DRUGS IN SUBURBIA: AFFLUENCE CAN MASK ABUSE

VIRGINIA BEACH Bay Colony seemed to the couple like a perfect place to
raise a family.

Their neighborhood in the Beach's northeast end was a haven of circular
driveways, emerald lawns and azure pools nestled among the hills and swales
of the Princess Anne Country Club. The neighbors were great. So were the
schools. And the ocean was just a bike ride away. Life would be wholesome
and safe or so they thought.

``This was our final house, this was our dream house. Now it hurts too much
to go to that house,'' said the woman, who has since moved with her family
to a community in rural Virginia.

Paradise popped when the couple discovered that their oldest son was a
heavy drug user, and that the younger one was moving in the same direction.
They were stunned to learn that lots of youngsters from other affluent
northeast Virginia Beach neighborhoods smoke dope, snort cocaine, drop acid
and even shoot heroin.

Like seven other parents interviewed for these articles, the former Bay
Colony couple agreed to speak only if they could remain anonymous.

The handsome brick house they once owned is a reminder that no family is
immune from America's escalating teenage drug abuse problem.

National surveys belie a commonly held misperception that serious drug
addiction is not a threat to children from welltodo families who attend
topflight suburban schools. Research by organizations as diverse as the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Columbia University's
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, and Who's Who Among
American High School Students reveals a pattern of drug use that remains
constant, regardless of demographic area, parental education level or
family income.

A 20year survey of middle and highschool students conducted under a
research grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse found rates of
tranquilizer, alcohol, steroid and nonheroin opiate abuse was higher among
children whose parents had achieved the highest level of education at
least some graduate or professional school beyond college than among
those whose parents completed grade school or less. Rates of use were
roughly the same for cocaine other than crack and barbiturates.

Illicit drug use among teens from all backgrounds has been increasing
steadily since the early 1990s, the NIDA reports. It's a national problem
that has deeply scarred families in the nicest of Virginia Beach
neighborhoods.

Today, the former Bay Colony couple's life savings have been decimated by
drug rehabilitation programs for their two children. They have moved out of
Virginia Beach and into a rural Virginia community, putting miles between
their sons and an environment that they believe fosters adolescent drug abuse.

``I am convinced that if you live down at this beach that your kids can get
in more trouble than if you live in Norfolk or Richmond,'' the husband
said. ``Down here, it's party time. They go to the beach and it's a
constant party.''

The couple is not alone in its beliefs. These and the other parents
interviewed for this story said that they are links in an extensive and
growing informal network of parents in northern Virginia Beach, all bound
by where they live and their children's serious drug problems.

``When one parent finds out another has a problem, they say you need to
talk to soandso,'' the Bay Colony woman said.

Her sons are better now, but during the months she was dealing with drugs
headon, parents with similar problems were calling her once a week. A year
later, they still call for advice.

Each of the parents interviewed said they had been contacted by 10 or 12
other parents beginning their own drug odysseys. The callers want to know
what drug use looks like, how to get help, how to navigate this parents'
rite of passage.

``I think you could talk to any parent on the North End of Virginia Beach
and hear the same thing,'' said another mother who sent her son to two
weeks of residential drug rehabilitation in Idaho and then to an
outofstate boarding school to get him away from the Beach party scene.
``I can't tell you the number of parents who call me out of desperation.''

``We're talking kids from unbelievably good families with parents who
care,'' said a mother of two recovering addicts who lives in an established
Hilltop neighborhood three miles west of the Oceanfront.

The network snakes through living rooms in Great Neck and Hilltop, winds
east to Croatan and then creeps up the coastline to Bay Colony and the
North End. No parent in the network ever thought that drugs would consume
their children. But who would? On paper, their lives were perfect.

In neighborhoods in the northeast section of Virginia Beach, per capita
income is high and the crime rate is low. These parents can afford to send
their children to prestigious private schools such as Norfolk Academy and
Cape Henry Collegiate. The public high schools, Cox and First Colonial, are
among the best academically in the region, producing merit scholars and Ivy
Leaguebound grads.

In the last four years, when drugsniffing dogs have padded down corridors
at Cox, they've never found a thing. However, last year, there were 13
disciplinary offenses related to drugs at Cox, five at FC.

The schools have high rates of volunteerism. The community offers a variety
of activities to keep youths occupied. The vast majority of the area's
young people lead healthy, productive lives.

