Drug Bust’s Sting Sets Edison Students at Odds

The marching band’s drummers pa-rump-ump-ump-pummed across the quad. The choir trooped through the corridors singing “Deck the Halls.” It was the last day of classes before Christmas vacation at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, and for the most part the student body seemed charged with good cheer. But along with all the chatter about presents and parties, a less festive topic arose wherever students gathered to talk.

Two days earlier, Principal Jack Kennedy had announced over the school’s P.A. system that at 6:30 that morning Huntington Beach police had arrested 19 juveniles and four young adults on drug charges, the result of a 2 1/2-month undercover operation in which an unidentified 20-year-old female police cadet, posing as an Edison student, had purchased cocaine, marijuana and LSD from Edison students. By Friday, students’ opinions about the sting operation seemed to have congealed, while rumors about the incident flourished.

“I think it’s good,” one 17-year-old football player said of the sting during a class break. The student, like the majority of athletes (and coaches and administrators), has agreed to have his name put into a pool from which volunteers will be drawn periodically to undergo urinalysis tests for drugs. “We’re cleaning our act up with our drug tests. . . . If it takes this to clean their act up, I think its good,” he said, adding that he had no qualms about someone posing as a student to root out drug dealing.

“The kids don’t really know who the undercover persons on campus are. I think it’s going to help because they’ll always be afraid of someone else (another agent) being on campus,” he said.

A 14-year-old named Erica was also blunt in her support of using a pseudo student to infiltrate the campus. “It doesn’t bother me. It worked. They got ‘em,” she said.

But an 18-year-old, Pam Leonard, while enthusiastic about the idea of getting rid of drug dealers at Edison, remained ambivalent about the ethics of having a police cadet falsely present herself as a student.

“It’s kind of like they tried to trick us,” she said. “It’s not really fair, ‘cause you like to think you have a working relationship with adults, and when they try to trick you into something, you lose your trust in them.”

Still, reflecting what seemed to be the prevalent opinion on campus, Leonard said that the drug problem probably justified the school’s approach. “If it works, I think they should do it,” she said. “The most effective way might not be the best way or the nicest.”

“I was very glad this thing happened,” observed Armelle La Fonte, a 17-year-old exchange student from Paris, as another student grappled with a classmate, shouting, “Hey, I caught a drug dealer.”

‘Not as Free as Here’

“In France, the police wouldn’t have dared to do such a thing,” La Fonte continued. “Here drugs seem to be a way of life. In France, drug (use) is still something you hide--it’s not as free as here.”

Several students worried that the drug arrests would hurt their alma mater’s reputation, and a few mentioned a remark by Huntington Beach Police Lt. Barry Price--quoted in the press after the incident--that “in all fairness” Edison is “the cleanest” high school in the district.

“If there’s that big of a problem here, it’s scary to wonder what it’s like on other campuses,” said Tamara, 15.

John Napier, an English teacher, said he had conducted a poll of opinions about the arrests in his classes. “The vast majority approved. I felt the students were really behind it,” Napier said. But he mentioned also another poll he had taken in his classes which school administrators might find less heartening.

“I asked how many thought they could buy drugs the next day. Half of them raised their hands,” Napier said. “I had all of them arrested,” he joked.

Comments From the Field

At “smokers field,” an area just outside the school fence where Edison students congregate between classes to talk and some to smoke, some students thought that there might be temporary difficulty in finding drugs at Edison. But there was general agreement that the arrests had not wiped out drug dealing on campus.

“I could find (drugs), right now, anything I wanted,” said one 15-year-old.

“Easy . . . ,” a girl chimed in.

“No problem. Within the hour,” the 15-year-old said, pointing at the brick buildings and prefab classrooms on the campus. “Any drug I wanted. Cocaine, marijuana, speed. . . . Drugs for kids our age are easier to get than alcohol.”

According to Kay Bergdahl, a coordinator of volunteers for the Huntington Beach Union High School District, the undercover student’s final report specified that “48% to 53% of the (drug purchase) contacts” were made at smokers field. Many of the students gathered at the field during two breaks, however, denied that they used drugs at all. They argued that the group that uses the field was unjustly singled out by the undercover informant (whom they were convinced they knew and continually referred to by name, although her identity has not been made public).

