WHY THEY DON'T JUST SAY NO

Andrew, Morris, and Smurf do drugs. One smokes pot, one shoots heroin, and
one pops pills. Carlings, after a life on the streets, is struggling to
stay clean. Here are their stories.

Andrew is your typical software programmer. He planned to earn a computer
science degree at a California university. But during his freshman year of
college, he started working part-time in the high-tech sector, enjoyed it,
and joined a local software company. At age 21, he's been in the workforce
for three years and makes $45,000 a year, plus stock options, at a Seattle
software company. Clean-cut and a slim 6 feet 1 inch tall, Andrew could
have stepped straight out of a Banana Republic ad. He likes to snowboard,
surf, and ride motor cross.

He's also your typical drug user. Andrew, who is white, smoked marijuana
for the first time six years ago, as a high school freshman in Northern
California. His best friend persuaded him to try it. "We did everything
together," he says. "We went out to the woods and smoked way too much of
the stuff. We had no idea what we were doing." Surprised by the
unexpectedly strong buzz, Andrew and his friend waited a while before
trying marijuana again.

Six months later, Andrew smoked marijuana with a few more friends, and then
did a little drug research on the Internet. "As I learned more, I found
that it would not really do significant harm." A few months later, his
parents asked him whether he was involved with drugs. Not accustomed to
lying, he answered yes. They shipped him off to the family therapist, who
hypnotized Andrew and told him, "You're walking along a road and you see
this weed. It's big, it's dirty. You don't touch it." Unpersuaded, Andrew
asked the therapist whether he had ever tried marijuana. The therapist
admitted not only to having tried it, but also to using it now. "I think at
the time if he had said, 'This is evil. This is bad. Never do it again,'
that probably would have done it."

Andrew's drug use continues today, and seemed to hit new heights last year.
"There were crazy things going on in the whole software industry," he says.
"I was thrown into a lot of things I wasn't ready for." To relieve stress,
he smoked marijuana three or four times a week. He says he has cut back
this year. A couple times a month, he'll smoke a joint. He recently tried
Ecstasy: "I can't say I ever had that much fun before."

America's drug users look a lot like America as a whole-but a little
younger. Their racial profile is identical to the general population's,
according to the most recent annual National Household Survey on Drug
Abuse. Most users are under 50 years old. Andrew's age group, the
18-to-22-year-olds, has the highest proportion of users-19.4 percent. At
that age, they're newly independent, and they're either making money for
the first time or living on their own in college. The rate of use spikes
again among people in their 40s, who presumably were the peace- and-love
experimenters in the late 1960s and early '70s.

For lawmakers looking to reduce the demand for drugs, however, the real
question is: Who makes up the drug-abusing population? Drug users tend to
be young; for many of them, drugs are a passing phase. For those who become
drug abusers, drug use is different. They see their lives taken over by
drugs, and they often end up in hospitals or jail.

Drug abusers represent about 20 percent of drug users, but they account for
about 80 percent of drug demand, said Mark Kleiman, a drug policy expert at
the University of California Los Angeles. Drug abusers as a group are
"poorer, darker, and younger than the population at large. They're socially
marginal or they're rock stars. They use drugs because they're easy to get,
and the consequences [for them] aren't that great."

The success of America's battle against drug abuse hinges, in part, on
understanding who's using drugs-and why. Drug experts say that a more
sophisticated understanding of drug use is the key to improving prevention
efforts and to recognizing their limitations. (See story, p. 2602.)
Otherwise, prevention techniques will keep on being about as effective as
Andrew's hypnosis.

Hooked On Heroin

Many drug abusers look like "Morris." He's quite presentable-tall and
clean-shaven, with an olive complexion and a medium build. As a precocious
teenager growing up in a New England suburb in the late 1960s, he fastened
on beatnik writers, not rock stars, as his role models. Morris, who asked
that his real name not be used, fell in love with the notion that drugs
would help him explore new areas of his mind. "I saw myself as an outsider.
I saw myself as a drug user before I used heroin. I was very interested in
it. As long as I can remember, I was interested in altered states of
consciousness. I was interested in the limits of human experiences."

He was also interested in a girl. In 1968, when he was 15, Morris traded
some marijuana for morphine. "I could have swallowed [the morphine
tablets]. I could have sniffed them, but I had a crush on this girl who
shot drugs. I thought that since I had this drug that could be used
intravenously, it was a way to talk to her."

Surprised that the injection didn't hurt, he continued to shoot morphine
with his crush. Several months later, he got hold of some heroin. "There is
a 19th-century novelist whom nobody remembers: Edward Bulwer-Lytton. He had
said that the experience of taking opium was like having one's soul rubbed
down with silk. For me, the sensation of heroin was very much like that."

After he went from using heroin monthly, to biweekly, to daily, Morris
began to realize he was dependent. He tried therapy, but it didn't work. He
graduated from high school and cultivated a bohemian persona. He took some
classes at a local college, but he didn't want a degree. "I liked [my
lifestyle] very much," he says. "Women were attracted to me generally until
they realized I had some problems that were rather serious, like using
heroin. Aside from that, I had a lot of girlfriends."

In the mid-1970s, he was arrested on a drug charge. Awaiting trial, he
found methadone. With his life more in order, Morris enrolled in college.
But when Morris graduated in 1980, his doctor said that he'd been on
methadone too long, and took him off it.

Morris returned to heroin, but he managed to enroll in a doctoral program
in history at an Ivy League university. His use accelerated in 1982 when
his sister, with whom he was close, died of a cocaine overdose. "I would go
to a bar in the inner city-in the city I was living in-with my work. And I
would sit in a stall, doing my grad work, waiting for the heroin dealer to
show up." By 1985, heroin had become more important than his graduate
studies. He began selling heroin to support his habit. Arrested twice,
Morris served just under a year in a medium-security prison. When he got
out, he met his daughter, who was born just after he entered prison.