But a combination of factors including affluence and boredom produce
problems that lurk behind these statistics. In fact, it's the very things
that make these neighborhoods among the finest places to live in Hampton
Roads that also make them fertile environments for adolescent drug use.

Virginia Beach Police Capt. James A. Cervera until recently supervised
police officers stationed in the city's public high schools. He has taken a
particular interest in juvenile justice, which earned him an invitation to
testify before Congress on the issue two years ago. He also teaches a
juvenile delinquency class at Tidewater Community College.

When Cervera asks his students what a drug user looks like, they are often
hesitant to speak up. But if they get past concerns about appearing biased,
they will say ``a black, innercity male.'' Part of that is the
mediadriven image of users being rousted and arrested in the street.

These wellmannered students from highincome homes don't fit the
stereotype of youthful drug abusers, Cervera said.

``In suburbia, where do you do your dope? In your locked bedroom,'' Cervera
said.

``Mom is doing her own thing. Dad is windsurfing. And the kid's in his
room, huffing on a bong like there's no tomorrow. What it comes down to is
do you really know what your kids are doing?''

``Yes,'' answered the parents interviewed for this story. All but one of
the mothers stayed at home. They went to baseball games, baked cookies for
the PTA and met their children as they stepped off the school bus. It
seemed such a sensible recipe for raising healthy families.

But, as in all neighborhoods, other youths came home from school to empty
houses. Some were ``party houses'' where kids hung out and the parents
either weren't there, didn't know or didn't care that minors were drinking
and using drugs inside their homes.

``One liberal parent can destroy it all,'' said one mother, whose son was
introduced to pot at age 13 by the boy across the street.

Add money to the equation and the party scene intensifies.

``They have the money, huge houses and more unsupervised time to throw
parties . . .,'' said Jeffrey L. Burns, a licensed clinical social worker
in Virginia Beach who specializes in adolescent problems and serves a
mostly welltodo clientele. ``There are probably more parties in these
affluent areas than in the (middle class) Bayside area.''

Money also keeps these youths out of the court system, and skews
statistics. Nationally, when a firsttime offender shows up in court with
parents, an attorney, a therapist and information that says he or she is
going into treatment, the judge may decide to let the family shoulder the
expense of treatment instead of the government, Cervera has found through
his reading and research.

``Especially with kids who are firsttime offenders, the courts want to see
somebody getting some help,'' Cervera said.

Residential drug rehabilitation for adolescents is a burgeoning business
that has grown fourfold in the past five years to include about 500
programs nationally, said Mark H. Sklarow, executive director of the
Fairfax, Va.based Independent Educational Consultants Association. And it
is one to which many of these parents have turned. Tuition ranges from $100
to $300 a day for programs that last from a few weeks to two years.

It's not necessarily a bad thing when families can provide a ``safety net''
to keep youngsters out of the judicial system, Cervera said. But the flip
side is the effect on incarceration statistics which disproportionately put
more poor people behind bars advancing the stereotype in which many
parents take comfort.

Then there are the youths themselves who work hard to preserve the illusion
that all is well. One mother said her son started smoking pot at 14, but
didn't let his guard down until three years later.

``I never had any suspicions,'' she said. ``He made straight A's, he was a
good kid. . . . What's amazing to me is these (other teens who were using
and dealing drugs) were the kids you would have never thought, they all
looked like my son.''

Counselors say there are countless reasons that teenage drug use goes
undetected by parents. Some don't know the signs, or wrongly attribute the
signs to alcohol, attention deficit disorder or bulimia. Others are scared
to deal with the problem headon and hope that it is just a phase. Still
others may be users themselves, and are loath to broach the subject with
their children. And parents whose children are doing well in school and
other areas are reluctant to tip the status quo.

``Parents are not aware,'' said Andy Young, a counselor at Cape Henry.
``They think `Not my kid' and wealthy parents think `Not with all we've
provided them.' ''

But Young, who has worked as a drug counselor throughout the region, said
parents need to realize that children need as much attention from ages 13
to 18 as they do from 0 to 8.

Many parents interpret falling grades as an early signal of drug abuse. But
counselors and students said that by the time grades fall, drugs have
become an integral part of an adolescent user's life.

