

...Teens aren't dying from drugs...

...But researchers reported that drug-related deaths were proving a major exception...

...In 1994, three-fourths of the nation's record 1.4 million drug arrests were for simple possession, four in ten drug busts involved marijuana, and a record 312,000 were of teenagers—up 50 percent since 1990...

...The results of this study were grim...

...The level of drug-abuse fatality among Vietnam veterans was much higher than that of the rest of the population and had continued to rise through 1988, the date of the latest report...

...I don't think it's an overwhelming problem," police chief Nichols admitted...

...It would rather concoct a crisis around a 3-percentage-point increase in self-reported, occasional marijuana smoking by high-school students...

...It was a problem for the arrested students...

...Most of the heightened death toll apart from drug-related deaths subsided by the late 1970s...

...Nationally, youth drug fatalities and injuries plummeted from 1970 to 1983 and have remained low ever since...

...When the testimony was completed, the entire case revolved around the $20 bill McCrillis said he gave to Smith under circumstances she disputed and to which no witnesses testified...

...The unreported findings of the Michigan survey were much less inflammatory than the headlines...

...Hospital statistics show that death is just the tip of an iceberg of drug abuse in this age group...

...And despite the usual press splashes over glue-sniffing, Wite-out, and other supposed "new epidemics," surveys indicate that use of inhalants has been at fairly steady, low levels for the past two decades—2 to 3 percent of high-school seniors said they had used inhalants within the previous month, for example...

...But if literally hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles-area junior and senior high-school students take drugs on a regular basis at school, a major mystery is afoot: the case of the disappearing dope...

...DAWN's companion survey of hospital emergency departments found that teens comprised just 3 percent of the 200,000 admissions involving heroin, cocaine, or marijuana...

...Our own interviews with teenage mothers and alternative high-school students turned up incident after incident of drug-addicted parents, household violence, children and teenagers forced to stay home from school to take care of younger siblings, and parents so debilitated by drugs that they could not care for their families...

...A further, tragic irony is that growing drug abuse among middle-aged Americans has real-life impacts on the very youths federal policymakers say they are concerned about...

...Take the Ver-nonia, Oregon, school district...

...Ryan said he obtained some marijuana from an off-campus source and gave it to McCrillis...

...Drug traffic at the school turned out to be "relatively light," deputies conceded...

...Smith's expulsion hearing was held before the Redondo/Manhattan school board on January 23...

...An ongoing project of the Centers for Disease Control, one not publicly advertised during the drug hoopla of the last seven years, was to monitor mortality among returning Vietnam veterans...

...She admits enjoying the arrangement a bit—studying in front of the TV...

...The next day, the local Daily Breeze banner-lined the arrest...

...Smith was taken to the principal's office where investigators searched her for drugs...

...In 1994, a projected 3,500 to 4,000...

...Drug death rates are now so high among middle-aged men that they dwarf all other classes...

...While the teenage drug problem has diminished, the adult drug-fatality rate has been skyrocketing...

...Clinton's newly appointed drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, announced in March that he will target the bulk of the quarter billion dollars shifted to his office from the Pentagon budget at more law enforcement...

...After three months of daily full-time attendance and investigation at the 1,650-student school, police made seventeen arrests...

...Even so, Vernonia prevailed in the U.S...

...In 1980, about 400 American men, age thirty-five to fifty-four, died from drug overdoses...

...According to the transcript, Deputy McCrillis admitted the marijuana-sale charge against her was a "clerical error" and should have read (psilocybin) mushrooms...

...Then they handcuffed Smith to two other girls, and led her to a sheriff's van...

...Authorities singled the school out as a major center for student drug use...

...Redondo Union High School's sprawi-ing, park-like campus covers dozens of acres, commanding views of affluefit oceanside houses and condominiums...

...Outside the school, alerted reporters from major television and newspaper outlets had assembled, cameras and recordets whirring...

...Given plenty of money, sufficient time, and aggressive sting operations, any institution—high schools, universities...