Though unmarried, Morris was in a committed relationship and wanted to take
on his new responsibilities heroin-free. He got a job with the national
AIDS demonstration project as an outreach worker, and he eventually went to
work for his city's public health branch, where he is still employed.

Morris relapsed into heroin use in 1997 when he had surgery and used
painkillers during his recovery. "I probably wasn't as vigilant as I should
have been." For a while, he was doing heroin at work, and that almost cost
him his job. Now, at 47, he's back on methadone and does heroin and cocaine
on the weekends. He doesn't expect to stop using heroin. He says, "It
doesn't make my life chaotic, and it isn't hurtful to anyone."

In The Inner City

Carlings, a 46-year-old resident at the Clean and Sober Streets
substance-abuse treatment center in Washington, has been clean for almost
two years. He has a scar on his right cheek-from an injury sustained while
playing Superman as a child. His gentle demeanor conceals his
more-than-30-year battle with drugs, violence, and incarceration.

"I used drugs, I shot drugs, I snorted drugs, I sold drugs. I did
everything that a person would do on drugs. I lied, I stole, I made
enemies, I made friends. It got me to the point where my family wouldn't
accept me," he says. "The low point was when I realized I had to sleep in
abandoned cars. I didn't have a job; nobody cared. I went to McDonald's and
washed up in there. I got on methadone. I got off of methadone. I used
again. I got on methadone again. I got off of methadone." That was how
Carlings spent his 30s.

His drug use started as a way to earn respect and money, and to escape
inner-city life. In 1971, drugs felt like the norm, and Carlings was
curious. A father at age 14, he started selling drugs, in part, to support
his son. "School wasn't too good for me at the time, because I had too much
business selling drugs. I dropped out in the 11th grade. Things were kind
of like on the up-and-up, and I found myself meeting people, I was really
popular with people, because I had the drugs." His using and selling began
with marijuana, but by the time he was 17, he had graduated to LSD, PCP,
cocaine, and heroin. And by then, he also had a daughter.

As Carlings used and sold more frequently in his early 20s, the environment
around him began to change. "It was more the gangster type of atmosphere,
where people supported their habits, and it was like an illness-you would
get sick if you didn't have it." Confusing a drug order earned him six
bullets, one of which remains in his left hip. "I was too caught up in it,"
he says. Carlings later lost his first son to "the life," as he puts it.
Carlings Jr., shot 17 times in a gang-related drug deal, died at age 26.

When Carlings was in his mid-30s, he was arrested in a crack house and
charged with dealing cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, as well as with gun
possession. He went to prison for four and a half years. "Gettin' locked up
was probably the best thing in the world that happened to me. I got a
little bit of a sense of what was going on. When I got out, I started to
work again."

Carlings, then 40, took a job as a janitor at a neighborhood Baptist
church. But the mother of his two younger children had just died, and the
children were placed in foster care. He was grieving, battling addiction,
and fighting for custody of his children. He relapsed-cocaine, heroin,
crack, marijuana. "I figured maybe I'd use some drugs to feel a little bit
better about things."

Within two years, he quit his job because he couldn't face work every day.
After an overdose landed him in the hospital, Carlings went to a homeless
shelter. His condition improved, and he got another job. With the job came
cash, and with the cash he bought crack.

At last, at age 44, he checked himself into Clean and Sober, which was next
door to the homeless shelter. "I knew that if I really wanted to get these
kids back, I needed to stop playing and face the truth about it-that I have
a drug problem." Now, almost two years later, he's a cook at Georgetown
University and has a stable income. As soon as he finds a place to live, he
says, he'll win custody of his children.

Party Girl

Her club name is Smurf. Her real name is Kristina, and she lives in a
suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah. She first tried Ecstasy this past New
Year's Eve. She'd turned down chances to try it before, because she didn't
know what it would do to her. But her friends talked her into it. "I was
scared at first, but my friends were like, 'It's really fun.' "

In fact, Kristina was the one to make the buy. She and her friends had
driven to a nearby town in the afternoon, to the parking lot of Albertson's
grocery store. They picked Kristina to seal the deal. Her heart beating
fast, she walked over to another car, where a friend of a friend was
waiting. She paid him $125, and he handed her five pills.

That evening, about 30 minutes into the hour-long drive to a downtown club,
Kristina and her friends each took one of the pills. Before long, "my
friend turned around, and she started laughing," Kristina, a slim,
blue-eyed, flirtatious blonde, recounted with a giggle. "She said, 'You
have a Perma-grin!' I just started laughing, and I started rubbing my hands
together, and I couldn't stop." Her hands felt like gummy bears, she says.

At the club, Kristina and her friends danced until 2 a.m. Her favorite
activity was to have her friend pick her up and swing her back and forth
like a pendulum-"I felt like I was floating." Back at a friend's house
after the club closed, Kristina professed her love to everyone there. "You
like to be touched. You hug people. You say the 'L' word a lot."

She was a convert. Having dropped out of high school a year earlier,
Kristina began taking Ecstasy a couple of times a week. She then started
selling the pills to support her emerging habit, which was costing her
between $50 and $250 a week. It wasn't hard, however, to hide her habit
from her parents. "I had my own cell phone, so all the phone calls I needed
to make, I could do from that. I just told them I was going dancing."

Within a couple months, her friends talked her out of selling. "They didn't
want to see me get thrown in jail or something like that." Now, she has cut
back to once a month, and she's working toward her GED. Why doesn't she
stop completely? "I'm working on it," she says.