Orange County Drugs : Athletes--Trouble in ‘Paradise’

A high school cross-country runner crashes his car after drinking at a party, killing himself and two other students.

A high school baseball player says he pitched his first varsity game with most of his teammates drunk.

A high school football coach starts a drug-testing program after finding two football players and a cheerleader had become addicted to drugs.

One might be surprised to hear of such unfortunate incidents taking place where one city’s slogan is “Another Day in Paradise,” where many residents think they have found the American Dream--Orange County.

Inner-City Tensions

Orange County. A place where many people moved to escape the problems presumed to be connected with the tensions of inner-city life. But a three-month investigation by The Times into the effect of drugs and alcohol on high school athletics in Orange County reveals that abuse is rampant.

Interviews with more than 120 students, parents, teachers, school administrators and drug-abuse experts indicate that pressures on high school students--athletes in particular--and substance abuse as a means of coping with those pressures are the same everywhere.

Drug abuse among the young knows no geographic, ethnic or economic boundaries. “I’ve seen it in Tucson, at a small school in Corning, N.Y., and in Orange County,” said Tim Allen, executive director of the Break Through Clinic in Costa Mesa, which helps high school students addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Pressures Build Up

“It’s the same everywhere. Pressure at home, pressure at school, pressure from the coaches, pressure from society, pressure from the boosters,” he added. “It just starts to build up, and finally the chemicals will relieve the pressure. Athletes are much more susceptible to go out and get drunk and ease the pressure.”

A 1986 statewide survey by the California attorney general’s office found that 85% of 11th-grade students had tried alcohol and 65% had been intoxicated and that 45% had been high on drugs other than alcohol. The same survey found that 20.1% used beer and 13.4% used marijuana at least once a week.

As for Orange County, a 1983 survey revealed that by the time students reach 11th grade, 69% had been intoxicated from alcohol and 47% from other drugs. Of those who said they used alcohol or marijuana weekly or more often, 30% drank beer, 15% took marijuana and 10% used hard liquor.

The studies did not address drug and alcohol use by high school athletes specifically, but few teen-agers interviewed by The Times disagreed that the problem is also acute among athletes.

“I’d say that 95% of the kids in school drink,” said Craig Rebeck, a track athlete at Mission Viejo’s Capistrano Valley High School. “I’d say it’s a little higher for athletes.”

Last March, close to Rebeck’s home in Mission Viejo, a runner from St. Margaret’s High School in San Juan Capistrano was killed with two passengers in an auto accident in San Juan Capistrano when he was driving from a party to a school dance. Witnesses and police said he was drinking.

Preston Walrath, a football player and track teammate of Rebeck, tried to explain why athletes feel the need to use drugs and alcohol: “There’s a lot of pressure on us. We’re in the spotlight a lot.”

So is the problem.

Heightened Awareness

The public’s awareness of drugs and sports has been heightened by the deaths of basketball star Len Bias and pro football defensive back Don Rogers and by growing revelations of drug and alcohol abuse by professional athletes--John Candelaria, Dwight Gooden, Thomas (Hollywood) Henderson, Micheal Ray Richardson, Steve Howe. . . .

The message to young athletes is mixed: On the one hand, professional athletes have been telling kids to steer clear of drugs and alcohol, but actions over the years have spoken a lot louder than their words.

First Lady Nancy Reagan has targeted drug abuse as her No. 1 concern, her ‘Say No to Drugs’ campaign enlisting the help of prominent athletes and actors who exhort kids--in myriad public service messages--to stay clean.

But for some teen-agers, that is tough to do. They are prey to fears and the pressures of growing up. There is the desire to be liked, the pain when they aren’t, boyfriends, girlfriends, parties, parties, parties.

And high school athletes face even greater demands: The pressure to perform on the field, the celebrity status that makes their presence mandatory at parties, the excuses people make for them that lets them escape accountability for their actions.

Their job description entails showing up at all the right places (parties), and doing what the “right” people do, even if some people say it is wrong. Deviation from what the crowd says is the norm is not good social etiquette for a 17-year-old.

