Twelve Years Old and Feeling No Pain … A shocking, firsthand report on the drug epidemic that is killing increasing numbers of our children — at increasingly young ages.
Early Attachment to Drugs
Saturday night, sometime after midnight, a telephone is ringing inside a New York City drug outreach and rehabilitation center. The storefront refuge for young drug abusers and addicts is deserted, but the automatic telephone-answering device records a hysterical and desperate child’s plea for help:
“I’m a drug addict. I’m twelve years old, and I’m going to throw up fast. I need somebody to talk to. I need help. What’s the use? I’m going to take two more pills, and I’m going to kill myself. Damn the whole world!”
A continent away, inside a bleak and small cell at San Diego’s Juvenile Hall, a teenager named John recounts a drug history beginning when he was eleven years old. A visitor listens quietly as John recites the litany of drugs he has either ingested or injected into his system (“crystal meth, coke, pills, pot”), and the many criminal acts he has committed to support his habits that have made him no stranger to Southern California juvenile jails, when John abruptly pauses in mid-sentence:
“You know, I would really have gotten away from drugs if they [his parents] had asked me, but nobody had ever asked me to stop. Oh yeah,” John fights to keep his voice from breaking, “I would have went away from it.”
There is a childhood disease in America called drug abuse, and in the last several years it has reached epidemic proportions. Each year, as the statistics from all over the country will reveal, the onset of the disease begins at a younger and younger age. Dr. G. Thomas Gitchoff, criminologist, who holds a clinical professorship in psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, and a professorship of criminal-justice administration at San Diego State University, told Penthouse: “The amount of serious substance abuse among pre-teens and early adolescents is underreported and virtually an invisible offense, similar to what incest and child abuse were ten years ago.”
Drug-abuse expert Dr. Joel Henderson, assistant professor at San Diego State University, revealed similar findings: “Where escape through mind-and mood-altering substances is not uncommon, fifth- and sixth-graders are known to emulate their parents’ drug-abusing habits. The opportunity and availability to use marijuana, ‘Sherms’ (angel dust), amphetamines, and alcohol is as common today as was the surreptitious smoking of Lucky Strikes twenty-five years ago.”
The statistics and testimonies from drug experts across the nation lend support to Henderson’s conclusion. In a 1980 survey of San Diego drug clinics, almost 30 percent of all admissions reported first using illegal drugs before they turned sixteen. Over 15 percent of all those admitted for heroin abuse said they began using the drug when they were fifteen years old or younger. Marijuana was the primary drug used by over 82 percent of the minors admitted to San Diego clinics.
In 1978 New York State’s Division of Substance Abuse Services studied the drug habits of the state’s 1.8 million public and parochial students in grades seven through twelve, approximately twelve to seventeen years of age. The results were staggering and frightening: 960,000, or more than 50 percent of New York’s junior-and senior-high schoolers, acknowledged marijuana use. Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, president of Phoenix House Foundation, estimated that nearly a third of the students had experimented with the drug by the time they were thirteen.
Another 275,000 students admitted to experimenting and using deadly PCP (angel dust). As we will see, many of these angel-dust abusers are found among the youngest students.
As cocaine abuse has become more widespread among adults over the last several years, indeed becoming the so-called social drug, its use has increased among younger members of society. The New York State survey revealed that more than 155,000 of the 1.8 million students had varying degrees of involvement with cocaine. The most dangerous trend observed in the New York State survey was the increase of poly-drug abuse. Nearly 360,000 of the youngsters acknowledged using between two and four different substances. About 47,000 of them were using heroin.
New York State is not exceptional when it comes to children and drugs. A nationwide drug epidemic among the young was found in the 1979 drug survey conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Of the over 7 million twelve- to seventeen-year-olds who have admitted marijuana smoking, over 2 million of them had indulged in the drug before their sixteenth birthday.
The 1979 NIDA study showed a dramatic and alarming increase in drug abuse by twelve- to seventeen-year-olds in this country. Since 1972, the number of youths who had used marijuana or cocaine during the past month more than doubled, as did the abuse of inhalants such as glue and varnish. LSD, mesca-line, and other hallucinogens were ingested during the past month by 57 percent more youths than reported doing so seven years earlier. As alarming as these figures are, persons involved in the drug world — abusers, police, counselors, and psychologists — all agree that the drug problem among the young is even worse than the statistics indicate.
