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PrintHIGH SOCIETY
How Substance Abuse
Ravages America and What to Do About It
By Joseph A. Califano, Jr.
Published by PublicAffairs Press
May 7, 2007
Order your autographed paperback or hardcover copy by phone (212-841-5228) or mail today!
From the man who in 1978 mounted the nation’s first anti-smoking campaign and declared smoking “Public Health Enemy Number One” comes a call for a fundamental change in our attitude about drug and alcohol abuse and addiction and a revolution in the way we deal with it.
In HIGH SOCIETY, Joseph A. Califano, Jr. shows how substance abuse has touched every family and circle of friends in America and causes and aggravates the nation’s most wrenching social problems – violent and property crimes, soaring health care costs, family breakup, domestic violence and child abuse, the spread of AIDS, teen pregnancy, poverty, and low productivity. He reveals that:
· Americans, comprising only four percent of the world’s population, consume two-thirds of the world’s illegal drugs.
· Nearly a quarter of the nation’s college students meet the clinical criteria for alcohol and drug abuse and addiction.
· Every American child will be offered illegal drugs before graduating from high school, most on several occasions.
The outspoken former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, noting that a child who reaches age 21 without smoking, using illegal drugs or abusing alcohol is virtually certain never to do so, chronicles the personal agony and public cost of our failure to act on this truth.
Califano calls for a cultural change potent enough to prompt a revolution in the nation’s criminal justice, medical, educational and social service systems and foreign policy priorities, and to awaken the power of parenting to raise drug free children and teens.
This book is an inspiration for our nation to end the denial, stamp out the stigma associated with alcoholism and addiction, and commit the energy and resources to confront a plague that has maimed and killed more Americans than all our wars, natural catastrophes and traffic accidents combined.
HIGH SOCIETY can have the kind of defining impact on our understanding of substance abuse that such classics as Silent Spring, Unsafe at Any Speed, and most recently An Inconvenient Truth, have had with respect to the environment, auto safety and global warming.
All proceeds from the sale of the book are being donated to The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.