JUST SAY KNOW

If Parents Throw Their Weight Into The War On Drugs, How
Much Does That Really Tip The Scales?

When do most parents find out their kids are doing
drugs?

When they get a call from the school principal. Or the police
department. Or the emergency room. Or the coroner.

Too often, parents are the last to know. Sometimes, it's a mater of
being clueless. Just ignorance about what kids are getting into these
days.

Last month, 12-year-old Tyler James Pinnick of Huntington Beach died
from inhaling chemicals from aerosol cans. He was "huffing." His
mother had never heard of it until then.

"There was not one piece of evidence that he was doing this," Renee
Sherer said shortly after her son's death. "No reason for me to think
it."

That's the same thing Dr. Michael Ritter hears nearly every weekend
from parents when their kids end up in the emergency room in a coma
induced by GHB, an increasingly popular designer drug.

Their predictable reaction: "Total shock and disbelief."

Sometimes, it's denial that keeps parents from knowing. Sometimes,
it's a matte of being too busy and overwhelmed by the demands in their
lives. Or worse, they don't care.

But parents, a public service announcement tells us, are the
anti-drug. How far does that really go, however, in keeping kids from
substance abuse?

A study by the Partnership for a Drug Free America found that teens
who get a strong anti-drug message at home are 42 percent less likely
to use drugs than peers who never discuss drugs with their parents.

The experiences of a teen-age drug user, her mother and
drug-prevention educators in Orange County show us how much more
complicated it is than telling kids to say no or telling parents to be
informed.

There is only so much parents can do, they all said.

Still, they agreed, being an informed parent is a start - one that
might just prevent an untimely end.

THE DAUGHTER

At 11, Alexis downed her first can of beer. A year later, she was
drinking every weekend, whatever was available at the homes of her
friends.

At 13, she started smoking pot. At 14, she got into snorting
medications prescribed to other kids for the treatment of attention
deficit disorder.

At 15, she experimented with LSD, and then found the drug she liked
the best: Ecstasy. "E," she calls it.

That became the way to spend her weekends - popping the stimulant that
brought on a hallucinogenic euphoria so she could feel happy when she
was so deeply depressed inside.

Alexis is willing to talk about her drug abuse, but only if her
family's last name is not used. She doesn't want to expose herself or
her mother to any repercussions.

Her mother, Alexis says, tried to do all the things parents are told
to do: ask about her friends, where she was going, what she was going
to do.

"I would just make up excuses. I assumed anything I was doing she
wouldn't approve of. So I would just lie."

By the time your kids are 14 or 15, it's too late to try getting them
to be honest with you and trust you and open up to you, she says.

"None of my friends talked to their parents about drugs. I didn't ask
my parents about drugs. We knew if we asked them, they would say bad
things about them. Drugs were the only thing making us feel good. Why
would we tell?"

That kind of communication has to start when kids are young.
Kindergarten isn't too soon, Alexis believes: "Kids are smoking pot
these days at 9 years old."

She has a message for parents: You want to prevent a kid from using
drugs? Then start with the very essence of their family life. Start
with yourself.

"Kids are their parents. It's who you're around when your self-esteem
is developing. If you grow up with all these problems, you're going to
get into drugs. Kids pick that up when they're very young from their
parents. Kids with self-worth aren't using drugs."

Alexis' parents divorced when she was 2. Her father lived in another
state. She didn't see him much. She had learning disabilities that
went undetected. She became depressed at a young age and numbed her
pain with drugs.

Things didn't change until she and her mother moved to Orange County
from Ohio last July. She didn't know anyone here, couldn't get her
drugs. Her depression finally became obvious to her mother.

She got Alexis into Hope Institute in Costa Mesa, a recovery center
that offers a "sober high school" for substance-abusing teens.

Counseling for both the teens and their families is a key
component.

At 16, Alexis has been sober for six months. She smokes cigarettes,
but that's it. No booze, no drugs. The peer-group input and the
counseling she gets at Hope Institute should be standard for all
schools, she says.

"When I get depressed, I can talk about it now. If I had a peer group
like this with counselors and I knew that I could go talk to them and
they actually cared, I probably would have talked more."

She won't say with certainty that she'll never use drugs again. She
can't, she says. She doesn't know.

But this she does know:"It's a lot harder to get kids back from using
drugs than to prevent it."

THE MOTHER

Barbara didn't realize her daughter had a serious drug problem until
she took her to the Hope Institute in October.

"I thought I was a parent who was aware. I was into PTA. I knew all
her friends since she was in kindergarten. I thought I was really up
to date on everything. I even hired people to come in and talk to the
PTA groups.'

She could see that her daughter was having mood swings. That she was
closed off. But she thought it was just an adolescent phase. If she
tried to probe deeper, Alexis would serve up the denial that allowed
her mother to also live in denial.

"She would just say, 'Oh, no. I'm not doing that.' I would believe
her. I wanted to believe her. You know, it was that thing of 'If you
trust them, they'll rise to those expectations.'"

She did some things wrong, she knows now. She was a single parent
raising three kids. With Alexis, her youngest, she started to be less
and less involved with school and PTA. She started working more. She'd
get home by 6 p.m., but that still left Alexis time alone at home.

She doesn't put all the blame on herself, however. The way our society
works doesn't help: "We're set up to fail, the way we have to work
until 6 or 7 and the kids get home at 3."