Carmen could easily pass for sixteen years of age — petite, brown-eyed, with long black hair, and attractive. Carmen, however, is in her mid-twenties and quite articulate about drug abuse among teenagers in the Los Angeles area. Carmen is also an undercover narcotics officer assigned to the city’s juvenile narcotics division. These officers spend a good part of their day in the bleak world of drugs, and they believe that drug abuse among the young is epidemic.
‘“I’m a drug addict. I’m twelve years old and I’m going to throw up fast… take two more pills and I’m going to kill myself. Damn the whole world.”’
When asked if the National Institute on Drug Abuse underestimates the problem with youngsters, one of the officers chuckles sadly and says, “Very much so.” Carmen and other L.A. undercover narcotics officers are of the opinion that “about 80 percent” of the city’s youth are smoking marijuana. However, marijuana may be the least of the drug problem.
Carmen reports, “I had an incident where I went and purchased heroin from a fifteen-year-old. It took place on the highschool campus. He was also a user, and I thought that was pretty alarming. He never said how long he had been using heroin, but he had track marks. I saw them, and thought he’d been using it maybe a year or so. He was getting pretty heavy into it. He was dealing heroin right in the school, and I knew of at least three others who were using the drug.”
After telling us how the fifteen-year-old was arrested, the attractive undercover cop shook her head in disgust. “Parents don’t keep their kids under hand too much. They let them get loose, and they fall into the wrong hands. They’re very vulnerable. I think that there is some peer pressure, if they are weak, but I think that the parents should keep a real good eye on them. They should come in and try to help them when they are weak. Every kid experiments with drugs, but some kids get to like it, and there they go.”
“I think that they should have more classes in the schools to tell them what happens when they use drugs. Classes that they have to take, are required to take. Some are just not aware of what drugs will do to them. Oh, it will get them high, they know, but they don’t know what it will do to their bodies. They don’t know.”
Lt. Don LaGuardia at first appearances is the stereotypical cop: big and beefy, with short hair and a weary face that reveals the horrors he wishes he had not seen in the more than twenty-five years he has served on the police force. But Don LaGuardia is not anyone’s stereotypical cop. He has a soft-spoken compassion for the thousands of unfortunate juveniles who come through his doors at the juvenile narcotics division he oversees.
Los Angeles is the only major city that has a separate, specialized juvenile narcotics detail. “We are interested in any child who has a drug problem,” LaGuardia said. “Whether he’s caught with one joint, a pill — whatever he’s caught with, that’s the kid we’re interested in.”
LaGuardia and his narcotics officers are not seeking to throw children into jail, but when youngsters are arrested, the officers spend time talking to them and their parents. What LaGuardia and his team are interested in is the drug dealer — those who are selling drugs in junior- and senior-high schools. Since his program began in 1974, more than 2,000 dealers of drugs to adolescents have been arrested. Unfortunately, most of them have been youngsters themselves.
On a recent afternoon in Los Angeles, inside his small office, LaGuardia explained the drug situation in his city as it applies to the young: “In a nutshell, the problem is marijuana. When you’re talking about juvenile drug abuse, you’re talking about marijuana. Probably 90 percent of the time the problem is marijuana.”
LaGuardia shook his head in frustration to a question about marijuana not being so dangerous. “It’s a whole subculture. For one thing, the side effects, the harmful side effects,” he emphasized, “have only become known in the last few years. It’s a devastating drug. It’s cumulative in the body’s fatty cells. It stays with you. They know that it causes damage to the brain cells. They know that it causes some chromosome damage. It’s just a bad, bad drug.”
Of greatest concern to the Los Angeles narcotics officer has been the age of earliest drug experimentation. “I’ll do a little drug survey. What’s the first drug you have used and how old were you? Invariably, 99.9 percent of the time it is marijuana. However, the age of first use has been dropping. It has been dropping steadily every time we do the survey. We had been doing it every six months, but we haven’t done it for a year now. The last time we did do it, the starting age for marijuana was 12.3 years of age.” LaGuardia readily agreed that some of the kids could be as young as eight, nine, or ten years old.
