Running scared: we're too frightened to deal with the real issues in adolescent substance abuse

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Abstract
Contemporary America is obsessed with self-destructive drug and alcohol use. However, our policies are based entirely on erroneous epidemio-logical, pharmacological and clinical beliefs about drug use and alcoholism. Adolescents are special targets for our anti-drug efforts, since they are a high-risk group both for substance abuse and for other kinds of self-destructive behavior. Nonetheless, our main prevention efforts—to instill more fear of drugs and alcohol—seem not to have persuaded most young people to avoid drug and alcohol intoxication or to have prevented the small group of potential addicts from their immersion in lives built around drugs. Rather than dealing with what in fact underlies such behavior, we are preoccupied with seeking biological explanations for our personal and social sense of loss and searching for medical cures for our cultural failures and existential malaise. This elaborate social defense mechanism, which at times achieves the level of psychosis, masks and ultimately exacerbates our deepest fears that we cannot cope with our worlds.

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