“When I first got to high school, I was worried that I’d have to hide to get high,” said Greg, a baseball player at a south Orange County high school who is a recovering alcoholic and drug abuser. “But then I found out that the athletes were the biggest ‘partiers’ in the school. I wasn’t worried then; I knew I’d fit right in.”

To be sure, not every high school athlete is abusing alcohol or drugs. Many manage to temper their use or to stay clean altogether. But often that, too, creates pressure.

‘We Drink as a Team’

Ken Luckham, a pitcher at Fountain Valley’s Los Amigos High School, said he was ostracized by teammates for not participating in postgame beer parties. He said he was told, “We play as a team; we drink as a team.”

Max Schneider, a Santa Ana physician who treats addicts at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange, said: “I am aware of a star athlete (in Orange County) where marijuana was a part of his team’s ritual and the kids smoked together. Booze--if you didn’t drink you were out.”

Many high school athletes find the world created for them is intolerable without the “relief” of drugs and alcohol.

Look at it as a 16-year-old high school athlete: He wants to be a success at sports. And teammates tell him that certain drugs help build up the body, that others take away physical pain and still others make the user just plain mean. Bottom line: Drugs will make him a better athlete.

And although adults tell him not to take drugs, they have shown him how important it is to be successful.

“The message is clear to the kids. Success means winning,” said Break Through’s Allen, who travels nationally speaking about teen-age drug and alcohol abuse. “We start them early with competition soccer, Pop Warner football, Little League. The coaches seem to have a tendency to live vicariously through the kids. The ‘have-to-win’ philosophy is given to the kids. What happens is that the kids tie their own sense of self with the score on the scoreboard.

“The same thing happens in high school. School principals and coaches, one of their criteria for success is a successful athletic program. Automatically that elevates all the athletes. It puts a great deal more pressure on the athletes than the regular student.”

And so kids such as Joe, a 16-year-old sophomore and football player at a south Orange County high school, discovered that drugs helped him reach the peak that coaches were looking for. When a player in practice called him a derogatory name, he found himself reacting as he had never reacted before. Joe, who had been using marijuana since the seventh grade, had smoked marijuana before practice for the first time.

“I punched him in the ribs, and when he went down, I kicked him in the face mask,” Joe said. “My coaches laughed. They told me to go and do it again on the next play. I thought I was doing what was right because I wanted to make them happy. Looking back, it was a pretty bad thing to do.”

And what do you do if you are the kid getting kicked? You cannot get any better at your game if you are in too much pain to play. Ellen Morehouse, a New York clinical social worker, remembers her encounter with a football player who told her that he and his teammates used “crack” (rock cocaine) during games. Morehouse said the boy was surprised to see her shock. What he did was just a matter of survival. He told her:

‘A Lot Easier’

“If you’re facing somebody that weighs 50 pounds more than you and you know in a matter of seconds that the ball is going to be snapped and that person is going to be on top of you and you’re going to get hurt, it makes it a lot easier to not give up if you’re on ‘crack.’ ”

The attitude is well-embedded in high school athletes’ heads. Win. Perform. Win. The two seem inseparable. But neither is easy to achieve, especially when it must be attempted in full view of others.

“When you think about a kid who studies for a chemistry test, and it’s pressure enough knowing he needs to get some kind of grade on this,” Allen said. “But take that same kid and put him on the football field. Now his test is in front of 5,000 people. You get him out there in the end zone with five seconds left and he drops the winning pass and not only do 5,000 people see it, but it’s in the paper the next day and on the films Monday night. And he gets it Monday morning when he walks across campus and his friends see him and say, ‘How does it feel to have cement for hands?’ He gets it all the time.”

Bill Workman, who coaches the Orange Coast College football team, coached at Huntington Beach’s Edison High School for 13 years. He produced some of the best teams in the state, which produced the inevitable expectations.

