20% SAY THEY USED DRUGS WITH A PARENT

Among Reasons: Boomer Culture And Misguided Attempts To Bond.

Teen Addicts Point To Parents

They are scenes that paint a startling picture of the drug culture's legacy
on American home life: A teenage girl shares her hopes and dreams with her
mother -- as they binge on methamphetamines. A boy bonds with his father
over a marijuana-filled bong.

For the vast majority of families, scenes such as these are hard to fathom.
But counselors who deal with teen addicts across the USA say that parents'
complicity has become a significant factor in putting kids on a path to drug
dependency.

A new survey of nearly 600 teens in drug treatment in New York, Texas,
Florida and California indicated that 20% have shared drugs other than
alcohol with their parents, and that about 5% of the teens actually were
introduced to drugs -- usually marijuana -- by their moms or dads.

The survey follows a report from 1999 by the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America in which 8% of teens in the overall population who said they had
been offered drugs indicated that at least some of the offers came from a
parent.

Classmates or neighborhood friends remain far and away the most likely
sources of drugs for teens. But counselors say the latest survey documents a
troubling trend: Some baby boomers who came of age as the drug culture
exploded in the '60s and '70s are enablers for their children who experiment
with drugs.

"I don't think we're at the peak of it yet," says David Rosenker , vice
president of adolescent services at the Caron Foundation, a treatment
program in Wernersville, Pa., that sees 6,000 kids a year. "We already see
it a lot: baby boomer parents who are still using and still having a problem
with their use. They're buying for their kids, smoking pot with their kids,
using heroin with their kids.

"When I started (working with youths) in the mid-'70s, this was not
happening."

Addiction specialists say it is happening now because of a range of factors
that show how the rise in recreational drug use has altered traditional
parent-child relationships, regardless of families' race or economic status:

* A small percentage of boomer parents have never given up drugs, and so
their children see drug use and addiction as normal.

* Some parents believe that sharing an occasional joint with their teenager
can ease family tensions and make a parent seem more like a buddy in whom
their teen can confide. Parents also might view it as an easy way to explain
their own past drug use.

* Other parents regard marijuana use as a relatively harmless rite of
passage for young adults. It was for boomers; almost 60% of those born in
the USA from 1946 through 1964 say they have smoked pot at some point in
their lives, a Partnership survey found in 1999. But since boomers' days of
rebellion, the drug landscape has changed. A smaller percentage of youths
are using drugs regularly, but marijuana and other drugs are more potent
than ever, and first-time users are more likely to be in middle school than
in college.

* Many parents -- 75% in the Partnership survey -- say they believe that
most people will try illegal drugs at some point. Some parents, counselors
say, naively figure that they're "protecting" their kids by allowing or even
encouraging some drug use in the home.

'Do It At Home'

Pamela Straub, 43, of Whittier, Calif., developed a drug habit in junior
high school. So when her own daughter, Felicia Nunnink, discovered her stash
of marijuana in a living room cabinet, Straub decided to lay down some
rules.

"I just didn't want her out on the streets," says Straub, whose own drug use
left her addicted to a range of drugs and homeless at one point. "I told her
I'd rather have her do it at home where I could keep an eye on her. I smoked
pot with Felicia. I can't really say if I was right or wrong. Well, now I
guess I'm pretty sure I was wrong."

Straub says she has been drug-free for more than five years.

Nunnink, now 22, looks back fondly to her teenage days when she shared
joints with her mother. Mellowed by the marijuana, she says she felt close
to her, and they talked -- more like friends than mother and daughter.

"At the time, I wanted to do it because I thought it was the only way to get
a bond with my mom," says Nunnink, who moved on to methamphetamines, which
she and her mother also shared. "It was cool. My house was where the kids
came over to get high."

But Nunnink soon found she couldn't stop taking drugs. Now she's in
rehabilitation and is thinking about what she would tell children she might
have someday about drugs. "I would be very open with my kids about drugs and
what they did to me. It really messed up my life," she says. "I think it's a
bad idea even to smoke pot in front of kids."

Counselors say that Straub's actions, however well-meaning, show how parents
can blur the boundaries between childhood and adulthood, sowing confusion
for teens.

"We have 35 years of drug culture now," says Mitchell Rosenthal, president
of the Phoenix House drug treatment program in New York, which conducted the
new study of teen addicts.

Rosenthal says he commissioned the study after speaking with three
California teens who had used drugs with their parents. Phoenix House
arranged for USA TODAY to discuss the study with several teens in its
program.

"Many people who experimented with drugs in their own adolescence may be
regular users, and many of them have children," he says. "Parents who do not
set limits and who try to be buddies with their kids are doing their kids a
real disservice. Kids have to be helped to control their impulses. They are
not helped by parents who want to jump into the playpen."

Parents Set The Standard:

On the flip side, parents can be a huge influence in steering a child from
drugs, says Steve Dnistrian, executive vice president of the Partnership for
a Drug-Free America. "You have perhaps the most drug-savvy group of parents
ever," he says. "They have been there and done that, and they do not want
their kids using drugs. But we have a disconnect.

