WHEN 'SCARED STRAIGHT' IS MEANINGLESS

Author Follows The Lives Of Three Bay Area Teens On The Complex Road To
Getting Off Drugs

Dirty

A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic

By Meredith Maran

HARPERSANFRANCISCO; 311 PAGES; $24.95

Meredith Maran's exploration of youthful self-destruction, "Dirty," is
wrenching as both advocacy journalism and parental confessional. Suffused
with her own anguished guilt as the mother of a child who spent his
adolescence flirting with prison or death, this passionate, affecting book
reveals how eagerly many teenagers obtain drugs and how difficult and
fraught it can be to help them stop.

Maran does not pretend to have figured it all out. Rather, by patiently
tracking three Bay Area youths' varying paths through the juvenile justice
and drug-rehabilitation systems, she demolishes the inadequate,
one-dimensional rationales (lazy parenting! the media! bad kids!) and even
more simplistic solutions (scare them straight! send them to boot camp!)
with which we console ourselves.

None of these kids can be reduced to formulas like "child of a broken home";

even when their stories seem to roughly sketch a popular explanation for
addiction, each one's stubborn, intricate individuality remains clear.
Though that eye for complexity prevents a clear narrative resolution -- the
book trails off rather than coming to a sharp point -- any reader who
shares these young people's lives will emerge chastened by the sheer human
difficulty involved in actually getting kids off drugs.

Maran acts as both a substitute parent and a compassionate friend to her
subjects: Mike, a working-class crystal-meth addict from Santa Rosa;
Tristan, an affluent, frequently stoned child of hippies from Marin; and
Zalika, a middle-class African American girl from Richmond who deserts her
stable family for the thrill of the streets. Maran paints each of them with
almost unmatchable compassion and respect, even when they're relapsing,
stealing or otherwise damaging others' trust. She gets them to share their
most ungenerous thoughts as well as their spasms of insight. Each teenager,
in fact, exhibits a very modern savvy about the usefulness of his or her
tale. "I know I'm gonna make it," Mike opines. "Because I have a good story
that's gonna help people understand. I may not be [rehabilitation] program
material, but I'm definitely book material."

When these kids are at their most exasperating (and none of them walks a
straight path from rehab to sobriety), the author's slangy emotional
generosity keeps them interesting and likable, even charismatic. With all
of their flaws, Maran draws them as complicated, self-aware, self-deceiving
and confused -- in a word, teenagers, and you root for them to get help in
whatever way happens to work. Which may well be the crux of the problem: No
one solution fits every child, and many current solutions don't seem to fit
any children.

Maran's depiction of the cavernous blind spots within the rehab bureaucracy
should be an eye-opener. She is not a muckraker; if anything, nearly
everyone we meet in this field seems driven by an urgency that is personal
and moral rather than financial. Teachers and counselors in "sober
schools," one of which Tristan attends, often faced their own problems with
addiction as adolescents and come across as empathetic and endlessly
compassionate in the face of almost certain disappointment. Administrators
and staff members at the county-run rehab program to which Mike accepts his
sentence do their best amid a bureaucracy that sets various agencies in
competition for the same kids. The cynical, street-wise, yet miraculously
hopeful members of Richmond's Drug Court, who ponder the solution that will
give Zalika her best shot at escape, would make a particularly compelling
book of their own.

Yet these good intentions are hamstrung by fundamental flaws: Salaries are
ridiculously low, training often rudimentary, and many of the programs
force adolescents into adult roles they have neither the ability nor the
inclination to play. The Alcoholics Anonymous-derived tenets (take
responsibility for your own failings; recovery truly works only when you
have freely chosen it) adopted by most treatment programs, for instance,
apply best to adults capable of weighing consequences.

Teens facing problems with addiction, in particular, tend to have severe
difficulty facing up to those consequences -- it's often why they did drugs
in the first place. While most of these kids are smart enough to figure out
what adults want to hear and give it to them in whatever quantity they
crave it, they also realize that beneath that mouthing of the approved
rhetoric lies a total lack of enforcement: "[E]ach program is a tightly
sealed container with a big hole at the bottom" because the kids involved
can always run away without fear of punishment. "Dare a teenager to run,"
Maran observes, and "the AWOL stats speak for themselves."

An exorcism of Maran's demons (seeing your child suffer this way cuts a
"hole in your heart," Mike's mom tells her) as much as a call to arms, this
book is painful, powerful and saddening, perhaps most of all because, in
the end, it turns up more questions than answers.

Jesse Berrett teaches at San Francisco's University High School and has
written for the New York Times and the Village Voice