Bennett Gives Students Gruff Anti-Drug Talk

Back in the classroom again, William J. Bennett wanted to do more Thursday than tell students to “just say no.” He wanted to tell them why.

Drugs, the director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy warned, make you thin and weak and old and ugly. They make you stupid, he added. They turn you into a jerk. And finally, he said, they can kill you.

This was no soaring oratory, no emotional crescendo. Instead, in his first foray into anti-drug exhortation, Bennett stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned gruff.

“When you take drugs or sell drugs, you’re killing people,” he told about 100 junior high school students at W. R. Thomas Middle School here. “You helped inject the needle in that vein. You helped him inhale crack. You helped pull the trigger of the gun that shoots somebody.”

“I want to make explicit what is too often implicit,” he had said earlier over breakfast. “There’s an awful lot of conspiracy of silence.”

Called Him ‘Supercop’

For more than two months, Bennett had kept away from schools and talked so much about punishment that his critics were calling him “supercop.” His junior high school lesson made clear that a similar emphasis on the consequences of drug use will play a central role in drug education.

Weren’t these scare tactics? a reporter asked. In response, Bennett quoted Plato: “Courage is knowing what to fear.”

Many in the teen-age audience thought that they already knew. Their middle-class Latino neighborhood in West Miami is called “Cocaine Alley,” and security guards patrol their school hallways. Things had been bad a few years back: fights, drinking, drugs. Now students have designated the place drug free. Just to be sure, lockers are frequently searched and a state trooper lives in a trailer on the school grounds.

But many of the 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds who listened raptly to Bennett said that they had learned lasting lessons.

“He really knows about drugs,” said ninth-grader Santelmo Hill, still struck by Bennett’s warnings about the consequences of drug use.

“You start by buying the drug, but, in the end, the drug will buy you,” Bennett had warned.

“I’m not telling you these things just to scare you,” he said. “But drugs are a plenty scary business, and it’s good to be scared of something that can really hurt you.”

Few Qualms

Perhaps as a result, the students voiced few qualms even about a Bennett suggestion alien to the junior high psyche: that students tell a responsible adult about friends who use drugs.

“Your friend might say: ‘You told on me. That was our secret,’ ” said 16-year-old Christian Toledo, who said that once he nearly was expelled from school for smoking marijuana. “But if you really care about your friend, you tell on him.”

If there was familiarity to the scene--with the burly Bennett bathed in the multicolored lights of a school stage--it was because he had visited schools 107 times while serving as education secretary from 1985 to 1988. But, although he formerly took as his text the need for improving academic standards, Bennett made only slight mention Thursday of that once-controversial agenda.

Even on a trip with an education focus, Bennett found the lure of police work irresistible. Television cameras spotted him Wednesday night on a stakeout with Miami-Dade police officers, watching from an abandoned apartment complex as officers posing as drug dealers arrested more than a dozen buyers and confiscated their automobiles.