That younger children are getting involved with drugs was borne out to Penthouse by Paco, Sal, Morty, and Patty, four New York City undercover narcotics officers. While not limited to juvenile narcotics offenders, their recent encounters included many with younger children. Paco recalled a recent drug bust: “We were by the Long Island Railroad, where the older guys hang out in the streets. You know, about eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. Because they already know our guys and cars and they don’t want to get busted, here’s what they do. My sergeant wanted me to go out and purchase a nickel bag [five dollars’ worth] of marijuana. So I went out and met three guys. I asked them for marijuana. One of them directed me to go around the corner. Lo and behold, there is this kid who was kneeling down against the wall. I’m going by, and I don’t see anyone. I’m just shaking my head. The kid says, ‘Are you looking for some smoke?’ I said, ‘Yeah, who has it?’”
“Well, I’m looking at him, and he looks like he’s twelve years old. So I said, ‘Do you have anything?’ and he says, ‘Yeah.’ I just looked at him, and said I had some place else to go. I got on my radio to tell my supervisor about it. He couldn’t believe it, so he sent out Hernandez just to check it out. And they checked it out. When they came back, they said, ‘No, the kid’s not twelve, he’s ten.’”
If drug users are getting younger, they are also getting more reckless. It would be difficult to find a more dangerous and harmful drug than PCP, and despite all the publicized warnings about the substance, greater numbers of children are making it their drug of choice. Sal, a New York City undercover narcotics officer, expressed alarm over the increased use of angel dust.
“They’re white, middle-class kids, twelve and thirteen years old. A lot of it isn’t printed, but in the emergency wards is where you find out what happens to PCP takers. You can go out on any given day and arrest the sellers, and they’re back out or somebody else has taken their spots right after they’ve been busted.”
If there is one expert about angel dust and the kids who subject themselves to its horrors, it is Father Coleman Costello. Father Costello has been dubbed “the angel-dust priest” of New York, and could easily be mistaken for a character out of central casting in an updated version of the movie Boys Town. A bear of a man, well over six feet tall and 200 pounds, only the brightest of blue eyes contradicting his rough exterior and thick New York City accent, Father Coleman has spent more than a decade saving children from drugs. Angel-dust victims are his special concern.
Father Costello runs a drug outreach center in Queens, N.Y., a borough that is called the “angel-dust capital of the world” by a young drug abuser. Rather than sit behind a desk in his cluttered and cramped office, Father Costello spends most of his time out in the streets with the drug dealers and users who have come to trust him over the years. He does not preach to them, but lets them know that he is available when they need help. And, more times than not, they do come for help. As the angel-dust priest is fond of saying, “You pay for it now, or you pay for it later.”
Father Costello explained: “Angel dust is an animal tranquilizer. It is used by a person for God knows whatever reason, especially when he sees what the effects are on his brothers and sisters. I have had kids say to me many times that they don’t know why they do it. They seem unable to control themselves in regard to this particular drug. It is one of the only drugs that can be absorbed anywhere there is an opening in the body. It can be used in suppository form, smoked, snorted, or injected. That kids will use anything like that, you can only question why. If you ask them why, they can’t give you an answer. As a matter of fact, when they start to use it they lose control. They get very depressed and have suicidal ideation. If you try to talk to a kid like that and use confrontation, you can’t do it, because they don’t respond to it. I’ll give you an example.”
“I had a kid whose parents were very well educated, very nice, very concerned. Their son was arrested in a stolen car. The kid was ‘dusted,’ and didn’t know where he was when arrested. We went to court, and the judge gave us the kid. The condition of his release was that he place himself in a drug program. The judge said, ‘I want you to go home, and I want you in that program at six o’clock tonight. Get your clothes now.’ At ten after five the kid called me up, and said, ‘Father, could I go to the drug program tomorrow?’ I said no, that the judge wanted him there at six o’clock that night. The kid then says, ‘Father, could I go to the drug program tomorrow?’ I repeated that he had to be at the program that night. He then said, ‘Father, can I go to the drug program tomorrow?’”