“At Edison you are expected to win,” he said. “If you failed, there was a lot of pressure. People said things on campus. There were reasons to escape and relax and do those things (take drugs).”

Joe, the football player from a south Orange County high school, used to smoke marijuana before games “just so I wouldn’t have to think about all the stuff I had to do. There’s a lot of pressure to win, and you always worry about the coach and what he’s going to think. After the game, we’d always get stoned to get all the pressure off.”

And what happens when they can’t handle the pressure, when they don’t perform up to standards that either they or others have created? What happens when the dreams of superstardom fade into mediocrity?

“Some kids base their whole lives on being athletes,” Break Through’s Allen said. “That’s how they see themselves, that’s how we allow them to see themselves. When they lose that, it’s absolutely devastating.”

Richard Fanti, Santa Ana High School quarterback, has seen it happen.

“They know that they’re not going to be that good so they figure, ‘Why bother?’ ” Fanti said. “They get into a different scene. At first, they start going out with their friends and not showing up for practice and then they drop practice. Before you know it, they’re asking you, ‘Do you want to buy some of this?’ They find something else to occupy their time, something else that will make them popular. Drugs will make you popular like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.”

Elgie Belizzio, a school administrator in Salinas and executive director of Sunrise House, an outpatient crisis center in Salinas, said: “They’ve been taught that using these things works. It’s the quick fix. You don’t pump iron; you use steroids. If you’re hurt, you take or drink something to feel better. It’s our society’s credit card mentality; you don’t have to endure pain. Kids have to learn that pain is not bad if you work through it.”

The situation is difficult to ignore, but some parents persist in the false belief that their children’s upbringing has made them immune.

“I’ll go into a situation where I’ve been asked to address a parent group at the school, and we might have 300 to 400 parents,” said Dave Larson, executive director of the Orange County chapter of the National Council on Alcoholism.

“I’ll make the statement that 97% of all the students in the school are experimenting with drugs and alcohol. And every parent in the audience says to themselves, ‘Whew! Thank God my kid is in the 3%.’ ”

To many parents, it does not seem logical that someone who depends so much on his or her body would do anything to harm it. A parent who drives his kid to summer league basketball games and watches the kid work out with weights and run each morning cannot be blamed for figuring his kid is clean.

‘Parents Are Very Naive’

“I think parents are very naive to think that student-athletes think their body is a temple,” social worker Morehouse said. “They wouldn’t do anything to make it impure. That’s not what kids are thinking.”

Many times what the kids are thinking is that sports presents a wonderful alibi. They find out that parents, coaches and administrators, many times subconsciously, make allowances for an athlete.

“After every baseball practice, me and my friend would go get stoned (smoke marijuana) in the back of his truck, then I’d come home,” Greg said. “I’d eat a lot, then go to sleep. She (his mother) thought I was hungry and tired because I had a hard practice. Baseball was my best excuse.”

Other times, he said: “All my mom had to do was smell my breath to know I was drunk. I didn’t even try to hide it. I was so messed up. But she pretended like she didn’t know.”

Allen of Break Through encountered a teacher who heard him talk about “enabling behavior,” actions that allow another person not to suffer the consequences of their actions.

She told Allen that a student, a football player, had walked into her class smelling of alcohol. She sent the boy to the vice principal and the vice principal suspended him from school.

She told Allen that three other teachers approached her that day.

“One said, ‘You know, he’s been coming to school loaded for the past three years. It was the only way I could control him.’ So she turned her head because it was easy for her,” Allen said.

An English teacher “came to her and said, ‘He’s a good kid; he’s having problems at home. I smelled alcohol on his breath yesterday so I gave him a breath mint and told him to stay away from the administration.’

“Then a coach, the football coach, came in and says, ‘What did you do? How come you threw him out of school? Don’t you understand that we’re playing for the championship this week, and he’s the leading rusher in our league? Last weekend I had to bail him out of jail for drunk driving. Football is the only important thing in his life, and you got him thrown out of school.’

