FUND INTERVENTION PROGRAMS TO HELP TEENS FIGHT DRUGS

When my stepdaughter was 13 she tested positive for drugs after being
picked up for shoplifting. The judge slapped her hand and sent her
back home, back to the streets where she gotten them from in the
first place, with a warning. At 16 she was in trouble again, tested
positive again for meth and, although we begged the judge to take her
off the streets, even went down and signed a Marchman Act, the judge
laughed and sentenced her to house arrest. She disappeared as soon as
she could.

Now she is 18 and shooting up, hustling the streets for drug money
and getting beat up by her drug dealer "boyfriends," and because she
is no longer a child, we can do nothing but wait for the phone call
that tells us she is in jail again or dead.

Did we fail her as parents? Perhaps, but we went to all the necessary
channels recommended, including psychotherapy (where she was
diagnosed as bipolar and given more drugs), school social services
(where we were told that, as the noncustodial parents, we had no say
in her welfare), the Department of Children & Families (which did a
one-hour investigation of her home situation and found "no need for
further supervision") and the courts, who refused to swear out a
Marshall Act for her. Did the system fail her? You bet!

Until our legislators make the funds available for more successful
intervention programs for adolescents, we are doomed to see an
increase in adult substance abuse, overburdened caseworkers, public
defenders, court systems, jails, hospitals, treatment programs and
the county morgue.

We cannot continue to turn our heads and allow judges to treat
adolescent drug abuse as a laughing matter. If it is not stopped
right there, the problems grow as the child does, as does the
delinquency, theft, assault, childhood sexual abuse, etc, etc., etc.

Until we, as citizens, force our legislators to do so, continue to
call, write and visit them with this issue, we are dooming our future
doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers and worse, parents, to a life and
death of useless waste, and ourselves to the fallout of this
disgrace. Let's fight for our children like we fight for the human
rights of strangers the world over.

Zoraida M. Colon-Munoz

Lakeland