High Society: How Substance Abuse Ravages America and What to Do About It

by Joseph A. Califano Jr.

In High Society , Joseph Califano points out that a child who reaches twenty-one without smoking, using illegal drugs, or abusing alcohol is virtually certain never to do so—and chronicles the fearful cost in personal pain and public dollars of our nation's failure to act on this truth. Califano shows how substance abuse is the culprit in violent and property crime, soaring Medicare and Medicaid costs, family breakup, domestic violence, the spread of AIDS, teen pregnancy, poverty, and low productivity. He takes on alcohol and tobacco interests that buy political protection with campaign contributions and seed a culture of substance abuse among our nation's children and teens. He explains the importance of parent power, proposes revolutionary changes in prevention, treatment, and criminal justice, and calls upon every individual and institution to confront this plague that has maimed and killed more Americans than all our wars, natural catastrophes, and traffic accidents combined.

Genres: Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2007

Reviews

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 1 out of 5]

[NOTE: Review edited for length reasons, full review at Amazon]

As long as there have been humans, there have been doomsayers. These people see it as their job to ensure that everyone around them is terrified. It's tough to scare people with nothing, so these doomsayers need to find—or manufacture—a scapegoat, a straw man, something for us to be afraid of. Granted, some things we have been warned about are very real dangers. The first Neanderthal to warn the rest of the folks around the campfire about the dangers of the sabre-toothed tiger had every right to be scared, and probably had some very nasty scars, assuming he had firsthand information about how dangerous the beast was. But as humans became more powerful, and better able to control the natural dangers around them, doomsayers had to invent things more powerful than humans for humans to be scared of. This, of course, is the basis of organized religion. Skip forward a few thousand years, and we've gone through the age of enlightenment. Religion doesn't really scare most of us any more. The new generation of doomsayers, taking a few clues from Madison Avenue, have combined the two approaches to doomsaying by taking a real, though usually minor, danger and blowing it way, way out of proportion.

And thus we come to Joseph Califano's laughably stupid High Society, a book that would be pure comedy gold if there weren't enough reviews on Amazon to convince me that there are actually people out there taking this nonsense seriously.

Califano opens by hammering the point into our heads that sixty-five percent of all the world's illegal drugs are consumed in the United States. Unlike other statistics he quotes, however, Califano never mentions whether the survey(s) used to arrive at this conclusion controlled for the fact that many drugs that are illegal in America are legal in other countries. That Califano neglected to mention this when he went out of his way to mention specific controls surrounding other statistics is telling. And when the author evades full disclosure on the first notable statistic in the book, that should be raising a huge red flag that everything else he says should be taken with as much salt as necessary.

As well, Califano has some very serious issues with tunnel vision. He cherry-picks the drugs he's going to report on in any given aspect of his expose to show the worst possible effects. This is, to be expected in a book such as this. Where he goes from spin to duplicity is in taking anecdotal evidence and raising it to the same level of credibility as scientific studies. That he does nothing to hide the fact that he is doing this is irrelevant as long as people are willing to accept the unspoken (and very, very wrong) idea that anecdotal evidence is as credible as scientific studies. The idea is ludicrous, and yet we see examples of it daily—on the news, in religious and political discussions, every time we get a chain email forwarded to us about a long-debunked urban legend. People are all too willing to swallow anecdotal evidence and turn it into an ironclad belief system. Joseph Califano is not a stupid man. He knows this, and he is playing on it.

To compound this, and to show that Califano makes no bones about stooping even lower in his bare-faced attempts to manipulate the reader with sleight-of-hand, Califano takes two (in the section of the book I read; I admit that I abandoned it as a hopeless cause at the end of Chapter Four) of the most egregious logical fallacies known to man and plays them like strings on a violin, using the emotional reactions they are sure to elicit from readers as a way to rally the masses to his cause. He mixes them in with just enough scientific (and, as we have already noted, anecdotal) evidence to make it seem as if he's not gunning for an emotional reaction, but no one who uses these two logical fallacies is looking for a reasonable assessment of his arguments. The logical fallacies are:

1. the “gateway drug” argument, which has long been disproved. A google search on “gateway drug fallacy” will pull up hundreds of websites explaining how wrongheaded the hypothesis is. However, my favorite debunking is quickly summed up by one true, completely provable, and yet utterly ridiculous statement: “100% of serial killers ate bread when they were children.” As I said, it's true, and it's easily provable. But it's also easier to see the other side of the coin: billions of people who eat bread every day never become serial killers.

