It is inspiring to see the tobacco companies, state attorneys general and the Clinton administration all agreeing that America is blessed with the most morally upstanding teenagers in history. Perspectives on the final shape of the tobacco settlement may differ, but all parties are united in their uplifting certainty that today's teenagers are incapable of telling a lie.
Do I hear a few titters from parents in the audience? Is it possible that your Jennifers and Jasons, your Tiffanys and Todds, don't always behave as if they had just downed a six-pack of truth serum? Could anyone be suggesting that the pride of America's youth is not always completely honest and above-board about doing their homework, exactly what they did last Saturday night or whether they have ever curled their innocent lips around a Marlboro?
As the nation embarks on a landmark crusade to dramatically curtail underage smoking, it is worth pausing to ask a simple question: "How will we know if we have succeeded?" This is not an abstract query, since billions of dollars of penalties could be levied against the cigarette companies depending on the outcome. Both the Clinton plan unveiled last week and the original tobacco settlement in June require a 50% reduction in teenage smoking within seven years.
Because tobacco sales to minors are illegal and the FDA now requires vendors to demand ID from anyone who looks younger than Uma Thurman, it is impossible to track the number of cigarettes actually consumed at the back of the school bus. But the lack of valid numbers hasn't deterred anyone in their quest for statistical precision. The solution, eagerly endorsed by all sides in this legal tangle, is to depend exclusively on survey data to measure the extent of teen- age smoking.
So whom are you going to poll? Our truth-telling, yes-father-I-chopped-down-the-cherry-tree teenagers. Maybe high-school juniors with nicotine stained fingers and a portrait of Joe Camel in their lockers might fib a little to their parents. But the assumption - unquestioned by the govern ment, the tobacco companies or public-health groups - is that every teenager will tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth on officially sanctioned tobacco surveys.
What are these policy-makers smoking? Are they so puffed up with the righteousness of the anti-smoking cause that they have lost all memory of teen-age psychology? Do they really believe that because a Ms. Grundy tells a classroom full of adolescents that a poll is for the government and the results will be top-secret every rebellious 16-year-old will automatically make a full and frank confession?
That certainly is the upbeat view at the government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which would take the lead in monitoring teen-age smoking under Clinton's proposal. Gary Giovino, the chief of epidemiology in the Office on Smoking and Health, insists, "If you give the kids anonymity and you give the surveys in the right setting you can get answers to questions that are valid."
There is something stirring about Giovino's unshakable faith that poll questions such as, "Do your parents know that you smoke?" will inspire tell-all candor among the young.
It would be one thing if these self-reported answers merely added to the government's store of policy information, such as current surveys on illegal drug use and sexual behavior. But all the current versions of the tobacco settlement would use this kind of polling data to assess financial penalties against the cigarette companies and even, in the Clinton version, set the levels of sin taxes. Never before in our nation's history have the answers of people too young to vote been used to set tax rates.
Why then has the role of these smoking-gun surveys not been debated amid the loud squabbling over the shape of the tobacco settlement? David Murray, the research director at the Statistical Assessments Service, which evaluates numbers free of ideological baggage, offers a beguiling theory. "The illusion of certainty is Washington's stock in trade," Murray says. "There are no real numbers in Washington. There are just useful numbers and non-useful numbers."
In other words, it is in the interest of all players in the skirmishing over tobacco to have statistics on underage smoking. The numbers don't have to be correct, as long as they are broadly acceptable.
That is a peculiar and dangerous way to make government policy, but why worry about accuracy when billions of dollars are at stake?
Pollster Harry O'Neill, the vice chairman of Roper Starch Worldwide, calls the Clinton proposal "grossly unfair to the cigarette companies and the polling industry." O'Neill points out an obvious problem: "The more smoking becomes socially unacceptable behavior, the more it is likely that the behavior will be under-reported." Since the government plans to spend billions to teach teenagers about the perils of smoking each year a higher percentage of the underage smokers might well lie on the surveys, thereby further contaminating the already suspect data.
Whoops, I forgot It is now official government policy that teenagers always tell the truth.
Walter Shapiro's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays. Past columns at USA TODAY Online at http://www.usatoday.com.
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