Catching Up to the Boys, in the Good and the Bad

Teen Girls' Alcohol, Tobacco and Drug Use on the Rise

By Lori Aratani
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 10, 2008; C01

She lost count of the vodka shots. It was New Year's Eve 2005, and for this high school freshman, it was time to party. She figured she'd be able to sleep it off -- she'd done it before. But by the time she got home the next day, her head was still pounding, her mouth was dry, and she couldn't focus. This time, the symptoms were obvious even to her parents.

After that night, she realized the weekend buzzes had gone from being a maybe to a must.

"Before, it was a novelty," the Silver Spring teen said. "It went from, 'Well, maybe . . .' to 'Oh, I know I'm going to drink this weekend.' "

A generation of parents and educators have pushed to ensure that girls have the same opportunities as their male counterparts, with notable results. In 2007, for example, it was girls who dominated the national math and science competition sponsored by Siemens. But a growing number of reports show that the message of equality might have a downside.

Teenage girls now equal or outpace teenage boys in alcohol consumption, drug use and smoking, national surveys show. The number of girls entering the juvenile justice system has risen steadily over the past few years. A 2006 study that examined accident rates among young drivers noted that although boys get into more car accidents, girls are slowly beginning to close the gap.

A 17-year-old Charles County girl was charged last month with reckless and negligent driving in a Nov. 28 accident in which a 15-year-old girl was killed. In June, a 20-year-old student at George Mason University traveling west on the inner loop of the Capital Beltway near the Springfield interchange drove her convertible into a tractor-trailer. She and three friends were killed. Then, in September, a 17-year-old Fairfax County girl was charged with aggravated involuntary manslaughter after she drove her sport-utility vehicle head-on into a van, killing a 59-year-old woman.

"When you take off the shackles, you release all kind of energy -- negative and positive," said James Garbarino, the Maude C. Clarke Chair in Humanistic Psychology at Loyola University in Chicago. "By letting girls loose to experience America more fully, it's not surprising that they would absorb some of its toxic environment."

The teenager with the vodka hangover, who is now 16, was one of several Washington region teenage girls who agreed to talk about their lives and what compels them to drink, smoke or indulge in behaviors that might make their parents blanch. They asked that their names not be used so they could speak frankly.

In the same breath, the young women talked about feeling "empowered" because they can choose from myriad colleges and careers and about how that "freedom" extends to partying at clubs, drinking and smoking. Experts worry that those feelings, coupled with a teen's natural sense of invincibility, can be a potent and dangerous combination. Indeed, the teenage girls interviewed by The Washington Post seemed almost blase about the potential consequences.

"People tell me all the time [smoking] isn't good for me," said an 18-year-old from Bethesda, rolling her eyes. But in her mind, that's 30 years down the line. Same with the drinking (she prefers champagne) and the occasional recreational drug.

"In the past, people have had this angelic picture, but girls are just as bad as boys are," she said. "We do what we want to do, when we want to do it."

"I live for now," she said, a grin spreading across her face. "It's great to be a girl."

Experts say there is no single explanation for why more teenage girls are deciding to experiment with drugs or why some are getting into fights. However, they do note that society's expectations about girlhood have changed dramatically over the years. Annette Funicello's wholesome beach blanket antics have given way to Britney Spears's latest meltdown.

"The why of what's happening is in part a direct response to the advances that we're making as a society around gender equity," said Deborah Prothrow-Stith, a professor of public health at Harvard University. If society offers girls and boys the same opportunities, that means they're exposed to the good as well as the bad, she said.

"We really have to ask the questions, 'Why wouldn't you expect girls to behave [like boys]?' Girls and women are closing all the other gaps," Prothrow-Stith said.

Experts who work with teenage girls, particularly those in the Washington region, say more options can also equal more stress. A 2005 poll, conducted by The Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard found that more than four in 10 local high school girls said they "frequently" experienced stress in their daily lives, compared with fewer than three in 10 nationally.

"Our lives are so crazy, and kids are looking for something when they feel" stressed, said Beverly Parker-Lewis, a clinical psychologist with the Fairfax County public schools. "Sometimes, the result is negative behavior."

Teenagers say pressure is a factor. The 18-year-old remembered being so overwhelmed by the pressure to be a perfect student that, at one point, she couldn't get out of bed. The 16-year-old talked about how both academic and peer pressure prompted her to take up drinking as an outlet for her stress.

Girls "work so hard to prove themselves all the time," said Christine Whitaker, a therapist with Metropolitan Counseling Associates in Bethesda. "Then, when the weekend comes, they blow it all out."

