The return of reefer madness.

• Author: Males, Mike
• Position: Exaggerated reports of teenage drug use

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."

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

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. 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.

Toxicology reports of the Los Angeles County coroner reveal that in a metropolis of nine million, not a single teen, age thirteen through nineteen, died from a drug overdose during 1994. 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.

Nor do Los Angeles hospitals find a serious drug problem among youth. Teenagers made up only 3 percent of 36,000 emergency-room treatments during 1993 for drug-related injuries. 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.

In fact, the "teenage drug crisis" is a politically manufactured hoax. Take the Vernonia, Oregon, school district. 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. 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." Even so, Vernonia prevailed in the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1995 upheld its effort to drug-test all student athletes.

Or take the Newport-Costa Mesa, California, school district, where officials also claimed extensive student drug activity. A series of unannounced sniff-searches by marijuana-trained sheriff's dogs throughout 1994 turned up zero evidence of drugs at the school. 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.

But mere facts have not slowed down the anti-teen-drug-use crusades. 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. Smith was taken to the principal's office where investigators searched her for drugs. They found none. Then they handcuffed Smith to two other girls, and led her to a sheriff's van.

Outside the school, alerted reporters from major television and newspaper outlets had assembled, cameras and recorders whirring. School principal Robert Paulson and Redondo Beach police chief Mel Nichols had already set up a press conference. The next day, the local Daily Breeze banner-lined the arrest. The Los Angeles Times later ran a glowing story quoting only deputies.

Redondo Union High School's sprawling, park-like campus covers dozens of acres, commanding views of affluent oceanside houses and condominiums. Authorities singled the school out as a major center for student drug use. in a secret agreement with the school district, the Los...