...Los Angeles Times reporter Eric Slater wrote a glowing news story praising a "well-managed narcotics operation"—a report cluttered with sarcasm about "hormone-addled sixteen-year-olds" and "later, dude" lingo...

...They are not the ones who use drugs the most, yet today's anti-drug warriors aim to inflict harsher punishments on adolescents than on groups that display more serious drug problems...

...In fact, three decades of drug-fatality statistics show that youths have not played a serious part in the nation's drug-abuse problem for twenty years...

...Males's book, "The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents," is being issued by Common Courage Press in April...

...The Clinton Administration parried by calling a national conference of community leaders to discuss teenagers and drugs...

...Another fifteen-year-old who had recently transferred to the school told the board, "I am not a drug dealer," but said he complied with the undercover agent's repeated drug requests in order "to make new friends in school...

...But why target teens...

...But after the hearing, the board voted to expel Smith...

...He based his story solely on the deputies' jocular anecdotes...

...Clinton himself, illustrating what The New York Times called "another setpiece in his effort to showcase a 'values agenda,'" carried the anti-drug "personal statement" to a suburban Greenbelt, Maryland, high school in March...

...Back in 1970, scores of L.A...

...Today...

...After her arrest, she was tested for drugs...

...Not only is it erupting among the wrong age groups and for the wrong reasons, its timing is terrible...

...The new drug crisis couldn't be more inconvenient for drug-war officials...

...But teenagers made up just 2 percent of these deaths...

...the RETURN of Reefer Madness BY MIKE MALES AND FAYE DOCUYANAN On December 15, 1995, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala called her third major news conference in a year on teenagers and drug use...

...In 1994,1,800...

...She testified that McCrillis approached her for drugs on a daily basis over a two-month period, entreaties which she refused...

...I would have thought they'd want to keep us in school...

...The city then accounted for one out of five teenage drug deaths in the United States...

...In Los Angeles County, teenage drug deaths declined by a staggering 90 percent from 1970 to 1994...

...Another arrestee, eighteen-year-old Ryan Adcock, admitted that he did sell marijuana to McCrillis...

...Of the 1,100 county deaths in 1994 considered drug-related— accidental overdoses, suicides, car wrecks, and other fatal mishaps in which drugs were found—only six involved teens...

...He harassed students on a daily basis...

...Allison Smith's only contact with school has been one hour per week, during which she picks up her independent-study assignments and returns home to complete them...

...If I was truly a drug dealer...

...But Volpert admitted that when the school tested 500 athletes during a four-year period at a cost of $15,000, it turned up just three "positives...

...A big part of the answer may be Vietnam...

...Supreme Court, which in 1995 upheld its effort to drug-test all student athletes...

...In June 1994, the federal Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN) released its annual survey of coroners in four dozen major cities...

...Ryan, a special-education student, said McCrillis had approached him for weeks, "nearly every day, over and over again...

...The tone was one of dire panic: "Your children are at risk," she declared...

...Middle-agers are now twenty times more likely to die from drugs than are teenagers, and middle-agers account for half of all drug deaths...

...Nor do Los Angeles hospitals find a serious drug problem among youth...

...The big killers: heroin, cocaine, pharmaceutical drugs, and alcohol mixed with drugs...

...Later she told him the money had been "ripped off" by the supposed supplier and never provided any drugs...

...Further, Smith denied ever using drugs at school...

...What, then, accounts for the incessant hype about a "teenage drug crisis" in news stories, documentaries, and official press releases for the last two years...

...No witnesses have appeared to corroborate the deputies' versions of the disputed incidents...

...The project found greatly elevated rates of suicide, homicide, and fatal accidents among Vietnam veterans for the first five years after their return, statistics that hold true for previous wars as well...

...No change in policy is evident...

...The drug discovered in the systems of most adolescents receiving emergency-room treatment was aspirin or an aspirin substitute, which accounted for four times more teen emergencies than all street drugs combined...

