'IT COULD BE ANYBODY' DRINKING, DOING DRUGS

Stereotypes don't apply when looking at teens, substance use

They're the cream of the teen-age crop: the football players, the
cheerleaders, the valedictorians.

And they say most adults don't have a clue.

Most parents think that the teens they have to watch out for are the
"punks," said Kelley Burke, 14, a student at Lincoln Junior High School.

But drugs and alcohol don't care what color your hair is or what type of
music you listen to or even if your nose is pierced.

"It could be anybody," Burke said when asked what type of person she
pictures as teen who drinks or does drugs. "It doesn't matter what they
look like."

The teens are right, said Fort Collins police Lt. Jim Broderick, commander
of the Larimer County Drug Task Force. You can't judge a book by its cover.

Even from an undercover standpoint police are seeing that stereotypes don't
fit, Broderick said.

"You had to look the part (of a drug abuser) 20 years ago and now all you
have to do is have the money. ... You don't have to fit the 'down and out
street addict,'" he said.

When Broderick walks into drug court he sees a myriad of "types."

"They could be somebody's nephew, somebody's kid," he said. "They don't
have 'drug abuser' stamped on their forehead. And they're in all areas from
use to dealing."

Some teens said even knowing a student's parents isn't always a good
indicator of whether a teen is traveling the straight and narrow.

"The students that have strict parents are usually the wildest," said
Maddie Kent, 14.

They're also very good at hiding it, Kent said.

"We all want to be able to look at a person and paint a portrait,"
Broderick said. "But it's a hell of a lot more complicated than that."

Everyone at some point conceives a stereotype image, said Poudre High
Schooljunior Scott Williams, 16.

"But eventually you find out that it could be anyone," Williams said. "The
movies are wrong."

Age is a bigger factor in which teens drink than anything else, he said.

Once they turn 16, they usually have access to a car and more time away
from parents, Williams said.

Adults used to classify substance abuse problems as problems of the poor,
said Jim Campain, PSD Safe and Drug Free Schools coordinator. But studies
show that it cuts across all socioeconomic lines.

Peer groups are more spread out now, Broderick said. Teens can have friends
who are athletes, intellectuals, skaters, punks, whatever. And there could
be drug users in any one of those groups or none at all.

The teens do a pretty good job of categorizing the different subgroups,
Broderick said. They know who's on the up and up.

"As parents we don't discriminate that well," he said. "The person who is
getting the good grades and is polite, those are the kids that aren't using
in our minds. It's the quiet, behind-the-scenes kids that are the dopers."

But students learn the social skills they need to mask their drug abuse
early on, Broderick said, and are fairly sophisticated about it.

"How many parent have talked with their kids about their perception of one
of their friends and the kid smirks and says 'you have no clue,'" he said.

These students are no dummies, he said. They're smart and know how to slide
under the parental radar.

Some of these kids are entrepreneurs, he added. They're dealing drugs and
looking at it from the money aspect so they have to be smart about it. For
parents, there is no easy way to pick out who the bad seeds are in their
child's circle of friends, Broderick said. There is no list of 10 questions
to ask each person your child brings by the house.

"I don't think you can be afraid of asking the hard questions," he said,
adding that while parents can't control other children, they can control
their own.

It's about parents taking responsibility for their children, Broderick
said. When they seem moody or their grades take a dive, parents need to
look at the possibility that there could be a problem.

They need to take an active role in their children's lives, he said.

Not only do teens believe that anyone can be into drinking and drugs. They
also believe many are.

It's common for teens to drink alcohol, believes 14-year-old Tyson Vogel.
Especially in high school, added the Lincoln Junior High ninth- grader.

But Vogel said he doesn't think experimenting with drinking early on is
such a bad thing.

By getting it out of their systems, he said, teens can move past it and
focus on other things. It loses its mystery.

And so perceptions continue to collide with the realities.

Most teens drink, concludes Williams.

And parents think it's the "other kid" who has the problem, not theirs,
Williams said. "It's always someone else's kid."