“Most of the people who come out here come out here because they can’t handle the people who don’t come out here,” explained one boy. “The smokers are looked down upon as the druggies, the lowlifes, you know, the nothings. It’s not right. . . . Just by the clothes we wear and the way we act, the things that we say, the music we listen to, people automatically think we’re some kind of weird drug addicts. But nobody’s too intensely into (drugs).”

Students on the field were quick to defend their friends who had been arrested, claiming that the informant had focused her attention on students who had acted as middlemen rather than actual drug suppliers.

San Fernando Accent

“She was always trying to bribe (drugs) out of me,” said one 15-year-old student, adding that she doesn’t use drugs. “She’d try to crank it out of you.”

Said another girl, in an accent usually associated with the San Fernando Valley: “She was all, ‘You know where I can get any coke?’ And I was all, ‘Nooooo.’ And she’s all, ‘Come on, you gotta know where I can get it. . . .’ ”

“Full-on crank city,” said another girl.

“Fully just trying to bribe it out of you,” repeated the second. “I was like, ‘Sorry lady.’ ”

One 15-year-old said he knew several of the students the informant had pointed out as suspects. “A friend of mine, (whom he named) was arrested, and he doesn’t do any of that stuff, you know? But (the informant) was a girl . . . and being friendly, he got it for her”

“We know it was wrong,” one boy said, triggering a rapid fire series of remarks from his classmates:

“But (the school’s) approach was fully wrong.”

“It doesn’t change anything.”

“I think it just makes them more rebellious.”

“None of these kids are criminals.”

“Yeah, none of ‘em.”

“They’re just party-ers, having fun.”

Most of the students at smokers field said they believed that other “undercover students” are still on the Edison campus. Many also argued that if the undercover student had dressed and acted differently, if she had tried to cultivate friendships in what they called the “higher class” segments of the student population (with the “jocks,” “surfers” and “preppies”) that more drug activity, particularly cocaine use, would have surfaced.

“Tell them to have some (undercover agent impersonating a) jock chick,” one girl said, making a few seductive moves, to suggest the way the undercover student supposedly acted. “They’ll freak out at how many jocks are sellers. I swear to god!”

Elsewhere on campus, the discussion continued along similar lines. In one drama class, for instance, students paused in the midst of a Christmas party and gathered on the set of the play “Light up the Sky” to grapple with the issue of drugs.

With Beatles music blaring in the background, the talk quickly turned into a spirited free-for-all as students argued the effect of peer pressure on drug and alcohol use, and debated the effectiveness of the numerous anti-drug speakers and programs--including a peer counseling center--the administration had brought on campus.

The commotion quieted, though, when one student spoke up.

Grievous Experience

“I’m glad (the arrests) happened,” she said. “I used to deal, and I’m glad it happened to them because maybe now they’ll stop.

“Sometimes all you can do is watch people who are getting into drugs and feel sorry for them,” she said, adding, with a trembling voice, that she had not sought treatment herself until the day she watched a friend die of an overdose.”

Grabbing a quick lunch in the midst of a full day of conferences with the parents of the students who had been arrested, Edison Principal Kennedy said that he understood the complex issues of trust and friendship that the use of an undercover impostor had raised in some students’ minds. He said he understood why a student might, at first, feel he had been betrayed.

“But after I’d sifted it all out, and had to make a judgment, I think I’d say it was the proper thing to do,” Kennedy said.

As to the students’ remarks that the operation had hardly eliminated drugs on campus, Kennedy replied:

“That’s probably true. That makes sense. I would guess that if a student wants to find something, he can still find it on campus. And what that does is it points out to us again that we can’t stop, and that we must continue.

“This is not the end, this is just the beginning. We’ve heightened the awareness of our kids, and our staff and our community even higher than it was before, and now we’re going to try harder. We’ll come up with programs that we haven’t thought of yet. We’re going to help our kids.”