CONFUSED

Most of what teens know about drugs they don't pick up in a classroom.

They get their information from billboards on the sides of highways; from
movies, magazines and the Internet; from parents who drink at the dinner
table; or from friends who experiment when nobody's home.

They get information about drugs -legal and otherwise - from so many
sources and, today, it seems, the messages they are picking up may be more
muddled than ever before.

"There are so many mixed messages that kids think everybody is lying," says
Mike Gray, author of Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can
Get Out.

As adolescents experiment with drugs at ever younger ages, adults often
counter with dramatic presentations on the dangers of illegal drug us. But
coming from within a culture saturated with drugs yet also terrified of
them, adults themselves may not understand how contradictory and confusing
their guidelines can sound.

For instance, teenagers are often told: illicit drugs are bad and you
should never do them; prescription drugs are fine and can be counted on to
enhance fitness and happiness as long as a doctor prescribes them; alcohol
is all right and will help you relax and enjoy life as long as you're older
than 21.

"There are good drugs and bad drugs," says Larry Murry, a senior fellow at
Columbia University in New York who runs the prevention programme
Casastart. "We know cigarettes are bad but opiates, for example, are good -
except when they're misused. To any thinking person, it's confusing."

Drug education, both formal and informal, usually kicks in at a sensitive
age, just when children are first struggling with notions of what happiness
is and how to attain it. They are just beginning to learn how to enhance
and avoid certain emotions and how to look and feel good, and many feel
their job is to strive to build a perfect mind, a perfect body, a perfect life.

There is today a cultural infatuation with perfection that convinces
children at a young age that drugs - especially legal ones - may be a tool
that leads to perfection, says Lawrence Diller, a behaviour-development
paediatrician and the author of Running on Ritalin.

"It's part of a broader societal shift," says Diller.

"The whole psychiatry movement basically got hijacked by the pharmaceutical
industry in the late eighties," he charges. "The discovery of certain drugs
and the power of certain drug companies actually altered the way we think
of ourselves."

With more children than ever being prescribed legal, mood-altering drugs
like Ritalin, some experts worry that the message they may be picking up
is: drugs are supposed to make you feel better, or look better, or perform
better.

Diller, who himself prescribes Ritalin to children, has reservations about
the way the drug is being used.

"I worry that Ritalin becomes a substitute for other important factors,
such as parents parenting better and teachers teaching better," he says.
When that happens, he says, "the doctor winds up being complicit with
values that are not good for children".

Society is normalising the use of self-improvement drugs and children are
acutely aware of that, says Peter Kramer, author of Listening to Prozac.

"There's a phenomenon of giving medication to people who are fairly
healthy," he says, "and having them overshoot to a point where they are
more culturally rewarded."

That may be one reason why it's hard for today's adolescents to absorb the
message when adults want them to understand that drugs can also be dangerous.

When the U.S. government founded the National Youth Anti-Drug Media
Campaign in 1998, it tried to instill in children the notion of an
"anti-drug" with 30-second, MTV-like ad spots.

But the government's own study, conducted by the University of
Pennsylvania, later found that children more heavily exposed to the ads
were actually more likely to experiment with illegal drugs.

No "anti-drug", it seems, has been able to override the pervasive message
that drugs exist to make people feel better.

What makes some children more likely to experiment with drugs than others?

If you asked most drug-education experts, they would tell you Jordan Temple
is a "high risk" potential user.

The streets of his neighbourhood in Queens, U.S., are teeming with dealers.
Some family members and friends are users.

A glance at Jordan (15) on the street reveals a skateboard tucked under his
arm, baggy jeans and dark skin.

But that quick look wouldn't reveal a report card decorated with As, a
penchant for chess, an early fascination with biology and an ability to run
a mile in less than five-and-a-half minutes.

It would also fail to include the fact that Jordan has been accepted to
Darrow, one of the nation's most prestigious boarding schools, in upstate
New York.

This "high-risk" teen is crossing the most daunting threshold of his young
life. But Jordan has stayed out of trouble and never taken drugs. And that,
he insists, has little to do with what any adults have told him about drugs.

Stories like Jordan's are among the the reasons that writer Meredith Maran
decided to write a book about why certain teens stay away from drugs while
others don't. After growing up in the sixties and seventies as part of a
generation that experimented with drugs, and raising two children who had
experiences with drugs, she went looking for answers.

"What does our children's drug use show us about them, about us, about the
world we have made for them?," she asked.

While writing Dirty: A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug
Epidemic, Maran identified two types of children who do take drugs: those
who "use" to have fun and those who "abuse" because they see few reasons
not to.

"It seems incredibly simplistic but most children say they do it because
it's fun and they go on to lead normal, healthy lives," she says. "And then
there are the kids who abuse drugs. And it's not just the traditional, 'Oh,
teenagers think they're going to live forever.' It's actually the opposite."

Sometimes, the trouble, says Maran, lies with children who, for whatever
reason, have been cut off from hope. They don't see a future that holds a
place for them.

"Kids who are in trouble emotionally, culturally, vocationally, use drugs
to harm themselves," she says. "They have a very astute social critique and
see very little they want to be a part of."

Curious about what keeps some children away from drugs, Maran went looking
for constants among those who'd never experimented, or who tried something
once or twice but stopped. Passion, she found, and the belief in being able
to make a difference in the world through that passion are possibly the
"anti-drug" education experts have been looking for.

During the recent war in Iraq, Maran was thrilled to see children out
protesting - not because of their political views but because they looked
so committed to something.

"Talk about keeping kids off the streets," she says. "Put them in the
streets behind a banner and you've got your problem solved. People need to
feel that what they do is a contribution."

Today, Isabel Maremont doesn't hang out with the teenagers who smoke and
drink. In fact, most adults would feel certain that Isabel, who lives in a
stable, two-parent home in a comfortable suburb, should be a low risk for
drug abuse.

A strong student, the ninth-grader has succeeded at almost everything she
has tried in her young life and certainly has the kind of passion and sense
of purpose Maran is talking about.

Just now, drug use has no appeal for Isabel. But if she ever tries drugs,
she imagines it will have something to do with the type of teens she hangs
out with. "I don't hang around with [kids who use drugs] now," she says,
"but I don't really know what they're like."

What may be hard for a young person like Isabel, say some experts, will be
the day when drug use comes closer to her experience. Her sixth-grade
anti-drug education class taught her about overdoses, brain chemistry,
quickened heart rates and irreversible dependency.

But what was never mentioned in the class was the possibility that, up
close, drug use might not look dangerous at all.

"One of the greatest epiphanies . . . is the first hit, when you discover
that you've been lied to," says Gray, who has long argued that failing to
teach kids that drugs may feel good is more of a "gateway" than the drugs
themselves.

One of the most explosive debates in drug education is the question whether
teens should be taught to fear even casual use.

Unlike sex education, where some students are taught abstinence with a
footnote - if you do it, here's the safest way to do it - the message in
drug education is to say no to everything.

Not allowing children to talk openly about any desires they may feel to try
drugs widens the gulf between them and adults, and they turn to other
sources of information, such as the Internet, Maran says.