However, the smaller number of habitual users of harder drugs and multiple drugs require urgent and focused attention regardless of their ages. We now suffer the calamitous results of a decade of backward drug doctrine. After spending hundreds of millions and arresting millions to fight drugs, America now faces its worst drug crisis. If the past is prologue, the future is bleak. California's '60s barbiturate crisis, which cost more than 10,000 lives, showed how quickly drug-abuse habits can spread from parent to youth generations.
Kids raised in drug-abusing families are far more likely to abuse drugs themselves.
Ironically, the brightest spot in today's escalating drug malaise is teenagers. Teenage drug-death rates plummeted in the late 1970s and have remained low ever since.