'I GOT CAUGHT UP IN THE MOMENT'

For Some Students, Drugs, Alcohol, And Addiction Are A Way Of Life

MELROSE -- Tony Colella, wearing a blue shirt from the carwash where he
works part time, cradles his guitar onstage while his childhood friend Dave
Crespo introduces the song "Killing Amy." "This song," Crespo says, "is
about drug addiction."

What Crespo doesn't mention is that he wrote it about Colella. Time was
when Colella would have performed the set stoned on marijuana, with pills
in his pocket for after the gig. He'd come to practice so wasted on pills
that Crespo threatened to throw him out of Ravin Klaim, the band they founded.

That was before Colella went to the hospital in August 2002 for overdosing
on Klonopin, an antianxiety drug, and before he was arrested at school with
marijuana in December of that year.

Now Ravin Klaim, winner of last year's WBCN Battle of the High School
Bands, is performing in a Cambridge cafe before an audience dotted with
fellow students from Melrose High. "Blank stares and open jaws," Crespo
sings. "I can't believe what I just saw."

Colella would be a senior this year, but he was kept behind in seventh
grade, the year he first tried marijuana, because he did no work, and again
in ninth grade because he chose drugs over class.

Marijuana, he says, became "natural, like water." He's tried cocaine and
OxyContin. He quit pills after the overdose, and after his arrest he ended
his habit of smoking weed several times a day. "Now," he says, "I go to school.

I have a job, a girlfriend. I'm making money. The band, we're doing stuff."

In a state where teenagers' use of drugs and alcohol ranks well above the
national average, surely many high schools have students like Colella.
Surely Melrose is not the only school where a visitor overhears an
undercurrent of chatter about drink and drugs.

A senior recounting her weekend answers "yes" when asked if she was drunk,
and one senior tells another that a mutual friend isn't ready to get off
OxyContin. A senior boy, an athlete, bounds downstairs at dismissal time
bellowing about getting drunk.

Two girls giggle over a pamphlet about marijuana. Each locker here has a
lock, the result of principal Daniel Burke's campaign to thwart a theft
problem he links to drugs. "Any school that has a theft problem, I would
dare say, has a drug problem," he says. At the nearby minimart one
afternoon, a high school student, his driver's license in hand to prove
he's 18, buys a cigar, then disappears in a car with friends. There's a
good chance they'll use the wrapper to roll a blunt filled with marijuana.

The store sells about 200 cigars a week, a few to an older man who enjoys
Garcia y Vega and the rest to young people. The most sobering statistics
show that Massachusetts has the worst teen addiction problem in the nation,
with an estimated 4 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds dependent on an illicit
drug. This has particular resonance in Melrose, where Matt Schille, '02, a
two-sport captain and honor roll student, died of a heroin overdose six
months after graduating. Last April, drugs killed Meagan Dion, two months
before she would have graduated.

At a Melrose High drug summit last week, in an auditorium decorated with
photos of the son he buried two Decembers ago, Paul Schille tells students
he wishes someone had told him Matt was using drugs. "We have a lot of
wonderful memories," he says, his words punctuated by students' sniffles.
"I can't think of them, because when I do I cry."

According to a 2003 survey, half of Melrose High students, like half of
high schoolers statewide, drank alcohol in the prior month.

More than 70 percent of the teens in Melrose who drank were binge drinkers
- -- this in a state that ranks in the top five for youthful binge drinking.

More than a quarter of Melrose students said they'd been in a car whose
driver had been drinking.

Almost a quarter smoked marijuana in the past month.

"It's high school.

It seems like parents are becoming hypocrites because their kids are doing
the same thing they were doing when they were kids," says senior David
Carroll. "Parents are either overprotective or they're OK with it. Even if
they're OK, they're not, like, `Go out and do it every weekend.' " Kicking
the habit "Should I be getting ready to bury my daughter?"

So asks a Melrose father whose daughter is kicking a heroin habit.

She sits across from him, her manicure a luxury she couldn't afford when
drugs claimed all her money, both of them agreeing to be interviewed as
long as their names are not published.

One day this year, she decided not to wait until a friend got paid so they
could buy heroin and shoot up. Instead she called her dad. "You're the only
one that can help me," she tells him now. "I knew I couldn't just stop. You
can't eat. Your skin feels like it's going to crawl off your body.
Everything hurts."

The girl belongs to a senior class considered one of the most accomplished
in recent years, but she is also part of a subculture that graduated from
expensive OxyContin to cheaper heroin.