“In other words, there is no memory of prior conversation [by angel-dust users]. That is why it is so difficult to deal with a person who does angel dust. As a matter of fact, a lot of programs aren’t prepared to deal with an individual who is out of control like that. It is only after a kid gets arrested and spends a week or two in jail, coming down from the effects of the drug, that we are able to get him to realize that he doesn’t have much of a choice.”
Sal’s and Father Costello’s alarm over angel-dust use by youngsters cannot be exaggerated. In 1979, 14,000 adolescents had to visit hospital emergency rooms because of angel-dust use. In the same year, 260 deaths of adolescents were associated with their use of angel dust. Many of these users are preteens. Father Costello told Penthouse of a recent experience that took place in an upper-middle-class area of New York City.
“I had a kid who was eleven or twelve years old. We were over in Bayside doing outreach work, just breaking in new ground. I saw this little kid with a bunch of other kids who were smoking dust. All of a sudden he started to stagger back and forth. Now this was amazing. I got two of the dealers to help me get him in my car to get him home. He had fallen on the street and started to hit his head on the ground. What a struggle! Two big guys like myself and I had a heck of a struggle trying to get the kid to calm down. This was just a little kid, nothing but skin and bones.”
“This is one of the other characteristics of angel-dust users. They are uncharacteristically strong. This kid was moving me forward in the car. They had him pinned down, but my only fear was that they were going to hurt him. I hoped he wasn’t going to feel any pain.”
“We couldn’t take the kid to an emergency room without the permission of his parents. We were able to find out where he lived from kids in the neighborhood. We took him to his home, and his father and mother answered the door. We told them that their son was under the influence of angel dust, and we advised them to take him to the emergency room right away. I gave them my card, and told them that their son obviously had a problem with drugs. They never did contact us. I called the father up, and he told me that he would be able to deal with the problem. And that is the problem: the failure of people to deal early with the problem. They hope that the problem will go away, but it doesn’t go away. You deal with it now, or you deal with it later.”
This is sound advice. The purveyors of PCP are obviously aiming at a market of children, and the names it is known by in the streets and schools read like the names of bubble-gum rock groups: angel dust, crystal, supergrass, killer weed, embalming fluid, and rocket fuel. In 1978 Congress passed legislation prohibiting the manufacture of PCP with penalties more severe than for any other non-narcotic substance under the Controlled Substances Act: for a first offense, a term of imprisonment of up to ten years, a fine of up to $25,000, or both. The stiff penalties are understandable when the Drug Enforcement Administration explains what the drug does to children:
“A moderate amount often produces in the user a sense of detachment, distance, and estrangement from his surroundings. Numbness, slurred or blocked speech, and a loss of coordination may be accompanied by a sense of strength and invulnerability…. Auditory hallucinations, image distortion as in a fun-house mirror, and severe mood disorders may also occur, producing in some acute anxiety and a feeling of impending doom. In others, paranoia and violent hostility. PCP is unique among popular drugs of abuse in its power to produce psychoses indistinguishable from schizophrenia…. ”
Many myths surround adolescent drug use. One such myth deals with heroin use by children. Federal and state surveys indicate that there is no widespread heroin abuse by youngsters. Unfortunately, what the surveys fail to include in their reports is that a youngster who is a heroin abuser or addict will not be attending school where the surveys are taken. While the National Institute on Drug Abuse states that there are only 100,000 heroin users in the country between the ages of twelve and seventeen, those who deal with drug abusers strongly disagree with the figure.
Ray Rodriguez administers a large drug-treatment center for adolescents at a New York City hospital. Ray, who had a severe drug problem himself as an adolescent, has interviewed and counseled over a thousand drug abusers over the last eight and a half years. The program that he administers is unique in that it will accept only the hardest of the hard-core drug abusers. One of its conditions for admission is that the heroin addict must have been using the drug for at least two years. As the program rarely accepts anybody younger than sixteen years of age, Ray pointed out to Penthouse that the adolescents coming into his heroin-rehabilitation center have been injecting themselves with the drug since they were as young as fourteen, many even younger.