Still, she says, "I should have listened to her. Really listened to
her. I should have looked at everything that she said and not assumed
it was a phase."

She did get Alexis tested for drugs a couple of times, but she came
out clean.

"I thought, 'Oh, I'm blowing this out of proportion.' Kids can hide it
pretty well."

Barbara knows now how wrong all her assumptions were. And yet she
doesn't know if there's a surefire way of preventing what happened
with her daughter.

"You can only just listen more. Not get angry. Try to figure out the
solution. Go to meetings to try to figure out how to deal with their
problems. I don't know if you can prevent it. I just know that maybe
you can shorten it."

The first step, she says, is to be aware of the pain in your kids'
lives and deal with that. She's not sure how many parents are willing
to do that. Because it's going to mean taking a hard look at themselves.

"I don't know that I've met a lot of adults willing to change. They
just think the kids have to adapt to them."

Some of the steps she suggests are simple, but require commitment:
stay involved in their schooling and other activities, have dinner
with them; go to church together; set a good example.

She and Alexis have found some things they enjoy doing together these
days. Yoga, for one, and cooking vegetarian dishes.

"It's there," she says of that common ground that can become a
drug-free zone for families. "You just have to search it out."

THE EXPERTS

The information is out there. Lot of it.

Drug-prevention resources and programs in the schools and in the
community. Not to mention Web sites on the Internet, both those posted
by anti-drug organizations and those that offer underground
information on the drug scene.

"With the advent of the Internet, there is no reason anybody can't be
informed on any subject," says Sgt. Joe Vargas, public information
officer for Anaheim Police Department and a former narcotics
investigator.

"But what happens is parents tend to believe it's not going to happen
to them. It's not going to happen to their children."

The thing is, no one is immune. Not even the family that does all the
right things.

"It can start from just innocent curiosity," says Bill Beacham,
executive director of the Center for Drug-Free Communities. "It's a
rare occurrence where there's a family where drug use is not going to
be an issue, because of all the pressures out there."

You have to be honest with kids, though, Vargas says. Yes, drugs can
kill them. Yes, drugs can harm them. But be willing to acknowledge
that using drugs is often a pleasurable experience. That's the
attraction and the danger.

"It makes a lot of impact on a kid when a parent is honest and really
discusses with them these are the situations you'll be into and here
is why I don't want you doing this."

Where do kids get most of their insight on drugs? From other
kids.

"And most of those kids get their information from their own
experiences," Beacham says, pointing out that what might be a
pleasurable experience for one child could be a disaster for another.

Sure, there's the DARE program, but it doesn't have anywhere near the
influence on kids that their peers do. Or that their parents might.

That's why Beacham believes it's important not only for the parents to
be well-informed (and well-behaved) role models but to teach their
children what to look for in a friend and steer them toward both
positive peer and adult role models.

"If you set the values, the attitudes, the belief system, kids may
deviate from those for a period of time, but they come back to them.
That's why parents are really the strongest prevention effort that we
can put forward."

True, it can be hard to keep up with what's going on. That's where
consistent contact with your child comes in. Beacham's suggestion:
"Have an open-ended conversation on a daily basis about 'How was your
day?"

Still, some kids seems to be wired differently. They will seek out
drugs because they love the thrill of taking a risk, says Debbie Lips,
director of administration at Hope Institute.

"No amount of drug education is going to prevent it."

Those are the kids who are going to require all the parenting skills,
all the awareness, all the caution you can muster. Be will to rein
them in if necessary, Lips says - take away the car, cut back on the
privileges, do random drug screens.

See what help the school district has to offer. Many programs, like
Hope Institute, are willing to do a free assessment to help determine
if it's an on-going problem or the beginning of experimentation.

"It's better for them to be somewhat offended," Lips says of tactics
that kids will likely perceive as an invasion of privacy, "than for
them to be overdosed and to find them in an emergency room or at the
coroner's office."

Where to get information

Several Orange County agencies and organizations provide information
and assistance in drug-use prevention. Here are a few:

)Alcohol and Drug Education and Prevention Team (ADEPT) of Orange
County Health Care Agency, (714) 834-4058. ADEPT also contracts with
prevention providers around the county:

- -YMCA Communities in Prevention North, (714) 446-8987, serves the
north county.

- -Community Service Programs/Positive Action Toward Health (Project
PATH), (714) 895-9088, serves the central county. Project PATH will
sponsor a community forum," Club Drugs and the Party Scene," 5-9 p.m.
July 19 at Southwest Senior Center, 2201 W. McFadden St., Santa Ana.

- -Community Service Programs, Project PATH serving south county, (949)
757-0317.

)Community Alliance Net-work of the National Countcil on Alcoholism
and Drug Dependence-Orange County, (949) 595-2288 or
www.ncaddoc.org

)Center for Drug-Free Communities in Orange County, (714) 505-4692
Other useful Web sites include:

)http;/home.earthlink.net/-nodrugs/, No More Drugs Inc. (includes
comments from teens on their own drug abuse and strategies to say "no"
to peer pressure)

)www.drugfreeamerica.org, Partnership For a Drug-Free
America

)www.samhsa.gov/csap/index.htm, Substance Abuse & Mental Health
Services Administration/Center for Substance Abuse Prevention

)www.cspinet.org, Center for Science in the Public Interest (focuses
on alcohol abuse)

)www.duila.org, Drug Use Is Life Abuse, a support group of the Orage
County Sherriff's Advisory Council