Op-ed: How smart are we?
Ron Cuff
– Thirty years after Kristin Smart vanished from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, investigators are still searching for her remains. Her killer, Paul Flores, is serving 25 years to life. Kristin’s brother Matthew stood in a courtroom and told a judge that Flores “chose to take a life, my sister Kristin’s life, a beautiful life.” Her family still cannot bury their daughter.
The coverage has rightly focused on justice delayed, and a predator finally held accountable. But there is a thread in this story that no one wants to pull.
Kristin Smart was 19 years old when she was last seen leaving an off-campus alcohol fueled party with Flores in the early hours of May 25, 1996. We talk at length about predators. We talk about campus safety. We rarely talk honestly about a culture that placed a teenage girl alone on a dark path with a dangerous young man after midnight. And that environment didn’t begin at the party. It began in a society that has thoroughly normalized underage intoxication, where alcohol flows at every celebration, every sporting event, every social gathering, and where the idea of questioning underage substance use is treated as an eccentricity, rather than the serious threat to youth that it presents. Curiously, we rarely prosecute, convict or punish individuals who provide alcohol or other intoxicating substances to minors.
We don’t know at what age Kristen had her first drink, but we do know that by the time she was 19 she had been exposed to alcohol advertising thousands of times. For example, most new alcohol products are fruit flavored and packaged with cartoon-like images. As responsible parents, why do we tolerate drug or alcohol advertising of any kind in front of our children? When adults want an alcoholic beverage, they know where to get one, so it’s pretty clear that most alcohol advertising targets youth.
Almost every feature film normalizes smoking, drinking, drug use, or all three. It’s called product placement advertising. Why do we put up with it?
College party culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is downstream from us. We hand young people a world soaked in alcohol and drugs. We allow addiction industries to spend billions making their products legal, glamorous and taxed at a low rate. We then express shock when 19-year-olds find themselves dangerously impaired in dangerous situations.
This is not about assigning any portion of blame to Kristin Smart. It’s exactly the opposite. The responsibility for her murder rests entirely with Paul Flores. But if we are serious about preventing the next underage substance use tragedy, we have to be willing to look upstream, past the campus, past the party, and into the mirror.
Ron Cuff
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