READING, WRITING AND RX

The slide was fast and easy. First came marijuana, then prescription
drugs and before Alice knew it, she was a high school junior with a
$300 a week cocaine habit.

"It pretty much went down from there. I got a reputation. Everybody
knew I was a druggie and they'd come to me when they wanted drugs.
They called me the dealer," Alice (not her real name) says. But any
money she made went to coke. "I completely gutted my bank account. I
would try to steal money wherever I could. It just got a lot worse
than I thought it would be," says the 18 year old. Snorting in
school, stealing from her family, she'd lost friends, weight and
direction. Her slide began as a 15-year-old freshman at a Cape Cod
high school, where she was introduced to marijuana by her new-found
friends. From there she quickly moved on to prescription drugs.

"My friends gave me valium and asked me to snort it. Of course,
having the marijuana ruin my brain. I said 'alright, I liked the
feeling,'" says Alice, who turned to anti-depressants, which were
readily available. In her junior year she started dating a young man
who was in his 20s. "All of his friends were doing a lot of coke. I
tried it one day and I just got hooked. I [still] smoked a little
weed every once in a while, but for me it was cocaine," Alice says.
"I'd just stay at my boyfriend's house and do drugs." For six months
Alice's life revolved around snorting cocaine. "I had very big bags
under my eyes. I lost 30 pounds," says Alice, a slim young woman.

Alice's story is not uncommon, says Paul Bender, a counselor for
Gosnold on Cape Cod, a substance abuse treatment facility.

"I'm seeing more and more [narcotic use] in the high school age,"
says Bender, who says the use of gateway drugs such as marijuana
sometimes begins as young as 12 or 13.

"A lot of times they'll begin with over the counter drugs like
Robitussin .. I think it's because they don't have access to
something like marijuana," Bender says. "Then they'll go to marijuana
and other things once they can get them." Alice says drugs are
readily available and widely used. "If you ever wanted to try it you
could get it anywhere [on the Cape]," she says. "A lot of kids would
go on field trips and do it. Anywhere you could go where there wasn't
a teacher around."

Bender says the easy access to drugs is clearly part of the problem.
"It is out there and available in every high school," Bender says. "I
have students at the high school tell me that even 'the good kids'
try it." Alice says that at her school drug use was seen as a sign of
popularity. "[Some kids] thought I was one of the popular ones
because I was doing coke and they were still smoking weed," Alice
says. Her friends however thought that doing coke was taking things
too far.

"A lot of my friends didn't want me doing coke. They thought it was
just ruining my life," says Alice. Her friends eventually informed
school authorities that Alice was snorting cocaine in school.

Although she resented their intervention, it got her into a program
that, after six months of habitual cocaine use, enabled her to turn
her life around. Home environment plays an important role the use of
drugs. Bender says adolescents are often living in an atmosphere
where drug use and drug abuse are present. "I know of people who say
their parents know they use or that their parents use marijuana also.
They talk about even smoking with parents of their friends." Bender
says. "We did a study at one of the local high schools three years in
a row and consistently we've come up with about 60 percent of the
students saying that they have a member of their family who has
problems with alcohol or drugs."

Another factor in drugs is the economic pressures that many families
face. "I think part is that we do have two workers in most families
now. And I think that we do have a lot more single parent families,
where parents are working and they're not able to keep an eye on
their children," Bender says. "The more nosy you are about their
business, the less likely they are to get seriously involved with
drugs.

"Kids push the limit because they need to know the limits are there,"
Bender continues. "When they don't find limits, they push them until
they do find limits. And if there aren't limits in place, the law is
the limits they come up against."

Alice says her family didn't know of her drug use and that her home
environment was a factor in her turning to drugs.

"I was using drugs to get rid of the stress from home," Alice says "I
did not get along with my stepfather. It kind of ruined the
relationship between me and my mother. I was never home. I didn't
want to talk to her about any of my feelings. She didn't know who I
was anymore," adding that dulling the senses is a defense that a lot
of adolescents use.

"Anything that would get you high and make you not feel like
yourself. That's what kids wanted."

Bender says that if we want to see a change in the direction our
children are going, we have to make a change.

"I think that if we want to see things different with our kids we
need to invest in them. That means an investment in time and
resources." After going into drug counseling, Alice transferred to
another school and though she fell in with another drug crowd, she
abstained from using drugs, made the student honor roll and
graduated. She is now living away from her family but working on
improving her relationship with her mother. She has a job, attends
Cape Cod Community College, continues with drug counseling and has
been drug free for more than a year. But it's still a struggle. "When
I get depressed, I still think about going back and doing drugs. But
there's something that just keeps me from doing it," Alice says. "I
try to tell myself that I don't want to end up the way I did."