2. the “think of the children” argument. This one, despite being a fallacy, is still very widely used, because it's the quickest way to the heartstrings of every parent who picks up a book, sees a movie, listens to a speech, etc. It's ingrained in us to protect the children, most notably our own children. In America, however, the idea of “protection” has gone haywire when it comes to the kiddies. There's a magazine advertisement that was popular a few months ago (as I write this, in November 2008) that sums up how stupid we've gotten. I don't remember for sure, but I believe it was for one of the glut of antibacterial products on the market. It shows a baby encased in a bubble, and the text above the picture read (forgive me for paraphrasing), “in a perfect world, all babies would be this well protected.” If you saw something like that, assuming you're a parent (or a sibling, perhaps), doesn't that strike an emotional reaction with you? But take a step back and think about that. That's the sort of protection that causes parents to pressure doctors to prescribe antibiotics for almost everything. It's been happening for decades, and what has the end result been? New strains of “superbugs” that are resistant to almost every antibiotic known to man. And now we've got the rise of the antibacterials. It hasn't happened yet, but when these kids grow up and get out into the world, with their immune systems having never had the chance to be exposed to thousands of different types of bacteria that we were introduced to as kids... I'm sure you can finish that sentence yourself.

Wikipedia's article on the “think of the children” fallacy notes that it is “an appeal to emotion that can be used to support an irrational conclusion (both logical fallacies) when used in an argument.” That sums it up rather nicely. I'm not saying we shouldn't think of the children. I'm saying that if someone is telling you to think of the children, perhaps you should take a look at the man—or the facts—behind the curtain. Because I'll bet you that the guy who's telling you to think of the children—in this case, Joseph Califano—is “us[ing it] to support an irrational conclusion.” And when you look at the structure of Califano's arguments, as we've been doing above, can you really come to any other conclusion?

I realize that simply outlining the problems with the way Califano has constructed his argument isn't going to change any minds about the validity of this book, so let me offer a specific example. On page 16, as he's introducing the topic of alcohol, Califano states, “No one [in colonial America] thought about age limits....Drinking was taught at home soon after a child learned to hold a cup in order to accustom children to the taste of alcohol and 'encourage moderation'.” Those quotation marks tell you all you need to know about Califano's attitude towards the idea that children who drink alcohol learn to do so more moderately than children who are forbidden from drinking alcohol. However, it is quite widely known, as much as we in America refuse to believe it, that this is a flavor of the truism “what is forbidden is desired”; rates of alcoholism in countries where there is no drinking age, or one much lower than it is in the United States, are a great deal lower than they are here. Finland, Sweden, Egypt, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Germany, and Austria are all excellent examples of this. For facts and figures to back this up, if you don't feel like scouring the Internet, I refer you to Stanton Peele's The Diseasing of America , which spends a number of chapters discussing the link between magic-age laws and substance abuse (and also, though I didn't touch on it here, the equally insidious practice of the gerrymandering of the term “alcoholism”, which means something vastly different in 2008 than it did to Dr. Bob and Bill W. in 1935).

