San Marcos Pupils Get the Anti-Drug Message

The 15-year-old girl, sitting in a car in the high school parking lot, was caught red-handed by the principal: She had a mirror, a razor blade and tiny plastic bag--accessories that telegraphed the use of drugs.

When Carmen Martinez arrived at the school a few minutes later, the girl, dressed in a pullover shirt, pedal pushers and pumps, was sobbing uncontrollably in the principal’s office.

“I don’t want to go to jail,” she gasped almost incoherently between sobs.

“If you’ve never been arrested before, don’t worry. You’ll be released to your parents,” Martinez said, holding the girl’s hand and comforting her like the drug abuse counselor she is.

“I’ve used crystal before,” the girl admitted, still sobbing out of control. “I went to rehab. But I’m not using it now.” She paused. “My parents are going to kill me.”

Martinez looked into the girl’s eyes. They were dilated, and the girl’s drug use was further betrayed by her hysteria. “Dear, if we do a urine test on you today, what kinds of drugs are we going to find?” asked Martinez, like the nurse she is.

The 15-year-old came clean. “Yeah, I did drugs today,” she hesitated, tears rolling down her face. “Crystal. Before I came to school. But it was the first time in a year. Really!”

They talked a little longer, and then Martinez ordered the teen-ager to stand up. “We’re going to go the station,” she said matter of factly, and slapped on a pair of handcuffs like the narcotics officer she is.

When San Marcos school administrators ordered new battle lines be drawn on the war against drugs, they copied a program used in neighboring Vista schools, including a special curriculum designed to teach even kindergartners about chemical devils.

Then they hired a full-time drug counselor to work with high school students that were teased or downright smitten by drugs.

And for good measure, they threw in Carmen Martinez.

With that, the war front may have shifted just a smidgen in favor of the good guys.

Special Assignment

Martinez is a deputy sheriff, on special assignment to San Marcos and its school district to pull in truants (“Kids who aren’t in school are up to no good,” is her motto), bust kids doing drugs and, more importantly, pop the dope dealers peddling brain killers to schoolchildren.

If good narcs defy stereotyping, Martinez is real good. She’s everything Miami Vice isn’t. She can’t have her picture published because it would blow her cover. Suffice to say she’s petite, and over 40, but fit enough to handle a guy twice her size and half her age. Now add a gun under her blouse, handcuffs in her pocket, a beeper on her belt and a badge in her purse.

Listen to her as she sweet-talks some kids about the virtues of good grades, and hear her voice change when she threatens to slam-dunk others for their arrogance.

One morning last week, she nabbed a dozen truants, helped corner a couple of 16-year-olds suspected of trying to sell marijuana, and turned over two teen-age girls to their parents: one, for possession of drug paraphernalia, and the 15-year-old for being high on crystal--a synthetic, white powdery methamphetamine snorted through the nose and described as a poor man’s cocaine.

There are no direct statistics to quantify the effect Martinez is having on drug use in San Marcos schools, but there is no doubt in officials’ minds that she’s having an impact.

“The good kids want to be her friend, but the word’s out that if you screw up in San Marcos, Carmen’ll get you,” said Marv Glusac, principal of San Marcos High School.

Indeed, her reputation preceeds her. “Yeah, I know who she is but I’ve never met her before,” Rob Glidden, 19, said sheepishly. He had just been ordered out of his car by Martinez for questioning about why he was loitering near San Marcos High School. “I heard she does her job really well. There are people around here who really watch out for her. They say it seems like she’s everywhere. But she’s really cool about it.”

The San Marcos Unified School District is not bashful in acknowledging social problems that surface in its schools. When a high school counselor several years ago told her bosses that 178 girls--20% of all the girls on the San Marcos High School campus--admitted to her they were pregnant during the course of the year, the district publicly acknowledged the problem to stunned parents and redesigned its curriculum to better address adolescent sex and sexuality.

And like a growing number of school districts in San Diego County, San Marcos has taken an aggressive stand on drug use.

Officials were attracted to a program started in the neighboring Vista Unified School District in 1984, called “Here’s Looking at You, 2000.” That program, funded in part by a state grant, features a curriculum designed to help students from kindergarten through high school develop their self-esteem and the ability to say no to drugs and to learn the dangers of drugs. Furthermore, more than 40 teachers and counselors in the Vista Unified School District have received specific training on drug counseling, to help them identify students on drugs and deal with them.

Treatment Recommendation

Students who admit or are found to be using drugs are then referred by the school district to a private agency that evaluates how the students should be treated--ranging from hospitalization in one extreme to simple in-school counseling.

Finally, it incorporates “community support” in the drug war, most notably with the hiring of a deputy sheriff who, among other things, meets with students and explains the hard-line legal reality of drug use.

Perry Templeton is the deputy sheriff and narcotics officer assigned to Vista.

“If a kid comes up to me and says he has a crystal problem, I’m not going to bust him,” Templeton said. “But if he comes to school stoned, I will.

