HARDLY A DAY GOES BY THAT DOESN'T FIND JESSE X STONED.

He's 17 years old and only a senior at Bend High School. He's been smoking
pot for years, a habit that hasn't escaped his mother's notice. The fact
that she doesn't approve hasn't stopped him, though.

He and his friends pile in a car and find an isolated spot to light up.

If he's at home, he'll smoke a bowl in the bathroom with the fan going.

During his junior year he'd even get stoned before heading to school. His
grades took a dive, not surprisingly, and he cut back when he finally
realized pot was standing between him and graduation.

"Last year I was smokimg at school and messed up," he says.

Jesse, who asked that his name not be used, now plans to quit smoking dope
this summer. He wants to enlist in the U.S. Coast Gaurd after graduation
and knows there'll be a drug test.

But until then, he's still buying pot at school.

"I could find it and be back in twenty minutes," he says from the Bend High
parking lot one recent afternoon. " It's just a matter of finding the right
person."

Dozens of interveiws by the Bulletin with teachers, administrators,
students and police reveal what some have long known and others find hard
to believe: Despite zero-tolerance policies, drugs and alcohol are almost
as easy to find as soda pop at every high school in Central Oregon and no
harder to get than cigarettes in middle schools.

Although suspensions and expulsions for drug possession or distribution
still are rare, students sat it's not at all unusual for drugs to be sold
openly on campus or for some kids to show up at school buzzed on pot or
liquor.

"If you knew the right people,it was easy," one 17 year-old says about
finding pot when she was a student at Pilot Butte Middle School. " You just
had to know the right people. I could always tell who had it."

The girl, interviewed at the Deschutes County Juvenile Detention Center,
says she started smoking pot when she was 10, drinking when she was 12 and
snorting lines of methamphetamine by her last year in middle school. She
was injecting heroin by her freshman year at Mountain View.

The girl, whose name is being witheld because of her age, said drugs of all
sorts were used at parties with high school classmates and said they were
freely bought and used at school.

"They'd snort lines in the bathroom; they'd smoke pot outside," she says
from a locked-off hallway in the cramped detention center. Back in
detention for passing bad checks, she says she kicked drugs and has been
clean for more than two years.

The marks that drugs and booze leave on the region's young people can be as
plain as the graffiti along railroad tracks or as subtle as the faint
needle marks on a young boy's arm. But the problem rises into clear view in
the hard, black and white numbers.

In a 1996 study compiled by the state Department of Human Resources, more
than half of Deschutes County's 11th graders said they had used alcohol
within the past 30 days, a number that is 23% higher than the staewide
average. Amoung the same group of children, the use of tobacco, marijuana
and LSD also were above the state averages.

It's the same story with alcohol and marijuana use among Deschutes County
eighth graders. Marijuana use among those students is 16% higher than the
statewide average and almost 8% higher for alcohol.

For those in the business of treating children who abuse drugs, being on
the wrong side of so many statewide averages adds up to big trouble.

"That is not good," says Roger Kryzanek, director of alcohol and drug
programs for Deschutes County Human Services Department. " To me, this is
the most concering bit of data we have."

"What it says to me is we've got big-city problems. We've got the same
kinds of problems you would expect to find in larger urban communities."

That's not news to to area police, who have been fighting a rising tide of
illegle drugs for more than 10 years. And even though police often see only
the tip of the iceberg when it comes to drug use among youngsters, they
know there's no such thing as a drug-free school.

"Any kid who's been in school from middle school to high school has been
exposed to it. They have seen it. They have seen it used. They've seen
people buying and selling it," says Dennis Porter, a Deschutes County
sheriff's deputy who is the school resource officer in La Pine.

Peter Miller, principal of the 139 student alternative Marshall High
School in Bend and former principal of the much larger Bend High School,
was blunt: " For a principal to say a school drug-free is a lie."

And what drugs are Central Oregon teens using? Again. the numbers paint a
billboard size picture: It's alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, in that
order, with a small but rising number using methamphetamine.

"Alcohol is the drug of choice, for kids as well as adults." says Sherry
Pressler, direstor of the Youth Enforcement Services program run by the
Bend City Police Department. " What kids tell me is they do more drinking
on a casual basis or at parties than other drugs."

"Tobacco, widely considered a gateway to harder drugs, is close behind
alcohol. Thirty percent of 11th graders indentified themselves as smokers
in the state's survey and another 17% said they chew tobacco.

One of the biggest problems with teen smoking is getting adults to take it
seriously, says Kryzanek. But treatment providers say the link between
tobacco and other drugs, especially marijuana, couldn't be clearer.

"I think it is clearly a gateway drug," Kryzanek says of tobacco. " If we
can reduce it, we know from studies we can seriously reduce latter drug
use".

It's no coincidence, experts say, that the percentage of young people who
smoke marijuana is nearly as high as the percentage who smoke cigarettes.

A far more dangerous threat to teens is the growing use of
methamphetamine, a powerful " upper " that's growing in popularity because
it is relatively cheap- $25 buys enough to stay high for 24 hours- and easy
to find.

Police and juvenile authorities believe more teens are being drawn to
the drug, sending more into treatment to break meth addictions along with
more serious health and mental after-affects.

"When I first got here in 1985, we saw most of our problems with pot,"
says Brad Mondoy, director of the Jefferson County Juvenile Department.
"Now we're seeing methamphetamine creating a lot of different problems.
We're finding it hard to repair some of the damage they've done to
themselves."