PARENTS FIT SECRET CAMERAS TO SPY ON THEIR CHILDREN

AMERICAN parents are bugging their children's telephones, installing secret
cameras in clock radios and sending strands of hair retrieved from pillows
for analysis at drug laboratories.

They are resorting to Cold War espionage techniques and science to fight
drug and alcohol abuse which many turned into a way of life during their
hippy days a generation ago. Baby Boomers with teenage children are
resorting to ever more desperate measures to prevent their offspring taking
drugs. "I felt absolutely filthy," June Gertig, 55-year-old mother, told a
newspaper after tape-recording her teenage son's telephone calls. "It's the
last thing I wanted to do, turn into the KGB in our own house."

Baby Boomers, who 30 years ago got high and hallucinated that there was a
police state in placid middle America, are hiring companies to bring
sniffer dogs into their homes to track down traces of dope. Radio shops
sell home surveillance equipment. Telephone bugs cost UKP20, and you can
buy a chemical analysis kit on the Internet for UKP45 if you want proof,
from the hair in your daughter's comb, for example, that she is taking
drugs. Aerosol sprays and special chemical-soaked cotton wipes, as simple
as home pregnancy kits, are available to see if there is cannabis or other
narcotic residues on car seats or other surfaces.

Drive Right is a small computer which can be attached to steering wheels to
monitor whether Junior is driving recklessly, and maybe drunk, when he
borrows the car for the evening. One company in Virginia is contacted on
average 12 times a month by parents who want it to bring its dogs to nose
around delinquent children's bedrooms for secret caches of narcotics.

For many of the rebellious Sixties generation which railed against
supposedly oppressive parents, the responsibilities of parenthood have been
a rude shock, and they regret their reckless youthful abandon. "I guess you
get wiser as you get older," said one, "and maybe every generation regrets
what it used to do, but I'm amazed looking back that we really thought
smoking dope was a harmless pleasure."

Parental spies run the risk, if caught, of destroying the remnants of trust
in their relationship with their children. But many say they are willing to
take that chance if it is the price of preventing their children from
ruining their lives with recreational drug abuse. Drugs counsellors say
parents should not be deflected from protecting their offspring, even by
devious means, out of a misplaced fear that to do so would breach some
principle about a child's privacy rights.

Most parent sleuths refuse to be identified. Others whose children have
caught them bugging, taping and filming say "all hell broke loose". Some
give up spying before they are caught because they cannot bear the feelings
of guilt.

But the trend is growing because it catches children and perhaps stops them
in time. Most American teenagers have telephones and televisions in their
rooms, and many have computers and Internet access. Parents increasingly
feel that they should be able to get to their children, even surreptitiously,

because the rest of the world does. They say that usually they are using
espionage as a last resort to confirm suspicions. Most, when they catch
their children admitting drug use to friends on the phone, or sneaking
boyfriends in through a window at night, feel vindicated rather than
surprised.

Sexual affairs can be stopped before there is an unwanted pregnancy and
drug addicts sent off to rehabilitation.