Ray was asked to comment about there being no heroin problem among adolescents. “That’s not true. That’s not my experience. This clinic is living proof of that.” Ray also offered another reason why the drug surveys do not indicate widespread heroin use by adolescents as compared with other drugs. “It’s the age-old problem of denial. Some people sort of have it as recreational use, and some kids are not hurting enough yet to come in for treatment. When they’re forced to come in here, they still won’t admit it.”
Ray Rodriguez smiled broadly when it was suggested to him that heroin abuse by youngsters is confined to city ghetto areas. “I get them from all over. They come through my doors from every borough in the city. I’ve got kids coming to me from New Jersey. The problem transcends every race, religion, and socioeconomic class.” We will see that this is true for drug abuse in general. The disease knows no boundaries in claiming its young victims.
Not even the futuristic and fantastic world of Space Invaders and Pac-Man can escape drugs. Few locations where children spend their hours and money are lacking in one of the dozens of electronic video games that swallow up millions of dollars in quarters. Arcades, game rooms, pizza parlors, and record stores are lit up and clanging with the sounds of these games. They are also locations where drugs are bought and sold by kids.
In 1982 New York State’s Division of Substance Abuse Services suspected drug activity at locations where children congregated to play video games. Undercover operatives were sent to observe 102 such sites throughout New York City. Their suspicions were correct, as they observed widespread drug activity at 65 percent of the selected video-game sites. Marijuana was used or available at all of the latter sites. Cocaine and heroin were found at forty and twenty-five of the sites, respectively. The observers of the drug activity noted that “the vast majority of locations had participants who were males under the age of eighteen.”
Don DesJarlais, a spokesman for the Division of Substance Abuse, told Penthouse: “About 15 percent of the kids looked to be twelve years old or younger. We didn’t break down drug activity by age group, but one of our concerns is that kids between ten and twelve are mixing freely with older kids sixteen to twenty. Because of the age-mixing, we would like to have as little drug use [ at video arcades] as possible.”
While Pac-Man and Space Invaders are not responsible for drug abuse among children, the dark or psychedelically lit video-game establishments, often poorly supervised by proprietors, are attractive locations for clandestine drug activities for young people.
Danny is fourteen years old. His appearance is that of most adolescents his age: long blond hair, neatly and stylishly cut, and a surplus army-fatigue jacket and jeans. It is only when Danny tells his story that you know he is an inhabitant of the childhood drug world.
Danny’s introduction to drugs came when he was ten years old, turned on to marijuana by an older buddy who was twelve. He told us about his progression in the drug world. “He turned me on and I liked it. Plus, where I was hanging out, everybody was partying. When they were partying, every time they lit up I was smoking. Right after I started smoking I got into mesc [mescaline]. After three weeks I wasn’t really smoking that much, but I was experimenting with different drugs. Then I got into mesc. I was doing mescaline every week. I started doing acid, but I really never got into it. Everything I ever did I would stop and then go on to something else. Then I finally started doing dust.” When Danny started using angel dust, things began to go awry in his life. Functioning in grade school was impossible.
“A lot of kids say, ‘Well, if I smoke a joint, I am going to be able to pass this test,’ but that’s not true. I couldn’t even think straight. …You know, when you’re high, you don’t even want to be there. You can’t take it sitting down. You gotta be moving around. Me, I gotta be walking around, having a good time. I could never pass tests when I was high.”
In the seventh grade Danny was kicked out of school. At twelve he was using drugs every day, and was in one of the several drug programs he was to attend. While in those programs Danny continued using more and more angel dust.
“I would smoke it. It was a drug I loved to do. I would get numbed out, be like nothin’ bothered me. Like everything was all right. I’d be in a good mood. Once in a while you’d smoke too much, and you wouldn’t know what the hell you were doin’. You can’t remember, like you can’t remember nothin’. You don’t even know your name. Nothin’.”
‘“I purchased heroin from a fifteen-year-old,” said a Los Angeles undercover narcotics officer. “He was also a user. He was dealing heroin right in the school.”’
