ABOUT THIS SERIES

To learn where and how Fairfax County teenagers get illegal drugs, The
Washington Post interviewed 100 county teenagers over the last six months.

The teenagers, who agreed to talk about their drug use on condition of
anonymity, came from three primary sources: the Fairfax County Juvenile
Detention Center, private and county drugtreatment programs, and
interviews at a local shopping mall.

Followup reporting with parents, school officials, drug counselors and law
enforcement officers helped verify details of some of the teenagers'
accounts and substantiated the broad themes laid out by most of the
teenagers interviewed: that they deal drugs as well as use them, that
teenagers operate with relative impunity and that adults responsible for
children often are unaware of the extent of the drug trade.

Nearly all of the dozens of teenagers interviewed at the detention center,
for example, were not there on drug charges. They were being held briefly
on charges from vandalism to car theft, yet they all said they had used and
distributed drugs regularly without detection by police or parents. Several
of the dozens of teenagers randomly approached at the food court at
Springfield Mall pulled out drugs and paraphernalia from their pockets
during interviews.

A computerized database of juvenile charges filed in Fairfax County over
the last year helped round out the information about teenagers involved
with drugs. The records did not identify the teenagers by name but provided
a demographic profile of the group by giving each age, race, school, drug
charge and city or town.

The series was reported and written by Patricia Davis, a Metro reporter
based in Fairfax, and Pierre Thomas, who was a National reporter covering
the Justice Department for The Post before joining CNN as a correspondent.

The teenagers, most of whom were white, came from disparate backgrounds,
yet their descriptions of teenage drug trafficking were strikingly similar.
They also echoed what drugtreatment counselors say they hear from many of
the hundreds of Fairfax teenagers they evaluate each year.