The Anti-Drug Crusade contains the common hype along with always-commendable pledges to crack down on drug criminals and introduce “zero tolerance” for users. Nonetheless, President Bush’s war on drugs can only fail, for it insists on attacking the symptoms of the problem rather than the real disease itself.

Social research on the use of illegal drugs shows one consistent theme: intact traditional families strongly discourage drug use; broken families or “alternative family forms” encourage it. Our “drug crisis” is in large measure the result or symptom of our “family crisis.” No number of new prisons or treatment programs can repair the damage to the young caused by family decay.

In the 1964 study The Road to H, Isidor Chein and his coauthors studied the family patterns of heroin addicts and found that 97 percent of “addict families” showed a “disturbed relationship” between the parents (e.g., divorce or history of separation), compared to only 41 percent of drug-free families. Another intensive study from that period by William Westby and Nathan Epstein reported that “fatherled” families with traditional mothers who were “deeply satisfied” with their role as housewife produced “emotionally healthy children.” Meanwhile, “mother-dominant” families or “sharing fathers” (where the mother and father strove to hold equal roles) spawned serious pathologies in children, including the abuse of drugs.

Horatio Alger’s Children, an extensive report on a sample from Marin County, California, prepared by Richard Blum and Associates in 1972, identified family-oriented factors related to “low risk” and “high risk” of teenage drug use. The team found that “low risk” families held an unquestioned belief in God; regularly attended church; were father-led and authoritative; had more children; and had mothers who gave first priority to their home and family, and had voted for George Wallace in 1968(!). “High risk” families, in contrast, had mothers who were employed and gave priority to meeting their “human potential”; had fathers who were “overly intellectual [and] took on mothers’ functions”; and were skeptical about God and rarely attended church. Simply put, intact, religious, traditional families successfully used “protective measures to ensure that external influences will not affect family unity” and gave their children enough “intestinal fortitude” to fight temptation.

Work in the 1980’s confirms the same points. One study found marijuana use by youth related to the presence of “unconventional” mothers. Another found that drug-users came from families where the fathers were “weak.” A major study by Dr. Alfred S. Friedman of 2,750 adolescents admitted to drug treatment programs found that the larger the family of origin (more siblings and extended family members in the home) the lower the use of drugs, while parental separation and divorce produced more abuse among the children. In a 1985 article in The American Journal of Sociology, two researchers showed a strong negative relationship between “conventional family roles” and marijuana use. More recently, a study at UCLA reported again that parental divorce and other signs of “inadequate family structure” significantly aggravated drug and alcohol abuse, while work at the University of Southern California found that “latch-key” adolescents with working mothers were twice as likely to abuse drugs and alcohol as those enjoying after-school care.

In sum, the overwhelming evidence shows that intact, traditional families help prevent drug abuse. Alternate family forms encourage it. The cynical reality is that existing federal and state policies actually help disrupt family life in ways that will invariably increase drug abuse. Take our welfare system, which discourages marriages and encourages female-headed families, or the day-care subsidies and the income tax structure that encourage mothers to work outside the home, or an ongoing war against “sexism” that disrupts traditional gender roles, or “no-fault divorce” that has cheapened the meaning of the marriage covenant. Proposed new programs of “workfare” and the ABC “child care” bill can only compound the problem.

On the one hand, government policy disrupts families and produces even more children and youth “at risk” of drug abuse. On the other hand, the government declares “war” on illegal drug use, and proposes to expand its powers, size, and spending. The predictable result will be both more government and more drug abuse.