...A 1992 Boston juvenile-court study found that of 200 children and youths removed from their homes after suffering severe physical and sexual abuse, two-thirds had parents who abused drugs or alcohol...

...Local police and the county sheriff's department, though eager to talk to the press at the time of the arrests in December, told us in March that they "didn't have time" to report how many students, if any, had been criminally charged...

...The multi-hundred-billion-dollar War on Drugs was inaugurated in 1983, escalated in 1986, and justified throughout with official promises that the crusade was vital to a reduction in drug abuse and crime...

...A series of unannounced sniff-searches by marijuana-trained sheriffs dogs throughout 1994 turned up zero evidence of drugs at the school...

...McCrillis stated he approached Smith "five or six" times during fall term and asked her to sell him drugs...

...Most of the arrests turned out not to have involved actual exchanges of drugs, but only disputed claims of who approached whom and exactly what transpired...

...Plenty of reason for a school board to give a ninth-grader the benefit of the doubt...

...It found a record-high 8,500 deaths resulted from drug overdoses, drug suicides, and drug-related accidents in 1993...

...In 1983...

...In fact, the "teenage drug crisis" is a politically manufactured hoax...

...Since 1983, the rate of drug-abuse deaths among American adults has risen 120 percent...

...The deputy testified that other students witnessed the transaction...

...Black youths have been particularly hard hit by the Clinton drug war...

...Nationwide, in 1983, 2,700 Americans died from drug overdoses, a number that had been declining for the previous decade...

...A black teenager is one-fifth as likely to die from drug abuse, but is ten times more likely to be arrested and dozens of times more likely to be imprisoned, than is a white middle-aged adult...

...Yet he did not report it to school authorities at the time, even anonymously...

...It would rather confon crisis around a percentagepoint increase in selfreported, occasional marijuana smoking by high-school students...

...A couple of months later he was arrested...

...But the government doesn't want to face up to the drug legacy of the Vietnam War...

...In 1994, 554 Los Angeles adults died of drug overdoses, and an equal number were the victims of drug-related suicides and accidents...

...teenagers died from drug overdoses...

...teen through nineteen, died from a drug overdose during 1994...

...Toxicology reports of the Los Angeles County coroner reveal that in a metropolis of nine million, not a single teen, age thirMike Males and Faye Docuyanan are doctoral students at the University of California, Irvine...

...Clinton is carrying his anti-drug message to the wrong audience: The worst drug abuse of his 1950s and 1960s generation is going on right now...

...But he refused requests from Smith's attorney to name them...

...The usual orgy of political maneuvering followed the study's release...

...The media couldn't have cared less...

...It was my first time selling," he says...

...Shalala and White House drug-policy chief Lee Brown—who launched a personal "crusade" in 1995 to depict marijuana as an "addictive killer"—denounced proposed GOP cuts in the drug-war budget as "playing politics with the lives of America's children...

...What could be causing this huge surplus of middle-aged drug abuse...

...She's puzzled at the logic, though...

...Smith categorically denied McCrillis's story...

...teen drug carnage was over, and the city's youth drug toll has been very low ever since...

...Clearly, an undercover operation like the one at Redondo Union High School could be inflicted on any group in society...

...Drug counselors, police and sheriff's deputies, and school officials throughout the United States have joined Shalala to proclaim a war on drugs in the schools— where they say kids are consuming drugs at younger and younger ages...

...What has become an annual media circus surrounding the release of the University of Michigan's "Monitoring the Future" survey of 50,000 junior and senior high-school students turns out to be governmental hyperventilation over increases in occasional use of marijuana...

...Two in three high-school seniors, and seven in eight eighth-graders, had not smoked pot during the entire year preceding the survey...

...But McCrillis turned out to have a worse credibility problem...

...They aren't going to hospitals or treatment centers for drugs...

...It held itself up as a national symbol of teenage drug peril: "Students in a state of rebellion" due to "startling and progressive" drug abuse, its lawyer, Timothy Volpert, declared...

