As a good lawyer, Joe Califano has bravely attempted to put the best face possible on the besieged report recently released by his Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA), "Alcohol Consumption and Expenditures for Underage Drinking and Adult Excessive Drinking." However, he can't change the ugly fact that it is seriously flawed, with errors and misuse of statistics. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) criticized the study for making "inappropriate" assumptions, using CDC data to make an inflated claim about the extent of underage drinking.
But even if Mr. Califano could somehow explain away the errors and other problems in this latest report, how could he possibly defend the sorry trail of other shoddy reports on alcohol that CASA has released?
A year ago, CASA loudly proclaimed a false statistic about the extent of underage drinking. It exaggerated the real figure by over 100%. The federal agency whose data had been misused quickly issued a press release to correct the damage done by CASA's distortion.
Before that, the activist group inflated a statistic on alcohol and drug use on the part of welfare recipients by over six-fold. Not surprisingly, Department of Health and Human Services, whose data had been distorted, criticized the deceptive CASA report as being "seriously flawed" and "misleading."
And before that, CASA issued a study of college drinking in which it promoted yet other wildly exaggerated statistic. However, an investigative journalist later revealed that one of CASA's statistics appeared to have been "pulled from thin air," another was based on no evidence whatsoever, a third claim was most dubious, and a fourth was "highly suspect at best."
Given this scandalous track record of erroneous, misleading, and deceptive reports on alcohol, we can have absolutely no confidence in future reports from this irresponsible advocacy group.
David J. Hanson, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology Emeritus. State University of New York, Potsdam, and lives in Chapel Hill, NC.
