Year: 1995
Type: article
Abstract: The new Democrats and the Newt Repub licans want to reform welfare, reduce crime, cut taxes, reshape Medicare, increase worker productivity and international competitive ness, house the homeless, and free state and federal budgets from the shackles of prison and Medicaid costs.The greatest obstacle to this proposed reinvention of America is abuse and addiction involving all substances: tobacco, alcohol, pills, and drugs.American leaders can soft-pedal the gravity of the addiction epidemic because so many individuals are content with their own self-denial.Yet, it is hard to find an American whom substance abuse has not touched directly.The anecdotal evidence is everywhere, even among society's most successful members; in the addiction to alcohol and pills of megastars like Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minelli, in the death of Maryland college basketball star Len Bias from a cocaine overdose just as he was about to embark on a promising professional career, in the destructive cocaine and heroin dependence of Eugene Fodor, the first American to share top honours at the Tchaikovsky violin competition in Moscow, in the life threatening alcohol and drug addiction of Robin Williams, and the overdose death of Williams' friend, John Belushi, in Cy Young Award winner Dwight Gooden's cocaine abuse, and addiction-plagued pro football stars like Dexter Manley and Lawrence Taylor, and in the death of rock star Kurt Cobain.Those who work the halls of national and state legislatures know how treacherous the lure of alcohol and pills can be in the corridors of political success.We have seen this in the political wives Kitty Dukakis and Betty Ford, and in the long line of alcohol abusing politicians, including at the peaks of their careers two of the most powerful congressional committee chairmen ever, Wilbur Mills and Russell Long.And is there an American without a family member or friend who smoked themselves to premature disability or death from emphy sema, lung cancer, or heart disease?The celebrity morbidity list here begins with Humphrey Bogart and Nat King Cole, and gets longer each day, just a couple of years ago claiming pop singer and two-pack-a-day smoker Mary Wells and Pat Nixon as cancer victims.The statistical evidence gives substance abuse and addiction its sinister status as Public Health Enemy Number One.More than 50 million Americans are hooked on cigarettes, about 18 million are alcoholics or alcohol abusers, more than five million smoke mari juana at least once a week, two million snort cocaine, including half a million addicted to crack.As many as a million are hooked on heroin, eight million abuse psychotherapeutic drugs like tranquillizers, amphetamines, and sleeping pills.Up to a million regularly use hallucinogens like LSD and PCP, and some one million Americans, half of them teenagers, use black market steroids.If illegal drug use is falling among affluent teenagers, binge drinking is still common among high school seniors and college students, and from 1977 to 1993, the per centage of college women who reported drinking to get drunk more than tripled from 10% to 35%.Princeton University presidentHoward Shapiro calls alcohol abuse "the greatest single threat to the university's ful filment of its mission".The human misery caused by addiction and abuse cannot be calculated; the broken homes, the lives snuffed out in their twenties, the teenage mothers and absent fathers, women victimised by violence and rape, babies disabled by a mother's smoking, drinking, or using drugs during pregnancy, children molested by a father hopped up on beer or marijuana or cocaine, old people locking themselves in apartments terrorised at the thought of grocery shopping even in daytime, children -yes, children com mitting suicide.We know that a child who smokes marijuana is twice as likely to commit suicide as one who doesn't.Substance abuse and addiction visit a special savagery on America's poor and minorities, but they spawn tragedies far beyond the black and Hispanic ghettos of poverty.Heroin wrenched the life away from Ethel Kennedy's son, David, in a luxurious Palm Beach hotel at the age of 28, and alcohol and drug addiction have touched many other members of that royal American family, including Robert
Source: Tobacco Control
Author: Joseph A Califano
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2805030729