...People under age 21 comprised only one in ten admissions to drug-abuse treatment programs in 1993, down sharply from one in six in 1987...

...Their typical estimates suggest that in any given Southern California high school, 50 to 80 percent of the students use marijuana, LSD, and/or crystal methamphetamine (speed...

...Only 2 percent of the seniors had used crystal methamphetamine, 4 percent had used cocaine, and fewer than 1 percent had used heroin during the previous twelve months...

...The government doesn't want to face up to the drug legacy of the Vietnam War...

...A 1995 study by The Sentencing Project found that even though whites comprise the large majority of drug users, 90 percent of those imprisoned for drug possession were black or Latino...

...We have a generation at risk...

...Exploding rates have occurred not among teens but among middle-aged men nationwide...

...On December 7, 1995, just before Christmas vacation, fourteen-year-old Allison Smith (not her real name) was arrested at Redondo Union High School and charged with offering to sell marijuana to Los Angeles undercover sheriffs deputy Tim McCrillis, who had posed as a student...

...And many suggest that even cocaine, crack, and heroin are regularly consumed on school grounds...

...Not only do the drugs fail to materialize in exhaustive undercover operations and searches, there is little evidence of any of the well-known consequences of drug abuse...

...But in nearby Baltimore, the coroner's report showed that while drug-abuse deaths had skyrocketed in the last four years, teenagers comprised none of the city's 458 drug-related deaths in 1994...

...In 1994, that number nearly tripled to 8,000...

...Three months after the arrests, parents say they know of only one student who has been criminally charged with selling drugs...

...about 500 Americans died in murders attributed by the FBI to narcotics...

...The test came out negative...

...He said that Smith, in an auto-shop class on November 16, 1995, finally accepted $20 and agreed to sell him hallucinogenic "shrooms...

...In a secret agreement with the school district, the Los Angeles County sheriffs department outfitted two young-looking undercover deputies as students in hallways and classes during fall term...

...Upon recommendation of the Re-dondo/Manhattan school district, the school board summarily expelled all seventeen, including one special-education student, even though only two were found to have drugs in their possession...

...Smith had trouble explaining why she had not informed the principal that another "student" was persistently attempting to buy drugs from her, or why she did not turn over the $20 he paid her to school officials...

...Schools that claim a big student drug scene can't produce evidence with dogs, undercover agents, random tests, and surprise searches...

...Congress, the White House staff, the Los Angeles Times, police and sheriff's agencies—could be relentlessly targeted, and a few arrests would result...

...I'd have a it of time to deal now," she joked...

...School principal Robert Paulson and Redondo Beach police chief Mel Nichols had already set up a press confe-ence...

...No one was called to support his version, and even he agreed that Smith never provided him with the drugs...

...In a system with 7,700 junior and senior high-school students, dogs detected only ten lockers in which drugs might ever have been stored...

...For an Administration that initially promised to concentrate on treating hardcore addicts and targeting big-time drug sellers, the obsession (one Shalala in particular is in the grips of) now is to punish occasional, single-time marijuana use by primarily nonwhite teenagers...

...By the late 1970s, the L.A...

...It doesn't happen to be one health and drug officials want to elucidate, for obvious reasons: Its key elements are not pot, teens, and marijuana-leaf T-shirts, but hard drugs, middle-aged men, and Vietnam...

...She said he finally placed $20 on a classroom table in front of her and left the room, and she was unable to find him to return the money...

...Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch went one step further, announcing hearings on the Clinton Administration's "ineffectual leadership" on youth drug use...

...He claimed to have personally witnessed Smith "pull out a small baggie of mushrooms and ingest those" in a school classroom...

...Overzealous anti-drug warriors, or student junkies lying to save their hides...

...But mere facts have not slowed down the anti-teen-drug-use crusades...

...There is indeed a large and growing drug-abuse crisis in the United States, also found most starkly in Los Angeles...

...It's the return of Reefer Madness...

...The Los Angeles Times later ran a glowing story quoting only deputies...