Our Newshawk writes: This article appeared in Newsday on Monday.
Newsday likes to stay clear of common sense. Please read and if
you think it's well written, tell her. I'm sure she stuck her
neck out on this one.

TEENS HAVE CHANGED THE WAY THEY USE DRUGS

WALKING through her Bronx neighborhood, Sarah Diaz, 18, sees empty crack
vials on the sidewalk, though not nearly as many as there used to be.

She sees quite a few crackheads, too, though for the most part they are
"old people" in their 30s and 40s and older. "They talk to themselves, they
talk to God, they collect cans and they fight with people who try to steal
their stuff," she says.

"I don't know many teenagers who smoke crack," Diaz told me. "The
crackheads are bummy. They've got a bad image. Teenagers see them and they
don't want to be like that."

The best news in a long time is that teenagers are avoiding hard drugs like
the plague. Researchers at John Jay College who are studying drug use in
New York City have found that heroin, once the scourge of many big-city
neighborhoods, has been taboo among young people for decades. In New York
City, virtually no black teenagers use it.

What's more, the crack epidemic, which ravaged communities in the 1980s
with violence and all kinds of social ills, is over. Prof. Richard Curtis,
who heads the John Jay team, says that in New York City, the demand for
crack has slowed so much that crack dealers have cut back on their hours or
have gotten out of the business.

The decline in hard-drug use among teenagers is not the result of police
sweeps or longer prison sentences for drug offenses, one federal study
found. Young people are deciding that using hard drugs is a ticket to nowhere.

"Teenagers today are very conservative," Curtis says. "Newt Ginrich would
love this stuff. They talk about their families and about improving their
communities. A lot of the young men I know who've given up drug dealing in
the last year or so say they did it for their kids."

Diaz knows a girl who used to smoke crack. "That was when she was 16," she
said. "But she doesn't smoke anymore. She stopped when she got pregnant.
She has a 2-year-old daughter now."

When Diaz was 9, she watched her mother smoke crack for a year after Diaz'
grandmother died. Then her mother stopped. She snorted cocaine for a while,
and she and Diaz fought about that. Now her mother is 35, and Diaz never
sees her get high.

Diaz' 18-year-old cousin once tried coke, but she never used it again
because the cocaine did nothing for her. Now the cousin smokes marijuana.
For her birthday she got a cake with 18 "blunts" (joints) stuck on it like
candles.

Which is the other side of the story about teenagers and drugs. While they
are avoiding heroin, cocaine and crack, young people's use of marijuana is
on the rise. Of those people arrested for crimes in 1996, only 22 percent
of the 15to 20-year-olds surveyed in a federal study were cocaine users,
while 70 percent were marijuana smokers.

In Crotona, the Bronx neighborhood where Diaz lives, there's a "Buddha
spot" on almost every corner. "Buddha" is slang for marijuana. "There's a
record shop that's a Buddha shop," Diaz says. "There's a 99-cent store
that's a Buddha shop, a Jamaican food store that's a Buddha shop, a 24-hour
store that's a Buddha shop, and people sell weed out of their apartment
buildings."

She also sees plenty of teenagers drinking alcohol which, along with
marijuana, is their drug of choice. "Marijuana makes you laugh," Diaz
says. "Unlike crack, it doesn't make you talk to God or steal other
people's stuff."

It may sound strange to say that a story about teenagers smoking marijuana
and drinking liquor is a good story. But marijuana is a far, far less
damaging drug than heroin, cocaine or crack.

We still need to encourage young people to avoid drugs of any kind and we
should punish merchants who sell liquor to the underaged. But the good news
is that teenagers have really learned something from watching our
generation's struggle with hard drugs. And that really is something to
celebrate.

Copyright 1998, Newsday Inc.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski