DRUG `PROBLEM' IS MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE

Numbers don't lie, but they also don't tell the whole story. The whole
story is much more complicated and takes much longer to tell.

Should we be alarmed, for instance, that 41 percent of Barrington High
School students have been offered drugs, according to the results of a
recent survey? Or should we be encouraged that only 27 percent actually
used drugs?

Examine the numbers even closer. They tell us that two out of every five
BHS students could have smoked pot last month. Or maybe they tell us that
three out of five never even saw a pot leaf.

Consider the numbers on actual drug use. They tell us that one out of every
four students uses drugs. Yet maybe the real story is that three out of
every four students does not use drugs.

You see, these numbers are two-dimensional -- lines on a page. They open
windows into the complicated lives of Barrington teenagers, but they don't
really allow us to step inside. To really understand drugs in this
community, you have to talk to the teens themselves.

Three of them this week offered rather illuminating commentary. Speaking on
the condition of anonymity (story on page 1), they said the drugs are
everywhere. They said that even if they haven't been offered any drugs,
they know where they can find some.

They also find it all very understandable. Kids with lots of money and
loads of free time are bound to experiment with recreational drugs. It was
that way in Barrington back in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, and it is still
true today. These kids have wealthy parents, relative to society at large,
and they live, as everyone knows, in "Borrington." Thus many of them use
drugs, mostly because they can.

After at least four decades of this ongoing cycle of teens partying -- kids
get the stuff, go to the beach to use it, cops arrive and chase them away,
kids go to a spot in the woods, cops chase them away, kids go home to the
garage, mommy and daddy are asleep -- it's dubious to suggest this
community really wants to say there is a problem.

But if it does, there are positive avenues to explore. Teens need
alternatives to drinking and smoking around campfires and down beach paths.
The Place, a teen hangout run out of the College Lane Barn, has had on and
off success. The Brickyard, a Maple Avenue restaurant run by and for teens,
is nearing completion, but it needs more money to officially open its
doors. Barrington should support the Brickyard concept, because it offers
something other teen centers have not: a sense, from teens' perspectives,
that it is being run by them, not by adults.

But this presupposes that the community has a problem. From your
perspective, does it?