BOOK BY ADDICT'S MOM EXPLORES CLASS AND COLOR IN DRUG WARS

When Meredith Maran's teenage son Jesse was addicted to drugs, she
found neither solace nor answers in the government's just-say-no war
on drugs.

Jesse found his way out of addiction. But Maran, an Oakland mother and
journalist, didn't just move on with relief.

Instead, she went back into the maw to find out why today's teens
become addicts, by gaining the trust of three Bay Area adolescent addicts.

Tonight at Los Altos High School, the community is invited to hear
Maran talk about her highly personal and poignant journey, chronicled
in ``Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic.''

``The film `Traffic' inspired me to write `Dirty,' '' says Maran, 52.
``It showed even the daughter of the government's drug czar could be
addicted and it showed the economic connections that keep all of this
going.

``A person's drug test can come back clean or dirty. I called the book
`Dirty' to implicate our society's complicity in this problem.''

This complicity -- rife with socioeconomic and cultural factors -- is
revealed as we follow a couple of years in the lives of these kids,
whose names were changed to protect their privacy. At the end of the
book, each of them is still struggling to change their lives.

There is Tristan, 16, from a white, wealthy family in Marin County and
addicted to alcohol and various drugs.

There's Mike, 17, a white methamphetamine user from Santa Rosa's
blue-collar suburbs.

And there's Zalika, 16, a crack dealer, prostitute and runaway from an
upper-middle-class African-American family in the East Bay.

``How has it come to pass,'' writes Maran, ``that this bright,
precocious, big-hearted girl is living in hiding with a pimp nearly
twice her age, selling her body on a Web site for horny men?

``The answer comes to me as a laundry list of our nation's ugliest
`isms.' Racism and sexism. Misogyny and child exploitation. . . .
Zalika couldn't sell what she's selling unless her customers -- drug
addicts, pedophiles -- weren't buying.''

The book also compares how the justice system treats people of color
in contrast to whites.

``Why is it,'' Maran writes, ``that although more white people than
black use drugs, more black people than white people go to jail for
buying and selling them?''

Maran contrasts today's adolescent despair with her own coming-of-age
involvement with social movements that filled her with purpose and
hope. ``Kids feel there's no future for them,'' she says.

``When I was a teenager,'' experimenting with drugs was most often
``part of the larger context of wanting to change the world -- not
just getting high,'' she says. ``I don't lie to my kids about what I
did as a kid. I grew up in New York City, lived in hippie communes and
was part of every social change and civil rights movement. I wasn't
into heavy drug use, but I smoked pot and did some
psychedelics.''

Some parents lie to their teens about their own past drug use, Maran
says, but ``everything you do is modeling behavior. If you want to
model lying, go ahead. Some people consider withholding information
not lying -- to me, it's still lying.''

Teenagers know better, she says. Why do teenagers use drugs? ``Because
it's fun,'' she writes. ``Every teenager I asked gave me this answer.''