USA - Man who sold Nixon White House on youth drug study has new public enemy

[Lunar Loops]

This interesting little piece is from signonsandiego.com:

Man who sold Nixon White House on youth drug study has new public enemy

By David N. Goodman
ASSOCIATED PRESS

9:03 p.m. March 29, 2008


HAMBURG TOWNSHIP, Mich. – President Nixon may not have dented the nation's drug epidemic when he named Elvis Presley a “federal agent at large” in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1970. But a $120 million research program born in the Nixon administration continues to shape America's drug policies.

And it all started with a 33-year-old psychology graduate student's bold plan to poll thousands of teens nationwide each year about their drug habits and beliefs at a time when reefer madness had them in its grip.


Lloyd Johnston, now 67, still runs that study from the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. His group recently won a $33 million National Institute on Drug Abuse grant to continue through 2012.

“It's just unparalleled in its importance in our field,” said Tom Hendrick, founding director of the Partnership for a Drug Free America – the group that launched the iconic TV ads showing a frying egg and a narrator who says, “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”

The study owes its birth to Nixon drug czar Dr. Robert DuPont, who read Johnston's 1973 book “Drugs and American Youth” and invited the research assistant to Washington to brief his staff. Johnston pitched DuPont the idea he and colleague Jerald Bachman dreamed up of asking teens across the country about their drug, alcohol and tobacco habits and attitudes.

DuPont was hooked, and secured funding for the first “Monitoring the Future” study.

“I said, 'We've got to do this, and Lloyd is the guy to do it,'” said DuPont, a psychiatrist and head of the Institute for Behavior and Health in Rockville, Md.

The project was approved in August 1974 and the first surveys were conducted of 17,000 students the following spring.

Released in late 1975, the results gave the nation a first comprehensive look at what its children were smoking, popping and drinking: 40 percent of high school seniors had used marijuana in the past 12 months and 45 percent had taken an illicit drug in that time.

From the start, the annual studies drew intense media coverage, Johnston said from the airy lakeside home 15 miles north of campus that he shares with his wife and daughter.

“NBC put on a one-hour special called, 'Reading, Writing and Reefer,'” said Johnston, a Harvard MBA. It “had a few talking heads like me” and lots of “kids who were heavy dope users.”

“Anybody who was viewing the program could see that they weren't functioning right cognitively,” he said. “I think it was one of the most effective prevention tools.”

Teens' perception of the physical and psychological risks of marijuana began rising and their use rates started falling, the studies found. Twelfth graders' marijuana use peaked in 1979 at 51 percent, and stood at 32 percent last year.

“Because Americans took action, today there are an estimated 860,000 fewer children using drugs than six years ago,” President Bush said at a December White House address announcing the Michigan study's 2007 findings.

The 45-minute confidential questionnaires now are given to 50,000 students in eighth, 10th and 12th grade each year, with cumulative data on more than 1 million students. With the $33 million grant, total funding has reached $120 million.

The Council of Europe began a similar study 15 years ago – a project that now involves 45 countries. Around the world, researchers have drawn from the study methods used by Johnston's group.

“They are idols for some of us,” Gerhard Gmel, a senior scientist at the Swiss Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Drug Problems, said from Lausanne, Switzerland.

Even a leading voice for legalizing marijuana expressed “high esteem” for Johnston's work.

“Johnston cannot be controlled, cannot be manipulated in the way other federal researchers can,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML, a non-profit public-interest lobby.

Thirty-three years of data have convinced Johnston that the single best way to cut teen drug abuse is to get information on drug dangers into the hands of teens. Focusing primarily on cutting supply won't work, he said.

“There's a lot of money to be made,” he said. “Put a bunch of (drug dealers) in jail, there'll be a bunch more there. Somebody's going to take over.”

He gets no argument from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency.

“From the DEA side,” spokesman Garrison Courtney said, “we see that educating people is as important as enforcement.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Johnston said teen smoking, not teen drug abuse, probably is where his group's work has made the most difference. Most of the 400,000 Americans killed by smoking each year started as young people.

Public alarm after Johnston documented a spike in smoking by young teens in the “Joe Camel” era of the early 1990s helped drive 1998's $206 billion tobacco industry settlement. That agreement with the states prohibited the targeting of youth in cigarette ads.

“In terms of lives saved and lives impacted, that's probably our most important contribution,” Johnston said.
With a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, he's now probing the social factors behind childhood obesity, “probably the second-largest cause of preventable death and disease in the country” after smoking.

Reputation Comments on this post:

good article