“You feel no pain. Like one time this kid was punching me, and I was just standing there. I thought he was just kidding around, like I wasn’t feeling any pain. But he was really punching me, and he gave me one punch and my head went like that. I started fighting back. Dust does make you very violent.”
Danny spent much of his time searching for new ways to get higher. Alcohol upset his stomach, but pills like Tuinal and Quaaludes, for a period of time, gave him the feelings he was seeking. “Ludes and Tuinal always gave me an up head. I felt like I was drunk. I felt good, but I liked the dust head better.”
As an eleven- and twelve-year-old Danny was spending at least twenty dollars a day for drugs, while dealer friends would treat him to another twenty dollars a day of drugs. Still, eleven-year-olds do not have twenty dollars a day to spend on drugs. Danny told us how he afforded his habit. “I’d tell my mom that I was taking a ten, then after I took ten dollars from her pocketbook, I’d go into my father’s room and take ten dollars out of his pants. I didn’t care. I mean, I knew they would find out money was missing, but I just didn’t care.”
Danny admitted that he was involved in robberies and house break-ins. All the money that he stole from his family and robberies went for drugs. By thirteen Danny was living in a fuzzy world of drug intoxication. His family was aware of this, but felt powerless to stop their son. As Danny said, “There was nothing they could have done to stop me.”
It wasn’t always a fun thing to do. Danny began to experience hallucinations and blackouts. “Once, me and my friend began to smoke. We smoked more, and I passed out in his house. When I woke up, I thought I was dreaming. I wasn’t sure what was going on, and said I’d better get home. When I walked into the house, well, I don’t remember what I did, but the next day my mother told me. When I walked in there were a lot of people there, and I just stood there holding on to the door. I was frozen. Finally I started walking and had to keep on holding on to everything, like I was going to fall down.”
It was soon after the last incident, when Danny lost any memory of the day, that he was placed in a drug-rehabilitation center called A-Way Out, Inc. Here, for the past ten months, Danny has been spending eight hours a day attending classes and therapy sessions with thirty-five other youngsters. Danny states that the program does help him. He has lapses, but when we spoke with Danny he had been drug-free for a month, the longest he has been without drugs since he was ten.
What many parents are unaware of is that drugs are easily available. Whether in cities or suburbia, kids can get anything they want to ingest or inject into their system. It is sold on street corners, in arcades, pizza parlors, parks, and very often in school. An amazing film was made by Los Angeles undercover narcotics officers of activity taking place on the campus of a San Fernando Valley high school. The students did not know they were being filmed as they gathered for an hour lunch break. The film records sixty minutes of what took place.
As the camera panned a school area designated as a “smoking area,” dozens of youngsters were seen smoking marijuana and hashish and snorting cocaine. Groups of students could be seen clustering around fellow student dealers or suppliers of drugs. Little attempt was made by the students to hide their illegal activities. Observing their behavior, one is struck with the impression that using drugs in school is an everyday occurrence. Indeed, nonparticipants can be seen strolling by the drug activity, including adults who may very well be school personnel, unfazed by what is going on. A Los Angeles police officer told us that it was a typical school day.
Every young drug abuser whom we talked with told us the same thing about the availability of “scoring ” drugs. Whether it was marijuana, cocaine, or heroin, the youngsters claimed that all they would need would be the money. Police officers and drug counselors agreed that they were not making idle boasts; drug dealers who sell to kids are found everywhere. Often, the dealers are kids themselves.
Stan was a child drug dealer. The seventeen-year-old, well-groomed youth was nine years old when his cousin turned him on to drugs. Stan, not unlike Danny, comes from a middle-class family. He has enjoyed many of the material benefits, including private school, from his father’s well-paying employment. There was little his parents could not afford in giving Stan a comfortable childhood. There was only one thing they could not afford, and that was his drug habit.
Before his tenth birthday, Stan had already experimented with marijuana and cocaine. He got into mescaline and an assortment of multicolored pills to take him up or get him down soon after. When you’re ten or eleven, it is difficult to afford $150 a week for drugs. Stan couldn’t take it out of his allowance, so he had to find other means. Stealing from his parents was but one way.
