HARD LOOK AT HARD DRUGS

The 16-year-old we'll call Fred just shrugs when I ask him about
cocaine at his school.

"Sure, I could get cocaine," he says outside his southwest senior
high.

"It's no problem. You ask a few people and before long, you have a
name, and then you just buy from that person -- cocaine or anything
else you want."

Fred is like the other kids I talked to yesterday -- he doesn't need
drugs or want them. But, Fred knows that drugs from marijuana to
cocaine and beyond are nearly as available as drinks from the school
pop machine, although a lot more expensive.

As I wrote yesterday, city police say cocaine is now being sold by
pushers to junior high students.

Although they haven't yet made arrests or seized the drug at the
junior high level, they have solid intelligence it's happening.

This comes as a shock to adults, but most high school students are
surprised there's any fuss at all.

It's easy to see how hard drugs have started to filter into the junior
highs.

Fred's school is just down the street from a junior high, and there
are many such close pairings all over the city.

For the pushers who work around high schools, the junior highs are
handy satellite markets, full of little prospects ready to be
indoctrinated. I don't blame the schools for any of this. They get the
problem -- and often the rap -- because they happen to be the places
where our kids gather every day.

Both boards work hard to keep the schools drug-free, but you get the
feeling that the bad guys are winning through sheer force of numbers.

At the public board, an ex-police officer named George Veenhuysen is
in charge of all security, including drugs, for more than 90,000
students. He and the board depend heavily on city police officers in
schools. And there's yet another bureaucratic layer -- the downtown
police drug squad.

"We have a very good working relationship," says Veenhuysen. But the
board wasn't aware that police now say there's cocaine in the junior
highs.

Very often, reports on marijuana drug busts in the schools aren't even
passed on to board security.

Veenhuysen says: "Any illicit drug use is serious, of course, although
I'm not too surprised any more when it comes to a marijuana bust at a
school. But I am very very concerned about the issue of hard drugs
like cocaine in our schools.

"If this is really true about cocaine, there's major cause for
concern."

He says students can be sure of confidentiality if they report
suspected drug-selling to school officials. A fine idea, but I suspect
it will happen about the same time the pushers start turning over
their proceeds to charity. What we really need are more police, and
more George Veenhuysens, to tackle a growing problem. The other side
of the drug culture is violence -- and we're in for plenty if hard
drugs ever take deep root around schools.