Teenage Addiction Escalates, Worries Experts

When teen drug use suddenly popped up as a hot issue of the 1996 presidential campaign, it only confirmed what many in Ventura County already knew:

Drugs--marijuana, LSD, methamphetamine, cocaine and even heroin--are swiftly growing more popular to a new generation of kids too young to have witnessed the devastation of decades past.

Talk to one of the victims, Anthony, 16, who speaks of smuggling speed into his high school computer class.

“We used to get down behind our textbook when the teacher wasn’t looking, I’d be chopping up a line of crank,” said the Oxnard teen, now serving time at Colston Youth Center for drug violations and truancy.

“You’d tell your friend, ‘Hey, come here, I need help with this question,’ ” he recalled. “And you’d pass him the straw and do the line right there in the classroom.”

Or speak to Judi Balcerzak-Dyer, a drug rehabilitation counselor struggling to treat swelling numbers of teenage addicts often entangled with several drugs at once.

“We’re always at capacity, and we always have a waiting list,” said Balcerzak-Dyer, who oversees the mix of county-run inpatient, outpatient and residential alcohol and drug programs for teens.

“Our referrals for adolescents in outpatient care used to total fewer than 60 a year, five years ago. We served over 200 last year, and our projections say we’ll see 250 this year.”

Sheriff’s Capt. Craig Husband is another who has seen the rise in teen drug use as he has worked case after case, trying to stem the flood of drugs through the schools and playgrounds. “The most significant demographic trend is that no community’s immune,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s an affluent community or a poor community, the drugs are pervasive.”

And then there are the prosecutors, men like Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Redmond, who has a growing pile of reports of crimes committed by teenage drug users.

“It’s been an incredible rise,” said Redmond, who estimates that 90% of juvenile crimes now involve drugs. “Seeing the ease with which they’re able to obtain methamphetamine now is scary.

“And to see LSD and heroin coming back after two, three generations ago when you had all the rock stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix dying from it, that’s really scary.”

Superior Court Judge Steven Z. Perren is one of the final links in the long chain that increasingly leads more teen drug users to Juvenile Court.

“There were four cases in my court that went unfinished because the defendants died of overdoses,” Perren told community leaders, police and worried parents Saturday at a Community Crime Symposium at Cal Lutheran University.

“The problems we have are awful.”

The same national polls that show an increase in teen drug use still indicate that most teens do not use drugs.

And that is as true for the 197,000 children in Ventura County as anywhere else.

While drug use nationwide has risen among 12- to 17-year-olds since 1990, the current level of use for teenagers and adults is far lower than the peak in 1979, according to the same Nationwide Household Survey done for the U.S. Health Department that has helped make teen drug use a major political issue this year.

“What’s getting lost in that story is the Household Survey shows we’re really making a lot of progress in this country,” said Charlie Parsons, newly named executive director of DARE America.

“There’s this feeling that, ‘Oh my God, it’s hopeless and we’re losing the war,’ and so forth,” said Parsons, former director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office. “And nobody’s paying any attention to the numbers. The peak was in 1979: We had 25 million people in this country using narcotics. Last year, it was 12 million.”

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Yet, society has let its guard down in the years that have passed. The most dramatic reductions in drug use began with heightened concern and tough law enforcement in the late 1970s, Parsons said.

Baby boomers tell their kids about their pot-smoking college days and may even condone casual use--unaware that today’s marijuana is six to seven times as powerful as it was back then, he said.

And Ventura County’s kids are picking up on it the same way that their counterparts do all over the country, say police, teachers, drug counselors and the kids themselves.

Kids tell of starting out with a beer or a hit of pot offered by a friend, and falling easily from there into harder drugs--methamphetamine handed off at cafeteria lunch tables, or a crack pipe passed in someone’s car in a school parking lot.

“It’s that invincible attitude, that ‘It’s not going to happen to me,’ ” said Stanton, 16, of Ojai, who admits he is addicted to pot. “But it’s putting my life off. I’m 16, I should be driving a car, having a job, having money.” Instead, he also is serving time in Colston Youth Center for possession of stolen property.

Teenagers are also indulging in more than one drug at once.

“They use crank to get going, and then they’ll use pot and alcohol to slow down,” said Ginny Connell, director of the Palmer Drug Abuse Program, one of the county’s larger treatment networks. “We’re almost always dealing with poly-substance abusers.”

Prosecutor Redmond can only shake his head.

“We see kids who are just destroyed at 14 years old and 13 years old,” he said. “We have kids who are coming to court the first time for drug use and tell us they were using it since they were 12 years old. They said, ‘I started drinking beer, then using pot, and now I’m using meth or LSD.’ And you say, ‘God! How could someone not see this happening and attempt to stop it?’ ”

A Los Angeles Times Poll last year of 460 Ventura County youngsters 12 to 17 years old rated drug use as low on their list of Ventura County’s problems, with only 6% saying drug use by kids was the worst thing about growing up in Ventura County.

