RedRibbon Reruns

This has been antidrug week for the schoolkids of Greater Los Angeles. In
our suburb, this has meant a veritable extravaganza of sobriety. The high
school plans alone have included, among other things, an antidrug pancake
breakfast, two antidrug pep rallies and a grand antidrug finale in which
a group of kids will paint their faces white and play dead.

This is diverting, the high schoolers say, but pretty old hatit's their
10th indoctrination, after all, in 10 years. Moreover, they say, they're no
longer convinced the adults have been truthful. In grade school, they were
led to believe that one toke from a joint could kill you. So far, all of
the pot smokers they know are very much alive.

Has there ever in U.S. history been a generation of children whose elders
have sought so obsessively to scare them straight? Our own teenager has
been paying tribute to this week's particular observance, Red Ribbon Week,
since she was a 4yearold in Montessori school.

As a gradeschooler, she and her classmates were made to sign little
contracts in which they promised to stay clean. They weren't sure what that
meant, precisely, but the idea of writing their names in cursive made them
feel very grown up. Later, there was the ubiquitous Drug Abuse Resistance
Education (DARE) program, headed by the local police, and still later,
letters from the district superintendent announcing that our school had
joined the onestikeandyou'reexpelled movement toward zero tolerance.

Over the years the propaganda has become a sort of seasonal marker. It
wouldn't be October now if someone didn't come home with a little red
hospital braceletRed Ribbon Week's signature gimmicktied around a little
wrist with instructions to leave it on for seven days, no matter what. In
the local elementary school, lectures from the neighborhood cop have become
as autumnal as Halloween parades. "Who knows what this is? Anyone?" he
always demands, hoisting a big picture of a marijuana leaf.

"He'd always ask if we knew what to do if we found a syringe in the park,"
one of our teenager's friends recently laughed. "They way he sounded, you
always wanted to answer, 'Duck, cover and roll!'"

Which would all be merely diverting, if it worked. Last year, in our same
suburb, a bunch of cheerleaders went on a diet in which their main source
of sustenance was speed. Seems they'd gotten so bored with Red Ribbon Week
rhetoric that they'd tuned out everything but one handy factoidthat
methamphetamines burn oodles of calories.

What is it that makes the war on drugs so compelling and yet so goofily
tiresome? For a generation now, we've plugged away, and our efforts still
don't ring true.

We focus on kids, when the vast majority of abusers are grownups. We fret
over the pros and cons of marijuana, when people are being killed by heroin
and cocaine. We allow ambitious politicians to whip up attention by
painting drug use as a moral failing, when our own experience tells us
that, really, people get high and stay high for only two basic reasons:
curiosity and neurosis. The desire to experiment and the feeling that,
without additives, they are incomplete.

From that standpoint, the war on drugs should be a campaign for mental
health. We should be fighting, not for mandatory drug tests or sterner
classroom lectures, but to make good, effective counseling as a available
and ordinary as P.E. and honors English.

"It would be so much better," one of our teenager's friends offered, "if
they'd just tell us the truth about drugs, and then give us someone to talk
to, who knew what they were talking about, someone who we could, like, trust."

But counseling is expensive, and trust doesn't come easy when the kid
begins to realize that a lot of what passes for a war on drugs is, in fact,
part of our war on kids.

So much more fun for us, the adults, to lecture the little ones on our
moral superiority. So much more satisfying, after so many years as
America's questing, neurotic children, to make somebody else duck and cover
and roll.

When our teenager was in grade school, she complained every night about her
homework, which would incite me to deliver a lecture, inciting her to
argue, inciting us both to stomp off in tears. One night, exhausted, I
forgot to fight back. You're right, I told her. This stuff is donkey work.

I wouldn't want to do it either, I told her. Unfortunately, this teacher
seems to need it to justify a passing grade.

Taken aback, she sat down and did the homework. She hadn't wanted to skirt
responsibility; she'd just wanted some understanding. The problem had been
all in my delivery.

It would be great, wouldn't it, if life were like a sitcom, and you could
change people's behavior with one great speech. What a relief it would be
if you could just send your kid to a pep rally and a stern but stirring
lecture, and know that with the snap of a red plastic bracelet, you'd never
have to worry about that stash of pot behing his surfboard on the closet
floor.

Never have to worry, either, about what that stash might mean about him, or
worry about what it might mean about you. But even little people hate to be
hectored, and we are afraid of a gentler delivery. Who has the answer? Anyone?