Stanton Peele
Morristown, NJ

Abstract

Contemporary America is obsessed with self destructive drug and alcohol use. However, our policies are based entirely on erroneous epidemiological, pharmacological and clinical beliefs about drug use and alcoholism. Adolescents are special targets for our anti-drug efforts, since they are a high-risk group both for substance abuse and for other kinds of self-destructive behavior. Nonetheless, our main prevention efforts—to instill more fear of drugs and alcohol—seem not to have persuaded most young people to avoid drug and alcohol intoxication or to have prevented the small group of potential addicts from their immersion in lives built around drugs. Rather than dealing with what in fact underlies such behavior, we are preoccupied with seeking biological explanations for our personal and social sense of loss and searching for medical cures for our cultural failures and existential malaise. This elaborate social defense mechanism, which at times achieves the level of psychosis, masks and ultimately exacerbates our deepest fears that we cannot cope with our worlds.

Introduction

When US college basketball star Len Bias died in 1986 while inhaling cocaine, cries went out for increased surveillance against drug use. In fact, the University of Maryland athletic program of which Bias was a part already had a model drug-testing program in place. Obviously, Bias circumvented this program while he regularly took massive amounts of cocaine. However, a reliable indicator was readily available that Bias was not fully engaged in university life—he didn't pass a single course in his last year of college.¹

Bias's behavior and death contrast with the experiences of the large number of cocaine users in American universities. In 1985, 17% of American college students used cocaine and most students said the drug was fairly easy to obtain. Yet only 0.1% of students (or 1 in 170 of those who used cocaine) used it daily for as long as a month (Johnston et al., 1986). Apparently, most students resist the addictive lure of cocaine, even after having sampled the drug, because school obligations and other values they hold prevent them from consistently savoring the drug's effects. It would seem that drug addiction is best resisted through an involvement in activities and values—such as achievement at school—that are incompatible with continued drug intoxication.

However, American society has not been able to inculcate such values adequately, particularly in certain key high-risk groups of people. Bias actually represents a class of people with similar problems. Bias's basketball coach, Lefty Driesell (who was removed as coach but became assistant athletic director at the University after Bias's death), noted about the athletic conference Maryland participated in: 'Cocaine has been a continuing problem among Atlantic Coast Conference players and former players. Five of the best players we've ever had have all admitted having drug problems: Bias, David Thompson, John Lucas, Phil Ford, and Walter Davis.' Meanwhile, "asked if he had been made a scapegoat for Bias's death (by Maryland), Driesell ducked the question with a smile, 'I'm still being paid by that school' " (Driesell reflects, 1987).²

Driesell called David Thompson 'the best player I ever saw in the conference'. Thompson, after having been investigated for cocaine use and for beating his wife while he was a professional basketball player, has since retired and was recently sentenced to jail for criminal assault (Woes for Thompson, 1987). Thompson played for a college team that emphasized God and community spirit (although this team was banned from tournament play because of violations it committed in recruiting Thompson from high school), and Thompson was thought to be a model citizen in college. Bias, too, was from an extremely religious family. Driesell said about Bias, 'He was one of the nicest young men I have ever known . . . I didn't even think he drank beer'. Bias's mother currently lectures around the US on the dangers of drugs. All of the five men Driesell discussed were blacks who came from rural sections of the southern US and from extremely abstemious backgrounds.³

Driesell and others seemed to have mistaken the kinds of values and preparation that are necessary to prevent self-destructive drug use. A dedication to abstemiousness and God does not seem adequate for the job. In common with most Americans, Driesell conceives of drug abuse as an external force that surprises otherwise good young people. The solution, of course, is to avoid any contact with drugs. Once someone uses drugs, in this view, anything can happen (no matter what the user's previous disposition). For those stricken with the 'disease' of drug abuse, medical treatment emphasizes biological causation but recommends something very much like religious conversion to keep the individual away from drugs— however tenuous the person's self-control and however ready for relapse the person remains as long as he or she lives.

Facing the Facts

It is not true that several decades of widespread drug use in the United States have made us more aware of the facts about, and nature of, drug use. Rather, the contrary has occurred, and totally unsupportable assertions about drugs are made and accepted without question. We have witnessed in the United States a gradual growth in recreational drug use until more high school seniors nationwide have tried illicit drugs than have not done so (Johnston et al., 1986). In many areas and among many groups, such drug use is a norm, and not to use drugs is abnormal. Such statistics are, of course, horribly alarming to parents and others. Nonetheless, as indicated in the 1985 college student cocaine use data, the rather large majority of young drug users are casual or occasional users. Less well known is that even those young people who use drugs heavily will generally desist or cut back this use before the age of 30, even when the drug in question is heroin (O'Donnell et al., 1976).

The American reaction to data indicating that many young people have used drugs has been increasingly alarmist (Clymer, 1986), even though there have not been clear indications that abusive drug use has grown. For example, daily marijuana use declined among high school seniors in the mid-1980s (Johnston et al., 1986), even while marijuana continued to be widely available and most adolescents have used the drug by the time they enter college. The one sign of regular drug intoxication among the young occurs in the case of alcohol. Fifty-nine percent of 1985 male college students (along with 34% of female students) reported having had five drinks or more in one sitting in the previous two weeks.