THE DOPE ON SPRING

About this time last year, a forwarded email message was making the rounds
of college campuses. "Don't forget," the message advised, "the appropriate
greeting is "hi, how are you?" not "how high are you?"

This month, while grown-ups were busy preparing tax returns, a lot of their
college-attending children were partaking in the annual springtime
bacchanalian festivals wither in warmer climes or in on-campus celebrations
of some meaningful date in their school's history. On these occasions many
of the students ingest a cornucopia of drugs that most of their parents
(despite imagined baby-boomer sophistication) have never heard of.

Nor does it seem they have much interest in knowing what's going on.
Despite all the attention given to drug abuse, parents are apparently
disinclined to believe their kids are using drugs. In a study released last
week by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, 71% of teenagers said they
"had friends who used" marijuana and almost half admitted they themselves
had tried it. But only 21% of parents thought that their little angles
might partake (admittedly even that must go down as a higher percentage
than their own parents would have conceded).

In fact, this is a drug "culture" with frightening differences from the
glory days of 25 or 30 years ago. Today even "soft" drugs like marijuana
can be as much as 10 times more potent than the joints their parents toked.
Because of crackdowns on smuggling, the neighborhood greenhouse business
has flourished: New strains like "hydrophonic," where the plants are grown
without soil, and "wet" - marijuana soaked in formaldehyde - have been
increasing the drug's potency exponentially. Meanwhile, drug use among
teenagers has doubled since 1990.

Other drugs, like methamphetamine, are also the product of basement
alchemy, often involving youths producing it, which in turn introduces some
of them to criminal enterprises. There are substantial profit margins in
this new underworld for chemists who turn over-the-counter cold medicines
into a particularly wicked concoction called "ice," crank" or "speed."
Costing $5 to $25 a dose, it offers a high similar to powder cocaine, which
retails at upward of $100 a gram, but it is much more accessible to a
middle-schooler's allowance. And these laboratories are proliferating.

Something else that's new: The spread of black-market pharmaceuticals like
Ritalin and Ephedrine, which have become a hot commodity in many suburban
neighborhoods. Last November, a group of suburban middle-schoolers got
hauled in by Virginia police when the principal caught a seventh grader
selling his Ritalin prescription to his pals. Other favorites come right
off the store shelves: Krylon gold paint for inhaling and whipped-cream
cans for nitrous oxide.

Last April, a 16-yer old in a Chicago suburb was caught with 37 grams of
marijuana, some opium and paraphernalia stashed in his parents house. A
15-year-old set up shop selling pot, PCP, Extasy and Special K in an
affluent District of Columbia suburb. These aren't just the kids from the
wrong side of the tracks. Ask any college student about the prevalence and
diversity of the new chemical culture. You'll get an education.

For the '70s generation, famous for hedonistic experimentalism, the
statistics suggest a willful ignorance. Parents disbelieve, perhaps because
they're afraid to find out the truth. Polls show that 82% believe drugs are
a "serious problem nationally," but only 6% think the problem exists in
their local high school.

The baby-boomers' self-indulgence has come home to roost, only this time
there's no ideological crutch. What's becoming increasingly obvious is that
Gen-X drug use involves teenagers who've rejected their parents' political
ideas but adopted their libertinism. A 1995 study by the University of
Michigan revealed that after a 13-year lull, teenage drug use had climbed
three years in a row. Yet nearly one kid in three claimed that his or her
parents have never discussed drugs with them. Only a quarter say it's a
topic of frequent conversation.

Earth to parents: Its spring, and it might be time for a chat.