Why does the United States remain an international public health pariah, suffering epidemics of homicide, gun violence, drug and alcohol abuse, AIDS, violent death, obesity, and similar ills that other wealthy Western nations (and many poorer nations) far better ameliorate? Both our persistent social problems and the widespread poverty underlying most (but not all) of them reflect an ugly tradition: officials and institutions exploiting America’s racial diversity to scapegoat powerless outgroups instead of implementing forceful, scientifically based health policies.

Confronted with massive, late-1800s scourges of opiate, cocaine, and alcohol abuse (typically in patent-medicine form) estimated to afflict 1 million white, middle-aged Americans, politicians, scientists, doctors, and the press incited public panics around lurid legends of Chinese immigrants’ opium dens and cocaine-crazed black men raping white women. Ignoring eruptions in upper-class drunken driving carnage after Prohibition’s repeal in 1933, officials launched a hysterical crusade against marijuana, vilifying Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and other “degenerate races.” Movies, news media, and congressional hearings in the 1950s sensationalized dope-driven teen orgies blamed on immigrants and blacks corrupting white youth, especially girls.

Little has changed today. Explosions in population-adjusted rates of felony arrest (up 80 percent), violent crime (up 50 percent), imprisonment (up 600 percent), illicit-drug death (up 300 percent), and obesity (up 80 percent) among supposedly staid, mostly white middle-agers over the last 25 to 30 years are officially dismissed. Instead, authorities and interest groups wage increasingly strident campaigns against teens and drugs, youth violence, child obesity, and teenage sex, conveniently blamed on salacious pop-culture, media images, peer pressure, and risk-happy teenage brains.

The real doubling in violent crime rates among middle-aged women in the last 15 years has been ignored as dubious authors and reporters trumpet a fabricated violence eruption among teenage “girls gone wild.” Drug policy officials, silent on drug abuse hospitalization and death rates five times higher among middle-agers than high school teens, concoct scare campaigns warning that doper kids are stealing their naive parents’ Xanax. And how long are experts and reporters going to hype vanishingly rare instances of youthful victimization by Internet predators and MySpace.com lurkers without mentioning the 1,000 children and teens murdered and 200,000 violently or sexually abused at home every year by parents and caretakers?

But, many might argue, risk-taking teens still need attention; what’s wrong with catching problems young? Nothing... as long as the fact that child and teenage risks are rooted in those of the adults around them is officially acknowledged and addressed. Stacks of studies and reams of data show the best predictors (by far) of teenage problems with drugs, drinking, smoking, violence, depression, obesity, and so on, are corresponding problems among adults of their families and communities, all strongly influenced by economic conditions.

Unfortunately, American officials don’t acknowledge that reality. Instead—even as countries with effective prevention policies focus on integrated solutions targeting health problems directly—American authorities still cast about like their nineteenth century forebears for powerless populations to blame. Now that minority groups have gained power sufficient to make stigmatizing them perilous, that means young people.

Official scapegoating not only foments unwarranted fear of young people, it fails abysmally to improve health and safety. Americans suffer appalling dangers for a supposedly modern society. The ineffectiveness of our health and prevention strategies, and our failure to recognize and reinforce the healthier trends emerging among more diverse younger populations, result directly from perpetuating century-old social and health policy dogmas maligning “inferior” populations.

The zeal to beat up on young people while flattering the powerful older generation’s health, morality, and wisdom also jeopardizes the United States’ transition to a tolerant, multicultural country. Europeans and Japanese have shown that healthy, low-risk societies can be forged in racial monocultures. America’s challenge is to show that diverse multicultures of the future can be even healthier still.

Michael Males, PhD, is senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, in San Francisco (http://home.earthlink.net/~mmales).