LOST AND FOUND: A LESSON FOR PARENTS

Our view: The old propaganda film, "Refer Madness," may be more comical than
factual. But it contains a nugget of truth: Marijuana often is the first
step toward serious drug abuse.

It's such a decades-old and oft-repeated warning that we risk dismissing it
without much thought: that serious drug abuse almost always begins with
marijuana. For parents who grew up in the psychedelic '60s and anything-goes
'70s, the temptation to be nonchalant about pot - or worse - is even
greater.

It's why yesterday's story on Page 1 of the C section, "Lost and found," is
worth retrieving from the recycling bin if you missed it. Matthew
Lajeunesse, a 2000 graduate of Council Rock High School, was indeed lost in
a consuming haze of drug use that started with a joint.

"I thought I'd just smoke every once in a while," he told our reporter. But
once in a while turned into every day, then several times a day. Soon drugs
- - buying them, using them, looking for more - consumed his life. He started
smoking pot laced with cocaine and snorting prescription drugs. "I cared
more about drugs," he said, "and less about everything else."

He called pot a "gateway drug."

We've heard that before, but not often from kids schooled by experience.
It's a lesson parents need to learn as much as their children. More to the
point, it's a warning parents have to act on.

As Matthew's parents did.

Together Matt's mother, father and stepmother interceded in his life. It was
tough, they said, to drag their son off to the police station. It was even
tougher to heed the recommendation of Northampton Detective Charles Wyant
and Office Steven Heath. But Matt's mom, Susan Milnazik, said she had faith
that God puts people in our lives for a reason. In this case, it was the
mother of a friend of her younger son's, a probation officer, who
recommended getting police involved. That involvement led to Matt being
shipped off to the Bucks County Youth Center in Edison. Twice.

Fortunately for Matt and his family, his second stay at the detention center
woke Matt to all the good things in his life and all the bad things that
waited - if he didn't get off drugs. That was 15 months ago. Matt has stayed
clean since. He talks to other kids about the dangers of drugs, even earned
a scholarship awarded annually by a family who lost their son to a drug
overdose.

So Matt was one of the lucky ones. He found his way back, thanks largely to
his parents, who credit their church and school officials with helping them
get their son back. Their modesty is commendable, their gratitude well
placed. But it is they who didn't dismiss their son's drug use as a passing
phase or adolescent experimentation. They recognized it for what it could be
- - the beginning of the end.