And teenagers are surrounded by a mix of messages. On one hand, their parents and teachers tell them not to drink, smoke or do drugs, but on the other hand, music and such television shows as "Gossip Girl" and "The Hills" showcase teens indulging in just such behavior.

According to a 2006 survey by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, girls between the ages of 12 and 17 were at equal or higher risk of substance abuse compared with boys. That same year, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy found that the number of girls who smoke or abuse prescription drugs had surpassed that of boys. More troubling: The increase in drug usage among girls comes at a time when overall numbers for teenage drug abuse are on the decline.

Sue Foster, vice president and director of policy research and analysis at CASA, said these behaviors can be especially dangerous for girls because of the different ways in which their bodies process substances. One drink for a woman is the equivalent of two for a man. CASA researchers found that girls and women "are also likely to become addicted to alcohol, nicotine, illegal and prescription drugs and develop substance-abuse related diseases at lower levels of use and in shorter periods of time."

The 16-year-old said her vodka hangover made her realize that drinking was starting to dominate her life. It was affecting her grades and friendships. Slowly, with the help of a counselor, she began to set limits for herself. She stopped hanging around with friends who liked to drink and found a new crowd. She still drinks on weekends, but it has ceased to be a "must" in her life, she said.

A recent study, conducted by emergency medicine physicians at the Center for Trauma and Injury Prevention Research at the University of California at Irvine medical school, examined accident rates of young drivers between 2000 and 2004 and found that although boys have more accidents, young female drivers appear to be closing the gap.

"It used to be that girls had far fewer accidents and speeding tickets and were considered to be better risks," said Carolyn Gorman, vice president of the Insurance Information Institute. "But over the last 15 to 20 years, girls have been catching up with boys."

Those who work with adolescents say that as people become more aware of the trends affecting girls, the key will be to find ways to address them.

Because teenage boys have been considered the traditional culprits, "young women are falling between the cracks," said Virginia Tsai, a physician with the UC-Irvine study.

Rebecca Kullback, a colleague of Whitaker's who is co-founder of Metropolitan Counseling Associates in Bethesda, said parents need to rethink the messages they're sending their daughters and teach them how to better manage their stresses. Other experts say that those who work with adolescents need to better tailor intervention programs to be effective for girls as well as boys.

But the real challenge of reaching the teen girl demographic might be persuading girls that their behavior could have consequences -- if not now, somewhere down the line.

When asked why they drink, the 18-year-old and a friend paused for a moment before summing up the appeal in one succinct statement:

"Life," the 18-year-old declared, as her friend chimed in, "is better with a buzz."

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5 Myths About Those Nefarious Neocons
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Sunday, February 10, 2008; B03

As the Bush administration winds down, neoconservatism has become the most feared and reviled intellectual movement in American history. The neoconservatives have become the subject of numerous myths, mostly spread by their numerous detractors. They're seen as dangerous heretics by livid liberals as well as by traditional conservatives such as William F. Buckley Jr. and Patrick Buchanan.

So "neocon" has become a handy term of condemnation, routinely deployed to try to silence liberal hawks such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut or right-wing interventionists such as former deputy secretary of defense Paul D. Wolfowitz and the former Pentagon official Richard N. Perle, who's been nicknamed the "Prince of Darkness." That moniker aside, the neocons insist that there's nothing sinister about them; they simply believed that after 9/11, the United States should use its power to spread democracy throughout the Arab world, just as it had done in Eastern Europe and Central America during the Cold War. Their critics aren't so sure -- and the misconceptions grow.

1 The neocons are chastened liberals who turned right.

This is the self-mythologizing version that the neocons themselves like to spread. Don't believe a word of it. They weren't ever really liberals.

The one thing the movement's founders carried away from the sectarian ideological wars of the 1930s in New York was a prophetic temperament. Back then, Irving Kristol and a host of other future neocons were Trotskyist intellectuals who loathed their rivals, the vulgar Stalinists. Kristol and his comrades believed in creating a worker's paradise that would reject the totalitarianism of Stalin's Soviet Union in favor of a true Marxist utopia. After World War II convinced them that the United States wasn't an imperialist power but one fighting for freedom, Kristol and his fellow travelers briefly embraced liberalism in the late 1940s. But as the convulsions of the 1960s reenergized the radical left, the future neocons kept moving right. All along, they retained the penchant for abusive invective and zest for combat that they had first honed as Trotskyists, wielding magazine articles and op-eds as weapons to discredit their foes and champion their ideas.

