by Mike Males

About the author: Mike Males is a freelance writer and author of The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents and Framing Youth: Ten Myths About the Next Generation.

1970: "Kids and Heroin: The Adolescent Epidemic," trumpeted Time (3/16/70). "A terrifying wave of heroin use among youth . . . has caught up teenagers and even pre-adolescent children from city ghettos to fashionable suburbs." Quoting unnamed "experts," Time predicted the number of teenage heroin addicts in New York "may mushroom fantastically to 100,000 this summer. . . . Disaster looms large."

Although exaggerated, 1970s fears had some foundation. Coroner reports showed 125 teenagers died from heroin overdoses in New York City and 140 in California that year. By the late 1970s, teenage heroin abuse subsided and remains low to this day (the teenage heroin toll in 1998: two deaths in New York City, nine in California). Press...