MORE YOUTHS TURNING TO POT

Drug's Potency Makes Habit Tough To Kick, Councilors Say

Bored with small-town life and craving to be like the older boys,
Christopher Bolton took his first tentative tokes of marijuana at age
12.

Three years later, he says, that early dalliance turned into a
$100-a-day habit that kept the Auburn teenager shrouded in a hazy
stupor from morning until night.

He found the drug's allure so powerful, he didn't feel any shame when
his struggling single mother confronted him about stealing $700 she
had painstakingly squirreled away to buy a used car. She had stashed
the money inside a wall for safekeeping.

''She had tears running down her face,'' recalls Bolton, who used the
savings on a week's supply of marijuana. ''That meant nothing to me.''

Bolton, who was caught with marijuana in his high school locker, is on
probation for four years and undergoing substance abuse counseling.
Now 17, he has been drug-free for eight months.

In growing numbers, youngsters like Bolton have become ensnared in the
lingering perception of marijuana as a relatively benign drug, even
though many of the plants grown today are especially potent and
researchers have begun documenting damaging effects from the drug.

''That means if Johnny or Mary is smoking one joint a day now,'' says
Jerry Manny, a substance abuse psychotherapist at the Worcester Youth
Guidance Center, ''that would be the equivalent of smoking eight or 10
joints a day when the teens' parents were that age.''

The result is thousands of children and adolescents in the United
States are smoking marijuana so compulsively that they are being
forced by the courts, schools, and their families into drug treatment
programs.

In 1996, the latest year for which data are available, more youngsters
received treatment for abusing marijuana than any other substance,
including alcohol, according to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration.

Of the 182,000 people under age 20 admitted to substance abuse
programs, 48 percent were treated primarily for marijuana use and
dependence. It's a phenomenon that crosses racial, ethnic, and gender
lines.

''There is sort of an implicit acceptance, that it is no big deal,''
says Jerry Duberstein, a psychologist and director at Team
Coordinating Agency in Haverhill.

''But the consequences are serious in terms of kids. It gets them off
track. They struggle in school. They are not able to hold onto jobs.
They get into trouble in their relationships with their families and
friends.''

Over the years, enhanced cultivation methods have yielded marijuana
plants with higher levels of the mind-altering ingredient THC,
tetrahydrocannabinol, say public health and law enforcement officials,
although they concede that hard data are hard to come by.

In addition, while their parents' generation typically smoked
marijuana rolled into cigarette-sized ''joints,'' some youngsters
today favor smoking the much larger ''blunts,'' which are hollowed-out
cigars filled with marijuana.

Children and adolescents today, as a result, are taking in bigger
doses of THC, which recent research has found lingers in body fat
cells for days. That means even after the initial effects have worn
off, the drug continues to impair judgment.

As the potency of marijuana has been rising, youngsters' perceptions
of the drug's harmfulness have been eroding, resulting in a tripling
of marijuana use among adolescents between 1992 and 1995, according to
state and federal reports.

Teens and substance abuse specialists say society's vacillating views
- - reflected in cycles of expanding and relaxing penalties and
decriminalization and recriminalization of marijuana in some states -
have led to misconceptions and complacency.

Amy Harris, director of the Chelsea Alcohol and Substance Abuse
Program, says her difficulty finding quality educational materials
about marijuana brought home the scant attention society has been
paying to the problem.

In Massachusetts, the state Public Health Department spends $7 million
a year on substance abuse prevention. It has had public service
campaigns to discourage the use of tobacco, alcohol, and inhalants,
but no similar campaign targeting marijuana use.

In 1995, the federal government launched an antimarijuana campaign,
which included funding for research on the effects of the drug and
development of materials parents can use to educate their children
about its dangers.

H. Westley Clark, director of the US Center of Substance Abuse and
Treatment, acknowledges that despite the federal effort, ''clearly the
message is not sinking in in the manner we would like it to sink in.''

But Clark also sees another factor behind the large numbers of
youngsters being treated for marijuana use. Parents might be quick to
send their children into treatment, Clark says, because they envision
them traveling to dangerous neighborhoods to get drugs.

Often, however, youngsters have to venture no farther than their own
neighborhoods and schools to get the drug.

Peter Ducharme, 18, of the South End recalls how casual his
introduction to marijuana was at a party with teenagers seven years
ago.

''It was just there,'' he says. ''It wasn't planned. It was just
something people did and didn't have a problem with.''

Ducharme began dealing drugs to classmates to support his marijuana
habit, and he says that at its worst, it amounted to $200 a day. He is
now in court-ordered substance abuse counseling program and has been
off drugs for eight months.

Ducharme and Bolton, who have been in trouble with the law more than
once because of substance abuse, say their drug use might have been
averted had there been more to keep them occupied after school.

But Clark says many youngsters find plenty of activities to do to keep
away from drugs, and those who abuse them might be self-medicating
because of underlying emotional problems.

''I thought I was helping myself,'' Bolton says of his marijuana use.
''All it did was put everything on pause.

''It was ridiculous,'' adds Bolton, who credits his fiancee with
inspiring him to turn around his life. ''I wasted time. I wasted
money. Trust is the biggest thing I lost, the trust of my family and
teachers. You can throw it away in a millisecond. But it can take
years to get back.''