2 The neocons are Israeli lackeys.

Bunk. The neocon saga couldn't be more American. It's a tempestuous drama of Jewish assimilation, from immigrant obscurity on the Lower East Side to the rise of a new foreign policy establishment that sees the United States as the avatar of democracy and foe of genocide. What truly animates the neocons is what they see as the lesson of the Holocaust: that it could have been avoided if the Western democracies had found the courage to stop Hitler in the late 1930s. This helps explain Perle's and former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith's antipathy toward the State Department, which tried to stymie U.S. recognition of Israel at its founding in 1948. Neocons such as Norman Podhoretz scorn the State Department as filled with WASPs who seek to cozy up to the Arab states instead of recognizing Israel's strategic value and moral importance as a bastion of democracy in a sea of tyranny.

What's more, the neocons are often to the right of Israel's government. Feith and National Security Council aide Elliott Abrams scoffed at the idea of land-for-peace talks with the Palestinians, for instance, and Wolfowitz pushed for an invasion of Iraq for which even Ariel Sharon demonstrated no particular enthusiasm. The neocons aren't Israel's best advocates, either: The Iraq war has emboldened Iran, fanned the flames of jihadism and made Israel less, not more, secure. Contrary to Wolfowitz's arguments, the road to peace in Israel turned out not to run through Baghdad.

3 The neocons had too much power and took over Bush's brain.

In fact, President Bush used the neocons for his own purposes and then dumped many of them overboard. (Of course, many liberals think Bush doesn't have a brain to take over in the first place, but leave that aside.) On the campaign trail in 2000, Bush was a realist in the mold of his father. But under the appalling pressure of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Bush became the leading neocon in his own administration -- which is why he didn't need them around anymore once they had done their job as lightning rods. What's more, he never gave any of them Cabinet-level positions.

Neither Vice President Cheney nor former defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- the men who made the real decisions with Bush in the Oval Office -- has ever been a neocon. They are Republican unilateralists who believe in deploying U.S. power whenever and wherever the executive branch sees fit, regardless of what U.S. allies want. Cheney and Rumsfeld used Wolfowitz and other neocons to provide an intellectual patina of justification for war against Iraq, much as Cheney has been trying to do with Iran today. (One reason there was no serious postwar plan for Iraq was that no one in Cheney's office could ever decide whether the administration should have one.)

Lacking a real base in the Republican Party, the neocons got picked off as soon as Bush's handling of the war seemed to falter. They didn't have too much power; ultimately, they had too little to implement their schemes. The result has been finger-pointing and self-exculpatory memoirs from the likes of Feith. Meanwhile, the CIA (which the neocons loathe) has outflanked them on Iran by declaring that it isn't building nuclear weapons. And one of the most prominent surviving neocons, the NSC's Abrams, has proved unable to stop Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's efforts to restart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

4 The neocons are bloodthirsty ideologues, trying to impose a militant Wilsonianism on the United States that is alien to our foreign policy traditions.

Militant? Sure. But alien? Baloney. In fact, the neocons' worldview melds both of the major strands of traditional U.S. foreign policy thinking -- realism and idealism -- in a highly opportunistic fashion. This is why liberal hawks such as author Paul Berman, Washington Post columnist Peter Beinart and the editors of the New Republic signed on to the neocon crusade at the outset of the Iraq war, while the true realists, such as former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, blanched in horror.

5 The Iraq debacle has discredited the neocons.

This could be the biggest whopper of them all. Now that the "surge" in Iraq has brought levels of violence down somewhat, the neocons are already claiming vindication. As Iraq fades from the front pages, the neocons' hero, Arizona Sen. John McCain, is poised to become the Republican standard-bearer in 2008. (The neocons also would have happily flocked around Rudolph W. Giuliani, who recruited Norman "World War IV" Podhoretz as a senior adviser.)

The truth is that the neocons have been repeatedly declared dead before -- and, to the chagrin of their enemies on the left and the right, bounced back. At the end of the Cold War, the arch-realist George H.W. Bush relegated them to the sidelines; then the triangulating Bill Clinton seemed to deprive them of their biggest foreign and domestic policy issues. If they came back from that, they can come back from anything. Now that Robert Kagan, William Kristol (who seems not to be discredited in the eyes of the New York Times, which just made him a columnist) and a host of other neocons have hitched their fortunes to McCain, the neocons are poised for a fresh comeback. If they make a hash of foreign policy by 2011, perhaps the familiar cycle of public scorn and rebirth might even start all over again.