‘Not Held Accountable’

“And that’s exactly what we do for the athletes. . . . We let them slide and let them get by with certain behavior, and they are not held accountable for it,” Allen said.

Adults can be part of the problem for many reasons, even unwittingly. Many parents, for example, do not recognize alcohol as a drug, according to Larson of the National Council on Alcoholism. And parents often permit their children to drink.

Dick Enright, football coach at Mission Viejo’s Capistrano Valley High School, offered the obvious: “Because the parents drink, they don’t mind their kids drinking, as long as they don’t smoke dope or do cocaine.”

Alcohol, Larson said, is the drug most abused by teen-agers.

“If I drink one beer, I might as well drink six,” said Deanna de St. Paer, a senior who played junior varsity softball at Irvine’s University High School. “It’s so much easier to talk to that one guy standing in the corner who is absolutely gorgeous when you’ve had a few beers. You’re more interesting, he’s more interesting, the party is more interesting. If you’re sober, you think, ‘Ah, what do I say?’ You don’t want to make a fool of yourself. When you’re drunk, you don’t care.”

Cocaine and its cheaper derivative, “crack,” have become popular to the point of challenging marijuana as the second-most-used substance. And doctors are warning that many teen-agers are drinking excessively and combining alcohol with other drugs.

“Guys are always seeing what will happen if they try this with that,” said Mark, a 16-year-old former water polo player who said he sold drugs at Buena Park High School. He asked that his real name not be used.

For those parents who are aware how vulnerable their children are, the situation can be overwhelming and terrifying.

“I get a knot in my stomach every morning when they leave for school,” said Bob Spence, former Los Amigos High School baseball coach who has two children in high school. Spence has reason to worry: Over the two-year period he coached at Los Amigos, 1985-86, he suspended several players for drinking alcohol.

Helpless at School

“I love my kids, and I can take care of them when they’re at home,” Spence said. “But you’re helpless when they go to school. Sometimes I think the only way to solve it is to put bars on the doors and windows.”

For another Orange County father, the solution was more expensive. The father, a prominent Orange County basketball coach, discovered his daughter’s straight-A average turned to Fs because of drug addiction and he placed her in a drug rehabilitation hospital. The final tab--$37,000.

There are other solutions, but none of them are easy.

“I feel like I’m in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean bailing out water with a coffee can and no one there to help me,” said Larson of the Alcoholism Council.

There are no sure-fire, crash-course cures. Experts say education about how to deal with life without drugs must begin in the home. The strongest lessons are usually the example by parents.

“I got drunk with my parents on a camping trip,” said Joe, a football player at a south Orange County high school who is a recovering alcohol and drug abuser. “They figured it was all right because I was with them. But it was like telling me it was OK to get drunk.”

The experts say it is critical for parents--and children--to understand from the start that sports are fun, not mandatory. That win or lose, their children are still loved. And no matter what the child’s prowess, athletics makes up only one facet of his or her life.

“If athletics is the only way kids know how to deal with things, the only way kids can make friends, that’s as bad or addictive as the drugs,” Allen said. “Because you become so consumed with that, you forget the other things in your life. These kids are only 16 years old. They have 16-year-old minds, and we expect them to act like professionals.”

Some high schools searching for solutions have turned to drug testing of athletes. Huntington Beach’s Edison High School started the nation’s first successful testing program in 1985. Since then Banning (Carson), Fontana and Colton high schools have adopted programs, as well as schools in the San Diego, Coronado and Fallbrook unified school districts. Mission Viejo High School will test its football teams starting next fall.

When all good intentions fail and the teen-ager uses drugs, drug rehabilitation facilities have become a well-worn route to recovery. Since 1982, there has been a 400% increase in the number of rehabilitation facilities in California, said Chauncey L. Veatch III, director of the state’s Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs.

What they find out in treatment, what many kids, parents, coaches and teachers find out from living with the situation, is that drugs and alcohol are not the real villains. They are only the means for many high school athletes to escape something larger.

Win. Perform. Win.