FATAL CRASH REVEALS INHALANTS AS DANGER TO YOUTH

CHESTER HEIGHTS, Pa. - The impact of the car crash tore bark off a tree
along U.S. Route 1, and now sad words are written there as a memorial to the
five girls who were killed.

"We love you all." "Forever rest in peace."

"I will always love you." The tragedy of five juniors from nearby
Penncrest High School dying in a late-afternoon car accident on Jan.
29 was horrific enough for this area of middle-class suburbs southwest
of Philadelphia. By all accounts, the girls were exemplary citizens,
bright students and popular. But neither residents of the area nor
school officials nor, least of all, the parents of the girls, were
prepared for what followed last week: a report from the Delaware
County medical examiner's office that the driver of the car, Loren
Wells, 16, of Media, had inhaled a chemical solvent that could have
impaired her judgment. Further analyses found that three of the other
girls had inhaled as well.

"We were finally getting back to normal," said Laird Warner, the
superintendent of the school district. "Then this hit." Experts who
study drug use by young people say sniffing or inhaling chemicals --
young people call it huffing -- is one of the most common forms of
drug use among teen-agers starting to experiment, and one of the most
potentially dangerous, capable of inflicting serious damage to the
heart, brain, lungs, liver and kidneys that sometimes causes death.
Inhalants are easier to find and cheaper to buy than marijuana and
alcohol because the chemicals are found in hundreds of everyday
products, from paint thinners and cleaning fluids to marking pens and
aerosol cans of whipped cream. Moreover, inhaling may arouse little
suspicion among relatives and friends unless a major medical problem
develops.

"This is a silent epidemic," said Harvey Weiss, executive director of
the National Inhalant Prevention Coalition, a private nonprofit
organization based in Austin, Texas. "It is silent because people
don't talk about it, and the numbers of people who use these
substances is significant." Most are school-aged children. Annual
national surveys by the University of Michigan to measure illicit drug
use by 8th-, 10th- and 12th-grade students found that chemical
inhalants were the most widely tried illicit drug among 8th-grade
students from 1991 through 1995, before marijuana moved into first
place. In the most recent study, for 1998, 20.5 percent of
eighth-grade students admitted to having tried an inhalant, compared
with 22.2 percent who admitted trying marijuana. The survey found that
11.1 percent of the eighth-grade students surveyed had used an
inhalant in the past year, compared with 16.9 percent who had used
marijuana; and 4.8 percent had used an inhalant in the past month,
compared with 9.7 percent for marijuana use. Inhalant use drops off as
teen-agers move on to greater use of marijuana and alcohol. The 1998
survey found that 8.0 percent of 10th-grade students and 6.2 percent
of 12th-grade students said they had used inhalants in the past year,
while 31.1 percent of 10th-grade students said they had used marijuana
in the past year and 37.5 percent of 12th-graders did. "The numbers
say we have got a large number of kids using a wide spectrum of
inhalants," said Dr. H. Westley Clark, director of the Center for
Substance Abuse, an agency of the Department of Health and Human
Services in Bethesda, Md. "Some defy the imagination. But the issue is
not to criminalize the use or ban all the substances. The issue is to
make parents and kids aware and deal with the root causes of the use
of these substances." Joseph Haviland, principal of Penncrest High
School, which has about 1,300 students, said beer is typically the
intoxicant of choice among the students. He said neither teachers nor
school administrators ever suspected that students were involved with
inhalants.

State troopers said the car could have been traveling more than 70
miles an hour, well above the posted limit of 55. But even after
autopsies of the crash victims revealed the presence of a toxic
inhalant, parents of the dead teen-agers did not want to accept the
findings.

Dr. Dimitri Contostavlos, the Delaware County medical examiner, said
Miss Wells had been "under the influence" of diflouroethane, a
chemical component of Duster II, a spray that is used to clean
computer keyboards. Contostavlos' toxicology report included the
finding only because investigators found an empty can of Duster II in
the Chevrolet Corsica that Miss Wells was driving.

A law-enforcement official familiar with other tests said the
autopsies of at least three other girls found the same substance. In
his report on Miss Wells, Contostavlos concluded that "driver
impairment, with the loss of control on a straight road in daylight,
in good weather, with no other traffic involved, resulted not from
youthful inexperience and a dangerous stretch of road, but primarily
from intoxication due to inhalation abuse."

In a written statement this week, the parents of Miss Wells and the
other girls -- Tracy Graham, 17; Rachel Lehr, 17; Shaena Grigaitis,
16, and Rebecca Weirich, 16 -- contended that "it seems clear to us
that there is inconclusive evidence that our children intentionally
abused the cleaning agent involved."

The parents proposed that the substance had been airborne. They
declined further comment, asking that they be allowed to "resume the
healing process." Contostavlos, who tested the parents' theory on
himself by sitting in a car and releasing a can of the cleaner, said
he stood by his findings. Experts say the parents' response reflects a
common situation. A 1997 survey by the Consumer Product Safety
Commission found that 91 percent of parents talked to their children
about substance abuse but fewer than half said they ever talked about
inhalants. And 95 percent said they believed their children had never
used inhalants.

"This is a very difficult situation," said Ann Brown, chairman of the
safety commission. "Even the best of parents don't realize there could
be a danger, that a child could even die on the first sniff."