“I did a lot of dealing, you know. I was dealing dust for a while, and speed, and different pills. All the money went for drugs for myself.” Most of Stan’s waking hours were spent in drug activity. “If I wasn’t dealing drugs, I was taking them.”
Stan’s counterpart on the West Coast is Marty. The son of wealthy Orange County parents, Marty was thirteen years old when he awoke one morning and realized that he had a forty-five- to fifty-dollar-a-day drug habit. To afford his habit, Marty broke into houses and sold drugs to classmates. He acknowledges breaking into sixty homes, including his own. Marty became so proficient in robbing houses that it became a habit: “I became addicted to robbing houses.”
Dealing drugs at school and at home was both rewarding and detrimental for Marty. “When you’re dealing, you always have a constant supply of money and drugs, but it becomes a hassle after a while. People kept coming around at odd hours, and I didn’t like it.” But Marty continued until about his sixteenth birthday. His life was caving in all around him. His parents were now aware of his drug habits and dealing, and he feared that the police were on to him for the break-ins. Marty had overdosed on a few occasions, and had already been placed in hospitals for his addiction. Finally, he was arrested for a car theft, and a condition of his probation was placement in Tustin Community Hospital’s Positive Action Center for youthful drug offenders. Now, Marty is back at school and working in the afternoons. He no longer sells drugs, nor does he break into homes to steal. And, while Marty is not drug-free, “I’ve got it under control,” he claimed. “In my mind I know. I can feel it. You know, when I was addicted to drugs, I knew it and it was a fucked feeling knowing that you had to have something. Now I can take it or leave it.”
It may very well be easier for youngsters to take drugs than not to. Marty told us that most kids around school are taking one drug or another. He even found it prevalent among nine- and ten-year-olds. Kids are great conformists among their kind; peer pressure is great, and it is easier to say yes when offered a joint.
Marty is not alone in finding it difficult to stop taking drugs. Danny and Stan, too, expressed concern that it is all too easy when they are with their friends to resume drug-taking. Reinforcement comes not only from friends but from many in the adult community. The drug behavior of athletes, movie stars, and rock singers is an obvious positive reinforcement for the young to take drugs. But more direct adult influences in their lives are contributing to the idea that taking drugs is a “cool thing.”
Lieutenant LaGuardia of the Los Angeles Juvenile Narcotics Squad points an .angry finger at parents and schoolteachers. Many of the youngsters’ parents are drug users. If it’s okay for them, why not for me? children are apt to reason. LaGuardia believes that the younger school-teachers are drug users, and that the kids pick up on it. The younger teachers often do not get upset when they find a student smoking marijuana. Furthermore, we have learned of a case where a high school teacher was teaching the virtues of drugs to her students while supplying them with various substances. Stan told us about her:
“She was a teacher in this high school I went to. She used to talk about tripping in class. She used to get high all the time. I’d go over her house every now and then, and she’d take acid and smoke pot. She invites the kids over there. This one kid, Doug, who had taken two hits of speed, had overdosed and had a stroke. Well, he’s back into it again, and this teacher is smoking with him over there, doing acid with him. I can’t understand how a teacher could do something like that. I couldn’t deal with it.”
In recognition that youngsters are spending billions of dollars a year for drugs, legitimate industries have mushroomed that cater to and capitalize on the burgeoning drug trade. In 1980, the NIDA estimated that up to $3 billion would be earned that year by the drug-paraphernalia industry, selling its products in thousands of record shops and so-called “head shops” across the nation to youngsters. Dozens of products are manufactured and distributed through these outlets to encourage drug use.
On the market are hundreds of types of marijuana rolling paper, coming in various sizes, flavors, and decorations. Roach clips, rolling machines, “bongs,” and water pipes can be seen prominently displayed in the windows of neighborhood or shopping-mall stores. Cocaine straws, spoons — often in sterling silver and gold to be worn around the neck — containers to store the drug, adulterants to cut it, and test kits are all available for from a few cents up to hundreds of dollars for each item. Drugs that are not illegal but are used for getting high can be bought in most head shops. Mushrooms for psilocy-bin and look-alike chemicals such as Pro-caine HCI and lsobutyl nitrate, better known by such names as coca snow and rush, are among the more common items. In recognition of the dangers in drug dealing and abusing, head shops sell safes to hide or smuggle drugs, antibugging equipment, night goggles, and money belts.
