Cocaine and White Teens

[groovedaddy]

By CHARLES M. BLOW

Last month, President Bush touted the results of a government-sponsored study by the University of Michigan called Monitoring the Future. It reported a broad decline in drug use among young people since 2001. This included a 24 percent drop in the overall use of illicit drugs. There was one exception he said: abuse of painkillers. But, one important metric that wasn’t mentioned, and that stubbornly resisted the downturn, was the use of cocaine.

According to data from the group that produced the report, the percentage of both black and white 12th graders who confessed to using cocaine in the past 30 days has essentially stayed flat since 2001. The major difference is that white usage outweighs black usage 4 to 1. (If you take a longer view back to 1991, when cocaine usage bottomed out following the outrageous ’80s, usage among white 12th graders since then has nearly doubled, while usage among black 12th graders has fallen a bit.)

While we turned our attention to pills being swiped from parents’ medicine cabinets, the number of youngsters snorting white lines continued virtually unabated, producing a striking consequence.

According to the most recent data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, admissions of white teenagers to drug treatment centers for crack and cocaine abuse soared 76 percent from 2001 to 2006. Crack and cocaine was the only illicit drug category in which the number of admissions for white teens grew over this period, and in 2006 the number was at its highest level since these data have been kept. By contrast, admissions among black teens for crack and cocaine over the same period held steady. By 2006, white admissions outnumbered those for blacks by more than 10 to 1. (It should be noted that admissions for white youths abusing painkillers in 2006, while growing, was still less than half the number of admissions for those abusing cocaine that year.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/opinion/10blow.html?th&emc=th

[sakabatou]

1. Well Bush would know

He's taken some himself, supposedly.

[ogneopasno]

2. I'm sorry, but hee to the writer's name. That out of the way, this is an interesting column.

[StClone]

5. With your mention

How eerily coincidental.

[Kolesar]

6. White Punks On Blow ... eom

[sui generis]

3. they still make and sell crack?

I am constantly surprised how common references at work are to snorting a bucket of peruvian marching powder, et al, by grannies and grampas as well as young'uns straight out of the MBA program.

I wonder how it scales over time against persistence of weed usage in comparative populations.

[MADem]

4. Do people still snort white lines? Isn't that terribly expensive?

I thought the new thing was the cheaper, more direct crack.

But then, all I know about this particular drug is the crap I see on TV about it....

[ogneopasno]

8. While the economy IS tanking, kids have had a lot more pocket money than they used to when I was

growing up...I read somewhere that that's part of the reason why.

[BridgeTheGap]

7. Hill Billy Heroin (Oxycontin) and Meth are big problems in Kentucky. n.t