SEEING ADDICTION THROUGH A NEW LENS

Children should beware the drug pusher - whether on the street, near the
school grounds or at home. In some homes, addiction is being handed down.

EVERY FEW years, a classic urban myth recycles through communities across
the country, spreading fear among parents at PTA meetings, church
gatherings, neighborhood barbecues.

The details vary, but the basic story goes something like this: A mom picks
up her little girl from kindergarten. The child is acting weird, and soon
is screaming and thrashing about, out of control. Mom rushes her child to
the hospital, where doctors find the kid is on a bad acid trip.

Some shady character hanging around the school grounds, it turns out, gave
the little tyke some innocent-looking fake tattoos of cartoon characters.
The tatoos were laced with LSD, the child applied one to her skin and -
kapow ! The kid has totally freaked!

If only keeping children safe from the risks of illicit drug
experimentation were as easy as warding off shadowy figures lurking around
playgrounds.

The danger usually lies so much closer to home.

A survey of 582 drug addicts getting treatment in four states tells this story:

Of those who responded, 20 percent said they first got drugs from family
members; 75 percent said they first used them with friends. Only 1 percent
said their first exposure came from a drug dealer.

Some teens reported sharing drugs with their parents. Of those who did,
most shared marijuana (76 percent). But harder drugs also passed between
parent and child: 19 percent said they shared crack, 16 percent cocaine, 6
percent heroin. The addicts were from cities and suburbs alike; they were
white, black, Hispanic. Drug abuse is an egalitarian evil.

Granted, the survey was limited in scope to drug addicts in a treatment
program. In the overall population, surely, relatively few parents are so
lame-brained as to push illegal drugs on their children.

But the results, among a population that has been trapped by addiction,
challenge an assumption at once frightening and reassuring: that drugs
pervade some other world than our own, a world that is threatening, yet
separate and identifiable and, thus, readily put out of bounds.

Much of the drug war is aimed at ridding society of those "others," those
shadowy figures in other neighborhoods, from other cities and even other
countries. And those others really are there. The war is being lost,
though, not "out there," but in people's homes.