Drugs: The President Matters
WALTERS, JOHN P.
Drugs: The President Matters by John P. Walters HIS YOUNG AUDIENCE KNEW Bill Clinton was talking about marijuana, but imagine for a moment that the soon-to-be president was referring instead to...
...In 1989 and 1990, the Bush administration’s concerted effort to interdict the flow of drugs into the United States contributed to a 43 percent increase in the price of street cocaine—which was accompanied by a 27 percent reduction in cocaine-related emergency-room admissions and overdoses...
...he recognizes the importance of exercising moral leadership on the issue of cigarette use by kids...
...More broadly, the president has failed to offer even token support to the efforts of religious leaders, communities, law enforcement, medical personnel, and local officials...
...Hard-core drug use is defined by doctors as a chronic condition, meaning that the only hope for most addicts is detox followed by repeated stays in a treatment facility...
...Yet contrast Clinton’s easy acquiescence in the cultural currents affecting drug use with his zealous attack on tobacco use...
...government has successfully managed two major drug epidemics in this century...
...Having cheap drugs—lots of drugs—tends to lead to increased numbers of addicts in hospital emergency rooms...
...Three decades of painful experience with illegal drugs show that it is not...
...These numbers have been roughly reversed under Bill Clinton, despite a drug strategy that is supposedly targeted at hard-core addicts...
...This despite the fact that 46 percent of parents fully expect their teenage children to try drugs...
...He is the president, and there are things he can do to reduce the drug problem...
...Bill Clinton is not a hostage, lashed to the mast of a sinking ship...
...Jay Leno joked that the Smashing Pumpkins has a tougher drug policy than the Clinton White House...
...The president has let his most remembered statement on this topic remain “I didn’t inhale...
...Instead, he has done things that have helped make it worse...
...And the earlier and more heavily teenagers become involved with illegal drugs, the likelier it is that they will go on to become addicts...
...There are addicts...
...Is it reasonable to accept, as Clinton would have us believe, that the president of the United States lacks the power to alleviate, or turn back, a seismic change in attitudes among young people, or an increase in addiction among adults...
...At a time when many businesses in this country have made great strides to create drug-free work places, the Clinton White House hired individuals whose drug use was so extensive and so recent that the Secret Service recommended denying them access to the most world’s most prestigious office building...
...Asked whether he would “inhale” given the chance to do it “over again,” Clinton replied, grinning, “Sure, if I could...
...But while the president has promised to move “Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man . . . out of our children’s reach forever,” he has been quick to avoid responsibility for, or even discussion of, drug use...
...This epidemic is no accident,” he said at a Rose Garden ceremony where he announced that tobacco would henceforth be regulated by the FDA...
...Of course...
...Moral leadership is important...
...Drugs: The President Matters by John P. Walters HIS YOUNG AUDIENCE KNEW Bill Clinton was talking about marijuana, but imagine for a moment that the soon-to-be president was referring instead to cigarettes in the 1992 forum he conducted with young people on MTV...
...The most critical program for preventing drug use is the one run by parents...
...Children learn by example, and the example set by the Clinton administration has been one of indifference and even casual tolerance of drug use...
...Among boomer parents who experimented heavily with marijuana as young people, the figure rises to 65 percent...
...Of course, Clinton’s unwillingness to target drug use among young people is not the sum total of the drug problem...
...Some will argue that kids don’t listen to what the president says...
...Because addicts can only beg, borrow, and steal so much, making drugs expensive and reducing their potency forces addicts to spend their limited disposable income on a smaller quantity of lower-quality drugs—a major incentive to enter treatment...
...Of course, the president would never joke about tobacco in this way...
...These efforts are unquestionably aided by political leadership, as New York Democratic representative Charles Rangel acknowledged when he said Clinton’s lack of leadership makes him nostalgic for Nancy Reagan...
...After steadily and dramatically declining from the late 1970s until 1992, in less than four years illegal drug use threatens to become part of the lives of a majority of our teenagers by the time they reach age 18...
...As a result, prices have fallen, use is up, and addicts are getting sicker...
...He served in the drug czar’s office during the Bush administration...
...It’s easy to see why...
...Yale professor David Musto has said as well that “we are dealing with a larger shift in values and attitudes...
...More than onethird of children say their parents have never even had a talk with them about drugs...
...The Clinton strategy deliberately deemphasized measures like interdiction that make drugs scarce and expensive...
...John P.Walters is co-author, with William J. Bennett and John J. DiIulio, Jr...
...of Body Count (Simon & Schuster...
...HHS estimates their number at 7 million, most of whom started out as young drug users in the 1970s and 1980s...
...No social phenomenon can be reduced to a single cause, and there is even some evidence that drug use among a small subset of young people was already increasing at the time Clinton was elected...
...LSD use among high-school seniors has reached a twenty-year high, and 34.7 percent of seniors now smoke marijuana at least occasionally...
...First, perhaps the most important lesson of our history with drug use is the fact that those who do not get involved with illegal drugs before age 20 almost never do after that...
...A recent Health and Human Services survey shows that teen use of marijuana and cocaine is up by 141 percent and 166 percent respectively since 1992...
...Since he was elected, the use of illicit drugs by children as young as 12 has more than doubled...
...UCLA professor Mark Kleiman agreed: “These are complex societal trends...
...Is it too much to expect President Clinton to try to shape attitudes among his peers, when his election in 1992 was widely hailed as a harbinger of that generation’s accession to control of American institutions...
...Children are bombarded daily by massive marketing campaigns that play on their vulnerabilities, their insecurities, their longings to be something in the world...
...Speaking on CNN shortly before his speech at the Democratic convention, the president argued that the rising numbers of young drug users weren’t his fault because “the patterns, interestingly enough, are the same in Canada and several European countries...
...The best way to reach addicts is to drive up the price of drugs...
...But the U.S...
...I tried before...
...But when faced with criticism for the alarming increase in drug use among young people, the Clinton administration and its defenders claim the drug problem is beyond even the president’s reach—that it is a function of the Zeitgeist and resists political solutions...
...Fair enough...
...Tobacco use is, in other words, one societal trend the government is willing to try to control...
...But parents—especially baby-boomer parents— have been falling down on the job...
...Make drugs expensive and lives are saved...
...Bill Clinton would never joke about cigarettes the way he once joked about his use of marijuana...
...Are there other non-policy causes behind this increase in drug use...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 2