``That's the last thing to go,'' said a 20yearold recovering heroin
addict who stayed on the honor roll throughout five years of heavy drug
use. ``You have to maintain that facade so that people don't know.''

They wait until after they do their homework is done to get high. They know
that falling grades sound alarms.

Each year, Burns experiences a bump in referrals as the grading period ends
and parents' suspicions are raised. This November was no different.

When Burns sees youths with drug problems for the first time, ``it's
usually a crisis,'' he said. ``Usually most kids don't get brought in for
counseling until they have let down one of their trigger points that
creates crisis wrecked the family car or missed the SAT.

``Most have been using two to three years before parents do anything about
it.''

And it's not only pot. Nationally, heroin use among teenagers has doubled
since 1990. It's a trend that Burns is seeing locally. Last year he saw two
or three youths who were doing heroin. Just this fall he's seen a dozen.

In a single week in midSeptember, Burns answered three referrals involving
youngsters from welltodo families in Norfolk and Virginia Beach using
heroin, two from private schools, one from a public school. Last month, he
saw a youth from an upscale Chesapeake neighborhood who is also using heroin.

Parents, psychologists and students disagree on the role that the
neighborhood schools play in the problem and whether schools can, or
should, do more to tackle drug abuse.

Despite the official record that shows few drug offenses in these schools,
clearly they are not drugfree.

``When I hear kids talk about what's in school at Cox and First Colonial,
it's just mindboggling,'' said Dr. Steven F. Waranch, a clinical
psychologist who practices in Virginia Beach. Students talk about pot, LSD,
ecstasy and mushrooms. ``Students are doing it, and the availability is
overwhelming.''

In January, a ninthgrade Cox girl was charged with selling LSD for profit.
A small quantity of LSD was in her possession at school and a search of her
home turned up more. A second ninthgrade girl who purchased some of the
drug from the first girl was charged with possession.

Waranch said that children should have thought about drugs ``in a very
serious way before they are exposed to them, which they most assuredly will
be.'' That's because ``it's impulsive. Substance abuse is about impulsivity.''

School is where connections to buy drugs are made, said several parents who
tapped their own telephones to find out what their children were into. They
also think that it's too easy for youngsters to leave school to get high or
buy dope.

One father camped outside the principal's office at Cox High enraged that
his son could slip off campus to buy drugs. Another woman, who learned from
a taped phone conversation that her daughter planned to leave Cox to party,
accompanied her daughter from class to class. Both of these children ended
up in longterm residential rehabilitation.

Cox Principal Perry Pope said that parents sometimes ask how students can
get away with smoking on campus. His answer: ``We've been teaching them
critical thinking skills since they were itty bitty.''

Pope said he had no memory of anyone camped outside his office. He said
that of Cox's 2,150 students, many have legitimate reasons for coming and
going throughout the day. To stop students from leaving school, ``You'd
have to button down this place like a police state,'' Pope said.

The schools function as a part of the community. And what goes on in the
community inevitably will spill over onto the campuses. Although they don't
feel that drug use is a disproportionately large problem in their building,
school officials also say they do not have their heads in the sand. They
offer educational programs, speakers, clubs, all aimed at discouraging drug
use. But educators say they cannot solve all of society's problems alone.

Schools have ``zero tolerance policies'' with regard to drug use or
possession on campus that can result in expulsion. Even lookalike drugs
can get students kicked out of school. Recognizing that there is a problem,
the Virginia Beach Schools recently established a twoweek drug
intervention program for firsttime offenders which allows them to keep up
with their school work while receiving drug education under a strict
contractual agreement between the student, parents and district. Cox has
sent eight students home for alcohol use and one student for marijuana
since the program began. None has gone from FC.

``If you come and visit the campus you see healthy kids engaged in positive
activity. You don't see any overt inappropriate activity,'' Pope said.
However, he also acknowledges that ``if you have one problem, then you have
a problem and we know there's more than one.''

The couple that moved their family from Virginia Beach believes that unless
schools and parents move past the stereotypes, the drug problem in paradise
will only get worse. Today, their children are doing well, but the mother
remembers dark days when she phoned her sons' friends' parents to warn them
that their children were involved with drugs, only to be rebuffed.

``Parents have to stick together,'' said a North End mother. ``I see a lot
of these kids and I know that they are going to be fine, it might just be a
phase of two or three years out of their lives. But some of them aren't
going to make it. That's the scary part.''