But the same poll, which had an error margin of plus or minus 5 percentage points, was one more indicator of the growing problem, revealing that more than a third of the Ventura County kids questioned thought that at least half their classmates regularly use illegal drugs.

The number of Ventura County teens sent into drug rehab or arrested on drug charges is an even stronger indicator. Simply put, it has exploded.

Many land in the Camarillo-based Palmer Drug Abuse Program, which is grappling with short funding and a long list of potential clients.

The program’s counselors once visited schools and counseled individual teen drug users. Now, there are so many clients that the facility must treat mostly court-referred drug offenders, while other addicted teens sit on a waiting list, said director Connell.

Police are also busy.

Ventura County sheriff’s deputies in 1988 arrested only 48 juveniles for having or selling illegal drugs. Five years later, in 1993, the number had risen to 175. And in 1995, deputies made 519 juvenile drug arrests--an increase of nearly 20% over the 433 arrests made in 1994.

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The rise in arrests and drug program admissions has come despite the continued presence in many county school systems of the one program that many law-enforcement and drug-treatment experts say is still helping to keep kids off drugs--DARE.

Drug Abuse Resistance Education was launched in 1983 in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The course was expanded into high schools in Los Angeles until 1992, when a cutback in LAPD funding forced the program to pull back solely to fifth and sixth grades.

Now DARE classes are taught in nearly 70% of all school districts nationwide, and more than 25 million students have graduated from the program.

DARE’s reach throughout Ventura County is broad, but the emphasis changes from community to community.

For instance, Simi Valley police teach DARE classes in the last grades of all elementary schools, and it extends into middle and junior high schools in Thousand Oaks. But Oxnard police teach DARE only in a handful of schools, while other drug-resistance classes are taught by organizations such as the Police Athletic League. And Camarillo hires only one sheriff’s deputy to teach the program in one school, Camarillo Heights Elementary.

Sheriff’s Deputy Eric Hatlee teaches several such classes weekly at Colina Middle School in Thousand Oaks. Friendly and upfront, he recently led a group of eighth-graders through lessons designed to reinforce the DARE lessons they learned in sixth grade.

Hatlee grilled the kids rapid-fire on ways to say “no” to friends offering drugs, and tested them on vocabulary: drug, dependence, victim, violence. They eagerly rattled off definitions. Then he broke them into groups to wrestle with the morality of such statements as “getting high is part of growing up.”

And Hatlee described addicts he has met.

“I’ve seen someone pulling the skin off their arm because they think there’s bugs crawling on them,” he said, causing some of his eighth-grade audience to chuckle. “I hear a few snickers out there . . . but it’s scary that your mind can be so dependent on a drug that it starts playing tricks on you.”

*

Afterward, social studies teacher Mary Crawford said, “This is a good program. The hard thing is to get them not to play the classroom game and give the answers that they think will be the right answers.”

But she also confided, “I’d like to rewrite that book.” The curriculum needs to include more room for kids to relate personal experiences--parents who use drugs, older brothers getting in trouble with the law--that could make the lessons more real and less preachy, she said. And it should be expanded to other grades.

Some kids agree.

DARE most commonly is taught in the early grades, not as often after the fifth or sixth grades. But it should also be taught in seventh grade--when students often start to forget the sixth-grade lessons and are offered drugs for the first time, said Stephni Gonzales, 12.

“That’s where they went wrong is where they stopped it,” she said, adding that DARE should be rewritten for older kids and extended into high school. “In the eighth grade, kids think it’s a joke.”

DARE alone won’t stem the tide, Hatlee said.

“DARE’s philosophy is that it has to come from three places--from the police, from school and parents. They have to be getting the same information from all three sources to make it stick.”

Yet even the most avid fan of DARE can forget in a moment of weakness all that he or she learned about that first hit of pot or line of crank--and wake up a thousand hits and a year later as an addict.

Annie, 17, did not start out with a gram-a-day methamphetamine habit.

“I had DARE in fifth grade,” says the west Ventura County girl, who is now in rehab. “I loved DARE and everything . . . I supported the program a lot.”

But when her parents’ marriage hit the rocks as her sophomore year ended, she found it a convenient--if feeble--excuse to toss aside everything she had learned about addiction and “try” smoking crack and snorting crank.

By junior year--even though she never had to pay or steal for drugs offered to her by classmates--she was in deep.

“I got really bad,” she said. “I started using it on an everyday basis.”

She ditched school, stayed out late snorting crank and hanging with friends, fought with her parents when she came in and essentially crashed her report card.

She grew thin: Meth left her with no appetite, so she lived mostly on fluids.

By last December, the daily flow of drugs through her nose and throat had sidelined her habit. “I got extremely sick,” she recalled. “My tonsils were all swollen. I had bronchitis, strep throat, tonsillitis.”