“Drugs is a matter of supply and demand. We can’t address the supply side very effectively, so we have to adjust the demand side,” he said.

San Marcos school officials bought the Vista curriculum and hired Carmen Martinez as their counterpart to Templeton.

“A lot of schools deny they even have a drug problem,” Martinez said. “That’s baloney. Every school does.”

The two deputies work hand in hand, with one often working the streets in the other’s city, where they might be less known to drug dealers. They often work their cases together, one backing up the other when making a drug buy and then making the follow-up arrest. They’ve done it dozens of times: in front of liquor stores, at front doors of homes, in parking lots.

Martinez is a former nurse who burned out in the medical business and followed a long-held desire to become a cop. Narcotics work has allowed her to integrate her interest in medicine, kids and police work.

She refuses to give up on the drug battle and takes hope in the growing number of young people who reject drugs. “I’m sure that every kid (in high school) has been offered it. But not every kid uses it. Some are insulted by it.”

She has arrested a 9-year-old boy in Vista for being under the influence of marijuana, crystal and PCP, and she arrested a tattooed 11-year-old in San Marcos who was addicted to heroin, thanks to his uncle, a drug dealer.

She refuses to grow frustrated when she sees drug suspects freed and back on the streets. “I find some reason to arrest them again. I’ll keep hitting them and hitting them and hitting them and get them really looking over their shoulder for me. I’ve got lots of patience.”

Students hold Martinez in some sort of awe. She pulled her sports coupe up alongside a sedan in a parking lot where two teen-agers sat, sipping a soft drink and smoking cigarettes. She ordered them out of the car--and told them to put out their cigarettes.

“Weren’t you on a motorbike the last time I got you?” she asked one of them. “Yeah,” he said, sounding incredulous. “How’d you remember?”

“I don’t forget,” she said.

The San Diego Police Department in January instituted its own drug abuse program for San Diego city schools, called DARE--Drug Abuse Resistance Education.

The program was developed by the Los Angeles Police Department for its city schools in 1983 and has received rave reviews.

The program calls for uniformed--but unarmed--police officers to visit 36 of San Diego’s 120 elementary schools, spending a full day on each campus one day a week for a semester. The officers talk to sixth-graders about drug abuse and its consequences and how to deal with peer pressure through assertiveness and improved self-esteem.

School officials in Los Angeles reported that DARE schools experienced less vandalism, and that student participants had improved grades and attitudes towards law enforcement.

The classroom police officers are said to be more credible to the students than regular teachers when talking about drugs. But they do no on-campus or off-campus drug enforcement; tips about drug users and dealers are turned over to narcotics detectives and patrol officers assigned to that specific beat.

“I’m not going to say that one program works better than another program,” said Ken Meil, who coordinates the Vista program, which does rely on regular classroom teachers to talk about drugs--with a deputy sheriff in proximity to counsel some students and to arrest others.

“What’s important is that schools do something to address the problem, and tailor it to meet their needs,” he said.

Jay Delaney, the full-time drug abuse counselor for San Marcos high school students, said Martinez is a valued partner in his district’s drug battle.

“The kids tell me that there aren’t the mega people hanging out at the parks and the fast-food places with Carmen around,” Delaney said. “That’s because the kids know we have teeth in our policy--and that there are painful consequences beyond just a slap on the wrist by the school.”

Every student stopped by Martinez off campus is written up in a field interrogation report, for her files.

Martinez, too, visits classrooms in San Marcos: sixth-graders, just before they enter junior high school, to discuss the drug problems they may encounter, and ninth-graders at the beginning of the school year, to discuss drug use.

She shows them slides--”I hope they’re not too gross,” she said--which graphically show huge, gaping sores on drug users’ arms and legs where drugs are injected, and ugly blotches on skin caused by the chemical reaction of drugs that are snorted.

“I just don’t want to sugar coat anything about drugs,” said. “I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen what they do.”

Martinez also meets with parents, telling them the telltale signs of drug use by their children: changes in how they dress; new friends; pale skin and red, watery eyes; sleeplessness--or constant fatigue, depending on the drug; disinterest in school; a disregard for personal hygiene, and belligerence.

And she tells the story to anyone who will listen about the 15-year-old who sold pills to a classmate, promising it would get him high. The youngster took one, and it had no affect. He took another, and another, and finally nine in all before he was rushed to the hospital.

The youngster had been sold time-release asthma medication, and a few more would have killed him.

Susan Maki, principal of the New Horizon High School in San Marcos where students with discipline problems at the mainstream San Marcos High School are referred, said Martinez has been an invaluable asset.

“Carmen not only has the force of the law behind her, but her personality. She’s reality therapy for our kids. She doesn’t pussyfoot around with them, but she’s still compassionate.

“And I can tell you this: since Carmen’s been here, we haven’t had a single repeat offender. I think that’s more than just luck.”