"Most of them have a difficulty knowing what to say persuasively on this
issue," Dnistrian says. "Dare the question come up: 'Mom, Dad, did you get
high?' So you avoid it. You don't deal with it. Then someone else deals with
it for you by offering your kids drugs."

Dnistrian recommends honesty. Tell your children what you learned from the
past and set high expectations for them, he advises .

"If you are trying to establish expectations for your teenagers to meet, and
you lower those expectations yourself by essentially giving them a green
light to drink or smoke pot in your house, then you're really pulling the
rug out from under yourself," Dnistrian says. "Parents who say their kids
are going to smoke and drink anyway so they may as well do it here -- that's
like setting the standard at 'C.' So don't be surprised if they come home
and tell you they've snorted cocaine or dropped acid. You've opened the
door."

Although the Phoenix House survey covers only teens who already have gotten
into trouble with drugs, Dnistrian says it underscores the vulnerability of
children in families that use drugs.

"It tells you how ingrained substance abuse is in the family structure," he
says. "These parents are so familiar with it and so close to it that they
are willing to pass the joint to their children. This is something we have
to watch."

Blurring traditional roles

In hindsight, Jason, 17, a recovering addict from an upper middle-class
family in Simi Valley, Calif., says he wishes his father had been more of a
parent and less of a buddy when it came to marijuana.

Jason, whose last name is being withheld because he is a juvenile, says he
first tried pot in the sixth grade with some classmates. He managed to hide
signs of his drug use from his parents, who regularly attended his hockey
games, scheduled family outings and vacations and kept tabs on his
schoolwork.

Then he made his first drug purchase: a $5 bag of pot. Jason says his father
walked by his room's open door as he was stashing it in a dresser drawer.

"He told me about his marijuana use," Jason says. "We went into his office,
and he had a (water pipe) and we got high together. I thought he was sooo
cool."

They began smoking together once a week.

"I felt a bond between me and my father when we were getting high," Jason
says. "It's like a father-son experience. I had a warmth inside me like, 'My
dad, he's cool.' I love him. We would talk about life."

Jason says his father told him that a little marijuana would be OK if he
kept up his grades, played sports, avoided fights and practiced safe sex.
His father condemned other drugs and despised Jason's cigarette habit, the
teen says.

"He wouldn't see a problem with marijuana if you could handle your
priorities," Jason says.

But Jason couldn't. He started smoking pot almost every day. He began
defying teachers, ditching school and skipping hockey practice. "I was
taking our household pets and selling them for money for drugs," says Jason,
now in drug treatment at a Phoenix House in Orange County, Calif. "I took my
brother's 3-foot iguana and sold it for a bag of weed. That's low."

Jason says marijuana "didn't interfere in any way with (his father's) life.
It did mine. I guess the addicted gene skipped him and hit me." Contacted by
officials at Phoenix House, Jason's parents confirmed his story but declined
to comment further.

This isn't Jason's first shot at getting clean. He spent his 14th birthday
in drug treatment, his 15th at a boot camp for troubled youths, his 16th in
a group home and his 17th at Phoenix House. He wants to spend his 18th
birthday like a typical teenager.

Looking back, he wishes his parents had tightened the reins earlier.

"Kids want parents to be friends," he says. "Parents need to realize it's
more beneficial in the long run for parents to be parents. There are enough
people outside telling us that things that are not OK are OK. Parents should
be a safety zone."

A family's cycle of addiction

In a few families, drug use has been passed on as though it were a
tradition.

La,Kiesha, 15, of Southern California, is the third generation of a family
in which members have become addicted to drugs. La,Kiesha says her
grandmother smoked pot regularly and gave her a few puffs when she was 5
years old, to settle her down before bedtime.

La,Kiesha's mother, Latricia, 32, says that while growing up she never
thought of marijuana as a drug. She says her mother was a church-going
licensed nurse who made sure the rent was paid and food was in the pantry,
and who saw marijuana as "a natural herb." Their surname is being withheld
because La,Kiesha is a juvenile.

"My mother didn't look at it as a problem or addiction," Latricia says. "She
felt as long as I was doing things at home, I was out of harm's way."

But the marijuana launched steep, parallel declines for Latricia and her
daughter that landed both of them in rehabilitation.

"They say marijuana is a gateway drug, and it can be," says La,Kiesha, who
eventually moved on to PCP and alcohol abuse. "Marijuana was for the days I
wanted to come down."

La,Kiesha says she stopped smoking and drinking 11 months ago. Her mother,
now a counselor, has been clean for five years. Now La,Kiesha is vowing to
break her family's cycle of drug use.

"I'm going to educate my children about drugs and the harm it can cause. I'm
going to say, 'I don't want you to go down that road,' " La,Kiesha says.

"It's a family history that I want to break."