The drug-paraphernalia industry has its consumer journals, the most noteworthy being High Times, with an approximate 250,000 monthly circulation. Although High Times states that its policy is to reject any advertising aimed at a juvenile audience, its contents and availability in head shops allow the magazine to fall into young hands.
High Times features in each issue the street price tor dozens of drugs, from marijuana to heroin. Both adolescent drug users and police officials have attested to its accuracy. Capt. Gregory Moore of New York City’s Narcotics Squad told us in a recent interview that High Times is his best source for availability and prices of drugs on the streets.
‘When you’re ten or eleven, it’s difficult to afford $150 a week for drugs. Stan couldn’t take it out of his allowance, so he had to find other ways. Stealing from his parents was one of them.’
The paraphernalia industry has also published its own trade journals. Two defunct journals, Paraphernalia Magazine and the Accessories Digest, were typical trade-organization publications. As the industry is beset with legal difficulties and community pressures, many of the journals pages are filled with advice on how to fight back and editorials urging industry self-policing. A centerfold in the August 1978 issue of the Accessories Digest, designed to hang on head shop walls, contained the warning that “certain items will not be sold to children.” While some shop owners may observe this stricture, quite a few do not.
On a recent afternoon I took my eleven-year-old son on a ride through New York City and parts of neighboring suburban Nassau County. Entering several head shops by himself, he was able to obtain rolling paper, roach clips, a pipe, and a cocaine spoon. Only one owner questioned him, and when he stated that the rolling paper was for his father, the sale was rung up on the register.
Until March 1982, communities had been unsuccessful in preventing or closing down drug-paraphernalia shops. Upon appeals to the courts, drug-paraphernalia lawyers were able to rebuff all community attempts at ridding the localities of head shops.
A recent Supreme Court decision, however, has given local communities the right to pass anti-drug-paraphernalia ordinances to rid their areas of the shops that sell accessories. It cannot be expected, however, that the Supreme Court decision will have any immediate effect, as the paraphernalia industry has millions of dollars to wage continued legal battles to change the Court’s decision.
Legislation and belated parental actions are not going to stop children from taking drugs. Once the young child has experienced drugs, at least for a time, he is going to enjoy getting high. Peter Chimera, a former heroin addict and now president of A-Way Out, Inc., told Penthouse that “there is a positive side about drugs that nobody talks about. The kids like it. They like the feeling they get, and not until they get into trouble do they believe drugs are harmful. The overdoses happen only to the other guy who is stupid. They believe that they are invincible.”
Danny, Stan, and Marty all agreed that there was nothing their parents could have done to stop them once they began taking drugs. If anything, drugs were for them a way of escaping from the normal, everyday problems adolescents have with their parents. While several drug-rehabilitation programs have had varying degrees of success with child drug abusers, nobody has yet devised a drug-prevention program to save children from going through the hell of drug addiction.
Sooner or later the world of drug abuse and addiction for youngsters becomes a living hell. Kids learn too late that the euphoria of drugs fails to be the answer to the problems of growing up. One youngster in a Manhattan drug program wrote the following poem, which was published in her school yearbook:
Dead or alive
You live to destroy every man, woman, girl or boy.
(Though it is the choice of every human to use you or abuse you)
Some may — some may not realize the trouble you sing
But to the innocent it’s sorrow you bring
Seller: You do not care
Some people stand by saying,
“It’s not fair”
His own kind he is slaying
See the drug in your hand
Make that inspection
And before you make the injection Ask: If drugs are the answer,
What is the question?“The Question”
In some ways it can be terrifying to realize that forty years after the publication of this article, it could easily be talking about a current situation. These days there are hundreds of online places for you to seek help with your individual situation should you need, but the sheer volume of that information can be intimidating all on its own. Maybe start with the Mayo Clinic if you have a need. Honestly, we really hope you do not.