Some, like her, are in recovery, some still use, and some have relapsed.

She's pretty, her hair and makeup meticulous -- hardly the stereotype of
the older, poorer, strung-out urban junkie. "I don't look at myself as a
heroin addict," she says, "because so many people around me are the same as
me."

She tried the painkiller OxyContin, unaware of the risks. "I was just
curious," she says. She was also curious about Klonopin. Cocaine. Ecstasy.
Mushrooms. And, finally, heroin. "That's the only thing I couldn't stop --
opiates," she says. Soon she had an $80-a-day OxyContin habit, financed by
work, her unsuspecting parents, and theft -- if she could find the money to
buy the drug at all. "I would miss three days and feel like crap," she
says. "Not sleeping.

Not eating. Sweating. I'd think, `Why don't I just quit?' But it's harder
than that." She went into rehab, was clean for several months, then,
wrongly convinced she'd be smarter this time, started again.

Finally, seeking a better high, she turned to heroin, a small bag of which
sells for about $10. When she told her dad she was an addict, she showed
him the tracks on her arms. "As a parent, what do you do? Scream at her?
No," her father says. "I'm there for her, but she has to do the work."

In another neat suburban house, another pretty girl talks of moving from
heroin detox to support group meetings. "You'll always be an addict," she
says. "You'll always have that feeling."

She, too, started with OxyContin. "You can take that drug and talk to
anybody," she says. "You can talk to the president.

That's how good you feel." In reality, she lost friends. `It's a disgusting
habit," she says. "I have so many people who come up to me and say how much
they hated me." She also shed 15 pounds she could ill afford to lose.

She, too, returned to OxyContin after being clean for months.

Then, to save money, she switched to snorting heroin. "You get your mind
rolling: `Oh my God, this is so much better,' " she says. "I was doing it a
few times a day during school. It was quick.

I did it in the math hallway.

You're that desperate." Finally, a friend told her mother in a conversation
that ended with both friend and mother weeping. "They saved my life," the
girl says. "I knew, telling her mom, I could lose her friendship, but it
was the right thing to do," the friend says. "Two people dying last year
definitely told me what the outcome was. If that never happened, I would
probably have questioned myself." Drinking games Bouquets of balloons
brighten Lynnfield's Colonial Center as girls in gowns and boys in neckties
arrive for the seniors' Winter Ball. Where some schools use breathalyzers
to check students as they walk in, Melrose employs a "meet and greet"
gauntlet of faculty looking for signs of inebriation as they smile hello.
Vigilance lurks beneath the jocularity of teachers mingling with students
on the edges of a ballroom pulsating with music and dancing teenagers.

Fifteen chaperones guard the exits, scan for hidden alcohol, and monitor
the bathrooms. Since Burke threatened to cancel senior proms after students
in two limousines arrived intoxicated in 2002, seniors now sign a behavior
contract.

Violators risk losing Senior Week activities.

Yet two girls, honor roll students, get in trouble for drinking vodka
before the ball, one after teachers thought she looked unsteady, the other
after a teacher overheard her say she'd been drinking. "I got caught up in
the moment," one of the girls says later. "I was thinking, `This is stupid,
but I'm not going to get drunk.' "

Few seniors will graduate without having had to make choices about alcohol.
"I know people that don't do it at all," says Christine Sullivan, class
vice president and contender for valedictorian, who in 10th grade first
went to a party where some students were drinking. "I know people who do it
a few times and far between, and when they do, they don't drink a lot. I
know people who do it to unhealthy levels. . . . There are the select few
who aren't exposed to it at all, whether it's their choice or who they hang
out with. The difference is when they're exposed.

Some kids were exposed to it in middle school. Others started this year or
last year."

Seniors talk about older siblings or friends who buy them liquor; about
drinking games with names like "Beirut"; about Jell-O shots, or
liquor-laced cups of Jell-O; about what Christina Carucci calls "full-blown
parties with music and dancing and drinking" and no parents at home, and
smaller gatherings of "hanging out, having a few drinks, and playing card
games"; about a class that has fewer bashes than previous batches of seniors.

"Most of the time the only thing that happens is beer spills and the floor
gets sticky," Carucci says. "I went to one party last summer, and the house
got trashed. We left. It was getting out of control.

There are parties where I've seen kids doing drugs.