This is already long, so I'll simply note in passing, as another nod to the tunnel vision I spoke of earlier, that Califano is all too willing to attack those evil legal drugs nicotine and alcohol, but, like all anti-drug crusaders who are playing you wrong, he neglects—entirely!—to mention a legal drug more widely used than either: caffeine. Why would someone so seemingly concerned about drug use in America neglect a drug that, according to at least one widely-reported study, published in New Scientist in September of 2005, 90% of Americans use daily? The answer is obvious if you think about it for a second or two: you can use it while working. You can drive while under its effects. You don't have to exit the building to drink a Coke. There's no age limit for buying Jolt Cola. In short, caffeine is still a socially acceptable drug, and the anti-some-drug crusaders don't want to go making the converts think twice about the drugs they still consume. And that, more than anything, should give you pause before you consider swallowing Califano's ludicrous arguments; he's playing to the crowd, even as he's playing the crowd. That's pretty much the definition of manipulation. I'm not necessarily saying to dismiss this book out of hand, though I certainly did, but I'm saying you should spend a lot of time validating Califano's claims before taking any of them to heart. The Emperor's clothes are, at the very least, moth-eaten and threadbare. (zero)

[Dustin Dye · Rating 1 out of 5]

TL;DR review: Dubious/agenda-driven research, hyperbolic statements, logical fallacies throughout, breezes over racist motivations to criminalize marijuana.

Califano fails to concede any points to critics of drug legalization, and typically uses ad hominen attacks than address their points. He appears to concede an argument for medical marijuana at one point, “The efficacy and safety, benefits and risks, of medical marijuana are matters for doctors, scientists, pharmaceutical manufactures, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and scientists like those at the Scripps Research Institute who are examining the potential of the drug’s active ingredient to stave off Alzheimer’s disease.” (p. 119) Califano has apparently forgotten that cannabis’s Schedule I designation prevents any such research. Given his previous positions as Special Assistant to President Johnson, and later as President Carter's disgraced HEW Secretary, he either knows this or should have known this. The fact he fails to mention this further makes his argument come off as disingenuous, especially considering the same chapter ends with this quote, “Legalizing drugs not only is playing Russian roulette with children; it is also slipping a couple of extra bullets into the chamber.” (p. 133) Holy won’t-somebody-please-think-of-the-children, Batman! This logical fallacy is known as an “appeal to emotion.”

The inside flap of Califano’s High Society compares it to Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed and An Inconvenient Truth. Yeah. Here is an illustrative quote from High Society: “Dr. Stanley Gitlow, one of the nation’s premier alcoholism clinicians, told me, ‘When Dad comes home after work and rushes to pop a couple of martinis, by the time baby is three years old, that tot sees drinking as the way to relax. Years later, when the child starts bingeing on the weekends in high school, he won’t even know what he picked up watching Dad hit the martinis more than a decade before.’” (p. 45-46) When someone sees sobriety as a virtue and claims they’re protecting the children, they’re prone to practice confirmation bias and logical fallacies. Califano commits a number of logical fallacies in his book, such as appeals to emotion (in the above two quotes), appeals to authority (above quote), slippery slope causative arguments (throughout), ad hominen attacks (he refers to George Soros as the “Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization” (p. 120), whatever that means), straw men (as he can’t find evidence to support his claims about marijuana’s dangers, he typically lumps it in with other Schedule I substances and then talks about the dangers of drugs in that group). Califano gives an appearance of having done extensive research by using numerous pointless endnotes. In fact, nearly a third of his book is taken up with an appendix including a multi-page chart provided without explanation and never referred to in the text, 83 pages of endnotes and an index. I can’t help but feel all this was added to give the appearance of a lengthy discussion of the topic and pad the hardcover price.

The first page says the author will donate all proceeds to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) Columbia. I thought, At least the money is going to a good cause, and Califano’s not doing this for the personal enrichment. But knowing Califano, I couldn’t accept this idea at face value. I became interested in CASA Columbia and Califano’s relationship to it, so I did some digging (read, Google search). CASA Columbia was founded by Califano, who is still on the board of directors and draws a salary of nearly $200,000 (https://www.charitynavigator.org/inde...). In other words, Califano donated all proceeds from this book, which are tax-deductible, to an untaxed non-profit that has paid him millions of dollars since it was founded in 1992. This comes off as disingenuous, along with his pushing an agenda. He's basically throwing the earnings form this book into a tax shelter and pretending it’s for a good cause.

In conclusion, don't dumb yourself down by reading this garbage.

[Patti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting book with lots of incredible facts and figures which are probably outdated by now. Very dry read....