by Mike Males and Faye Docuyanan

About the authors: Mike Males and Faye Docuyanan are graduate students at the University of California, Irvine. Males is the author of The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents.

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. The tone was one of dire panic: “Your children are at risk,” she declared. “We have a generation at risk.”

Evidence of a Teen Drug Abuse Epidemic

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. Their typical...