Those are the parties I've left." Seniors insist they walk home, sleep
over, or have a designated driver rather than drive drunk or hop in a car
with a driver who's been drinking. "My brother's best friend died doing
that," says Jonathan Beckley. Yet some confess to breaking this rule.
"Sometimes I didn't even know," says Kim DeBenedictis. "Other times I'd be
in a predicament. I needed a ride. I just buckled up." For every Melrose
High student who drank in the past month, another did not. Melissa MacPhee,
who says she greeted the New Year with two friends "hanging on my
shoulders, both hanging over the car doors puking," doesn't join in. "I
don't drink anymore, at all. The only thing I will have is a glass of
apricot sour with my mom," she says.

"I got drunk once. I was 17. It was the worst day of my life. I ruined my
favorite shirt." Some seniors have visited places where alcohol is not
forbidden. Beckley welcomed 2004 in Montreal, where the drinking age is 18.
"It felt good," he says. "They treated you like you were an older person,
an adult." Nikko Patten-Weinstein, Ravin Klaim's drummer, says he first
drank in Germany. "Once you're 16 you can go to a store and buy beer," he
says. "When I tried it, it was, `Oh, this could be nice sometimes.' They'll
have wine with dinner, a beer when they watch TV. They won't go buy a case
of beer and drink it in one night."

Friends in need Krista Maffei keeps a picture of Dion on her dashboard.

It's partly a shrine to a friend from cooking class who died at 18 of an
overdose of Klonopin and opiates. It's also a reminder of all the friends
whose companionship she's lost to drugs and of the dangers that lie down
that road. "A lot of my best friends are doing drugs, and they're different
people," she says. "I miss the people I used to know.

"A few years ago, you'd go to a party and everybody would be drinking.

Now you see 10 people on a couch dozing off. It's not fun," she says. "I
have a strong will. I don't want to put anything up my nose. I don't want
to take something that makes me sleepy.

I have a lot of things going for me. I don't need that to interfere."

DeBenedictis picks up a pamphlet about heroin in the guidance office.
"Sickening," she says. She, too, has friends addicted to heroin. "Senior
year is my worst year. I lost most of my friends," she says. "Honestly, I
see no point to it. I don't want to not have control over my decisions. I'm
not going to bring myself down to have friends.

"They used to be truly good kids, good head on their shoulders," she says.
"They were lively.

They looked healthy, outgoing.

They had happy things to talk about. They turned into depressed and
complaining people.

These girls came from really good backgrounds."

Road to recovery Class secretary Stephanie Genica listens to Ravin Klaim
from a bench at the All Asia Cafe in Cambridge. "Each year," she says,
"you're given another opportunity to make choices."

Genica says she experimented in eighth grade with liquor and marijuana but
tried to steer clear in ninth. "Sophomore year was Christ-centered.
Everything was black and white.

It was easy to make decisions," she says. "Junior year was my rebellion
year. Not that I did bad things.

I kind of felt I'd miss out on the high school experience, so I was more
careless.

Same thing senior year." That's meant a few drinks, she says, and
occasional marijuana.

Then, while writing a paper on hallucinogens for psychology, she was
tempted to try them. "I had the desire.

I had the opportunity. But I didn't," she says. "It would be interesting,
artsy.

I almost want to see what it would be like. I hope I never do it. I wonder
if we overeducate kids. It almost sounds like fun." Onstage, Jeff Clark
sings "Stand By Me," flanked by Colella and Crespo on guitars. Colella's
drug use peaked, he and his father say, when his grandfather, who helped
raise him after his mother left years ago, was dying of cancer. "He taught
me how to do basically everything. Cooking. Making a garden. Riding a bike.
Baseball," Colella says. "I didn't get that bad until I found out my
grandfather was going to die. I was thinking about it constantly until he
died, except when I was high. So I tried to be high every minute of the
day." With his arrest Colella found the will to change.

He has a pool table in his basement, and Crespo brought over an old sofa.
Weekends, they and other friends played pool to keep Colella out of trouble.

Last semester, Colella passed all his courses, and in math he got an A.

"It was a blessing he got caught in school," says his father, Frank
Colella. "He seems more caring, more happy.

He was very glum back then." "It's like a different Tony," Crespo says. "He
knows himself a lot better." Colella still has what he and his bandmates
call "an addictive personality." He'll latch onto a rock band -- Green Day,
blink-182, Alice in Chains -- and memorize every song. "I just wanted to do
drugs because all these famous musicians did. I wanted to be cool," he
says. "All these great musicians are heroin addicts. Where are they now? Dead."