A RECOVERING ADDICT TELLS PARENTS, "DON'T BE FOOLED"

Once an honor roll student with perfect attendance, Colleen
McGeoghegan dropped out of Pattonville High School and moved in with
her drug dealer.

"My parents thought I was too intelligent to get involved," said
Colleen, looking prim and proper with neatly cropped dark hair and
black-rimmed glasses. She is 20 now, been to hell and back. "Don't be
fooled," she said. "Many adults are ignorant about our lifestyle."

She was 16 in suburbia when she went to her first rave, where she
watched her friend have a seizure. In drugs, she had found an outlet
for common stresses at school and family changes at home. She also had
an undiagnosed manic-depressive disorder and was basically
self-medicating.

Cocaine use led to "a full-blown drug addiction by the end of my
sophomore year." When she couldn't get cocaine, she used meth, so easy
to make and find. Living from one binge to the next, "it was as if I
were dead, waiting for my toe tag."

Because St. Louis has been identified as a city where meth is widely
available and parents are just as widely unaware of it, the region has
been chosen to debut new ads from the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America. Who could have dreamed that the generation that inhaled - and
lied about it to their kids - would be such a bunch of blockheads
about their kids' drug scene? Count me among the clueless.

Missouri is the nation's runaway leader in meth labs. St. Louis is
indentified as an "emerging" market, with the right deadly mix of drug
availability and parental ignorance to become a high-use city.

In one ad, a woman's eye fills the screen. A tweezer is frantically
plucking away the eyebrow as the bloodshot eye stares. The tweezer
yanks and picks until you can barely stand it, and then the camera
pans out to reveal the other eyebrow, plucked raw and bloody. A
woman's voice says, "It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're
on meth."

Remembering the Reefer Madness campaigns of my youth, implying that
one breath of marijuana would land you in the loony bin, I asked
Colleen if she'd done anything like the eyebrow ad on meth. "Oh,
yeah," she said. "One time I was out of it, and I was pinching and
pulling on my face for three days. I'm lucky it didn't leave any scars."

It was news to me that Colleen fits the profile of a meth high-risk
group: high-achieving young women. "It's the superwoman drug. Women
use it to be superwife, superemployee and super thin," Cindy Nichols,
a drug counselor and former meth addict, told Glamour magazine.

According to a survey done for PDFA, only about a quarter of St. Louis
parents believe meth and ecstasy are a risk in their children's
schools, while 40 percent of St. Louis teens reported knowing someone
who uses meth, and half know ecstasy users. Eighteen percent of the
teens have been offered meth, 32 percent ecstasy.

What finally made Colleen quit was the realization it had become a
matter of life and death. Having shared dirty needles, Colleen sweated
out tests for HIV. She is not infected.

She graduated from Parkway Central two years ago and is attending the
University of Missouri at St. Louis, hoping to get a masters in
education. There certainly is much Colleen can teach us.