Mock Graves Serve as Grim Warning Against Drug Use : Substance abuse: As part of a national awareness campaign, 890 crosses are erected in Irvine to mark lives lost.

Each of the 890 grave markers represented a life that was destroyed by drugs. The people who put them there want to save their friends from the same fate.

“I’ve seen a lot of friends mess up their lives,” said Kimberly Carlson, 18, a freshman at Rancho Santiago College. Carlson, president of Drug Use Is Life Abuse, was driving the wooden crosses into the grass Saturday morning near Jamboree Road overlooking the southbound traffic on the San Diego Freeway. She has participated in this event since it began in 1987.

Carlson said that one of her former high school classmates at Orange High School is represented in the mock cemetery.

“She committed suicide after getting high,” Carlson said.

About a dozen students from county high schools and colleges and four county sheriff’s officials erected the mock cemetery in recognition of a national drug awareness campaign called Red Ribbon Week. The grave markers represent 890 deaths in Orange County related to cocaine and heroin use since 1987.

A second mock cemetery was erected by the same group of students along the northbound side of the freeway near Irvine Center Drive. Traffic slowed and many passersby honked in support.

Several students at the event said they worry about their friends who use drugs, but they feel nearly helpless to intervene.

“I am not here to enforce anything,” said Alysha Evers, 15, a sophomore at Orange High School. “Because (people with a drug problem) will not listen to you.”

Evers should know. She has been clean for seven months after overcoming a drug problem that began when she was in seventh grade. “I don’t know why I started,” she said. “I was stupid.”

She said that many of her friends use drugs regularly and so did she.

“I would get depressed and angry,” Evers said. “Finally I told my mom I wanted to go to the hospital.” After completing a rehabilitation program, she relapsed once but then decided that drugs would no longer be a part of her life.

Most of the students at the event said they have dealt with the trauma of drugs even though they do not use them.

“I tried to get my friend off of drugs, but she needs it, loves it, and can’t stop,” said Jackie Taylor, 14, an Orange High School sophomore. Taylor said she began noticing friends using drugs in seventh grade although she herself has remained unswayed by peer pressure.

“My friends all know that I am drug-free,” she said. “I don’t drink and I don’t smoke and I think my friends respect me for that.”

Her philosophy is simple: “I have a long way to go and I don’t want to mess it up. I know that the best life is one without drugs.”

She realizes that not all of her friends subscribe to that philosophy.

“I give them information. But they have to stop themselves,” she said.

Drug Use Is Life Abuse cites statistics showing a 70% decrease in countywide drug overdose deaths among high school students in 1990 compared to 1989. During the first nine months of 1991, there have been two drug-related deaths among high school students.

And students said they notice increasing numbers of friends and classmates who are trying to quit.

“A lot of it has to do with friends and who you hang around with,” said Afshan Ali, 18, a recent graduate of Capistrano Valley High School in Mission Viejo.

“My friends are very supportive and would not condone drugs,” she said. “But it is frustrating because it is a problem that will never end.”