THESE ARE YOUR KIDS ON DRUGS

LAST NIGHT I saw the ad again - part of the clever, $1 billion
anti-drug campaign aimed at young people that President Clinton
announced last year.

A riff on the old "This is your brain on drugs" spot, it shows a
teenage girl smashing an egg with a frying pan, then demolishing her
kitchen to illustrate the horrors of heroin.

This renewed concern over hard drug use among the young seems
encouraging, but if the message is simply "drugs are bad," it's hard
to feel hopeful.

For the past three years, I have filmed young heroin addicts on the
streets of San Francisco, where black tar heroin is cheap, abundant
and more potent than ever. They come from all over the country to take
refuge in The City's drug underworld. They are mostly white, the
children of the affluent as well as the poor.

The average heroin user is about 20, but I've met addicts as young as
14, boys and girls who've turned to crime and prostitution to support
their habits.

At times, the misery and desperation seem unfathomable. I'll never
shake the memory of sitting on the floor of a seedy hotel room with
Jessica, an 18-year-old, HIV-positive prostitute, as she shot up a
gram of heroin, followed by a hit of crack, followed by a shot of
whiskey, followed by another hit of crack. Then she told me how much
she missed her mother.

Or the time Jake, 20, also HIV-positive, hospitalized with a
life-threatening blood infection, sneaked out of the hospital and used
his I.V. shunt to inject his drugs.

They know drugs are bad. Not one of the kids I talked to was ignorant
of the dangers of drug use when he or she began. Heroin simply blotted
out a pain that couldn't be dulled or silenced any other way - a
despair that, for the most part, started with parental neglect,
alcohol-or drug-abusing parents and, often, extreme child abuse.

Periodically, a celebrity or the child of a celebrity dies of an
overdose and, briefly, addicts are given a face. Most recently, the
death of musician Boz Scaggs' son, Oscar, age 21, did that in San
Francisco. But to deal effectively with the falling age of addiction,
we need to be willing to put faces on all the other addicts: on Jake
and Jessica, on the neighbors' kids, on our own children.

In addition to the catchy ads, the Clinton administration recently
committed another $18 billion to the war on drugs, the bulk of which
will go towards law enforcement. This, despite the fact that a 1994
Rand Corporation study found that was the most expensive, least
effective strategy.

Will increased border patrols help Jake and Jessica? Will a higher
arrest rate?

Certainly, prevention is important. But it's not prevention to tell
kids to stay away from drugs while we ignore the circumstances of
their lives.

As long as policy makers refuse to back off the tough-on-crime bluster
and address the frayed social services net and lack of treatment
options for addicts, as long as communities resist looking at what
drives so many young people to such desperation, until we look at
ourselves as parents - and come to terms with the times we look away
from our kids - there are going to be a lot more broken eggs.

Get the picture?