After three weeks of recuperation, she started up all over again: “I would smoke coke and snort crank if it was offered.”

*

Then in February, her best friend entered rehab, so she made a go of giving up, too. By then, her friend “was the only person I was associating with,” Annie said. “And I was known at school as the biggest tweaker.”

So Annie entered Palmer Drug Abuse Program, made a pledge to stop using drugs or alcohol and began going for individual counseling, then group counseling twice a week. She relapsed briefly--on a bad day, someone offered her a hit of pot and she accepted--but she has been clean ever since, she said.

And she is still fighting the urge.

“Sometimes I get the desire, the urge to do it,” she said. “But I know I have a lot of support. I just try to keep myself busy and not be around people that use. It’s a lot of hard work. . . . You need to keep going to meetings knowing that you’re not going to be cured. You still have the disease, and there’s a lot of people out there who have the same disease you have.”

Name the drug, kids and police say, and you can buy it or get a free hit from a friend just about anywhere in Ventura County.

There are also groups--for every type of drug--that can help people who don’t know how to stop by themselves. In addition to such well-known groups as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, there is even a group in Southern California called Marijuana Anonymous.

After alcohol, marijuana is the most commonly available and abused drug among Ventura County’s youths, said Capt. Husband, head of the sheriff’s narcotics squad.

“There’s a lot of misinformation that ‘Once or twice isn’t harmful,’ or, ‘I won’t get addicted,’ ” he said. “It’s a very powerful drug. It’s hallucinogenic--it gives people a rush it didn’t used to give. The plants are all hybrids, designed to grow the most potent type possible. There’s been a lot of misinformation by the pro-marijuana forces. It’s a very addictive drug.”

Methamphetamine--the stimulant once favored mostly by biker gangs and long-distance truckers--is also turning up in Ventura County’s schoolyards.

It is twice as strong as it was 20 years ago, Husband said. It has replaced cocaine as the stimulant of choice. And it is grabbing new users who nibble at the stimulant hook to get a rush or study late, then find themselves “tweaking” for several days at a time on increasingly regular doses.

Cocaine--in powder and crack form--is still widely available, as is LSD, police and kids say.

And even more disturbing, say police and social workers, Ventura County kids are trying heroin.

Some, like Teresa, 16, of Oxnard, got hooked because they were surrounded by family members who were heroin users.

Despite DARE training, she said, “I wanted to know what would be so good about the drug that they’d be always in and out of jail for it . . . And I got addicted.”

Others, like Annie, tried the ferociously addictive narcotic just because it was offered and they were curious.

This alarms therapist Jean Ferguson.

“There’s a whole lot of heroin going around, and the kids are not looking at it like you and I would look at heroin, which is with a lot of horror,” Ferguson said.

Whether with “hard” drugs like heroin and speed, or more common drugs like marijuana and alcohol, drug use is damaging Ventura County families.

“The whole family is reorganized around the drug addict and the outlandish problems he’s been having, like problems at school, problems with the law, defiance of parents,” Ferguson said.

Sometimes, parents make it worse.

“Parents are terrible enablers, they bail their kid out of trouble, they deny it’s a problem, they buy his excuses when it’s right in front of their nose,” said Jean Ferguson, a family therapist who counsels Conejo Valley youths and families.

“They think they’re being a good parent when they’re doing it,” she said. “ But of course all kinds of bad parenting has to do with thinking you’re doing the right thing out of love.”

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Youths and Drugs in Ventura County

Though drug use nationwide is far lower overall than its peak 17 years ago, statistics and polls indicate it has still made a marked leap in the last five years among teenagers. The trends are similar for both the nation and the county.

* Percentage of Americans who used illegal drugs in previous month:

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Age Group 1979 1985 1990 1995 12-17 16.3% 13.2% 7.1% 10.9% 18-25 38.0% 25.3% 15.0% 14.2% 26-34 20.8% 23.1% 10.9% 8.3% Over 35 2.8% 3.9% 3.1% 2.8%

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Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services

* Ventura County teenagers arrested for drugs

by sheriff:

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% Change Over Year Number Arrested Previous Year 1988 48 -- 1989 60 25.0% 1990 49 -18.3% 1991 46 -6.0% 1992 84 82.6% 1993 175 108.3% 1994 433 147.4% 1995 519 19.8%

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Source: Ventura County Sheriff’s Dept.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

If You Want to Quit:

Teenage drug users in Ventura County have a variety of private impatient drug treatment centers and government outpatient treatment programs to turn to for help. In addition, there are many self-help groups such as these, which give support to substance abusers:

Alcoholic Anonymous, 805-389-1444

Cocaine Anonymous, 800-357-1488

Narcotics Anonymous, 805-378-6740

Marijuana Anonymous, 800-766-6779

(website: https://www.marijuana-anonymous.org)