SCHOOL DISTRICTS NEED EVERYONE'S HELP FIGHTING THIS PROBLEM

Talking About Drugs

There was some good news from local school campuses in recent days.
Incidents involving violent crime - which have never been very high
here in Santa Barbara County - are occurring even less frequently than
in years past.

A report compiled annually by the state Department of Education - the
California Safe Schools Assessment - shows there has been a decrease
over the past three years in the number of batteries reported on local
campuses. Battery is considered to have occurred when any type of
force or violence is used by one person on another. In the Santa
Barbara High School District, for example, there were 26 batteries
reported last year, compared with 38 in the 1995-96 school year. That
trend is being reflected on high school campuses countywide. And even
most of the "batteries" reported were of the type involving one
student fighting with another student in which some object was thrown
or used as a weapon.

All of which confirms the widely held belief that public schools are
about the safest place in society for our children to be.

But not all the news from the Safe Schools Assessment report is good.
Coupled with a report from County Education Office Supt. Bill Cirone,
there is something about which community leaders and parents need to
concern themselves - drug use.

According to countywide surveys, overall drug use in key school grades
has been steadily decreasing. But there are trouble spots. One is from
the Safe Schools Assessment, which reports that incidents in which
students used or were caught with alcohol or drugs on campus have
doubled since the 1995-96 school year. Most of the cases involve
possession and/or use of marijuana on junior high or high school campuses.

That reality is alarming enough but when you mix in a warning from
Cirone about increased heroin use by young people, there is more than
enough cause for alarm.

Cirone's warning is based on a report from data from the National
Institutes on Drug Abuse and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency that
shows a steady increase in heroin use by high school students.
Apparently youngsters are inhaling the drug - which is relatively
cheap and readily available in most cities - in the mistaken belief
that form of ingestion is less of a health risk than injecting it. Not
only is the percentage of high school students using heroin
increasing, but the average age of first use is falling, from 27 in
1988 to 19 by 1995 - a strong indicator that youngsters much younger
are dipping their toes into this dangerous pool.

There are economic reasons why heroin use is increasing. Drug lords
have depressed the price in order to ensnare a wider audience of
users. Heroin is far less expensive these days than it as a decade
ago, and can be purchased on street corners in Santa Barbara. The
increase in possession and use of marijuana on local junior high and
high school campuses is more perplexing. Why, after years of anti-drug
messages, are youngsters increasing their use of pot?

The temptation would be to lay some of the blame on anti-drug-use
campaigns, such as Fighting Back and the Sheriff's Department's DARE
program. They have been in operation for several years, yet drug use -
in some areas - continues to rise. Are these programs not working?

Perhaps the best way to answer that question is to ask another: Where
would we have been without those programs? The simple truth is that
the drug problem could have been - almost surely would have been - far
worse than it is today without the anti-drug efforts and messages
delivered by such organizations. The real answer to questions about
whether such programs work is that they certainly can't hurt.

The best way to look at this is to realize that information is power.
We now know that the use of certain kinds of drugs is increasing on
local campuses, which means we can do something about that situation.
This is a communitywide problem that requires a communitywide effort.