Bad Habits : Testament to the Downward Spiral of Drugs and Teen Angst

They needed so badly to fit in, feel better or rebel that hardly anything could have dissuaded them.

Not drug education programs. David Kelley, 17, of Westminster, said he and his junior high cronies laughed through the school presentations; they were loaded at the time.

Not private schools or student activities. April Alegria, 15, of Los Alamitos, said she went to Claremont High School, a private school in Huntington Beach. “It was the biggest druggie school in the world. We would smoke pot in the bathrooms,” she said. April was also a cheerleader. “That’s where the drugs are really at. Cheerleading and football players.”

Not middle-class homes with “family values.” Holly Oehlman, 17, of Long Beach, once told her mother that she would get extra credit if she brought cookies to school. “So we baked cookies,” said her mother, Pam, a school librarian and former Girl Scout leader. “I found out later she hadn’t been to class in weeks.”

Now, unlike their partying peers, the students are recovering in a live-in high school for teen-agers with drug problems, the Phoenix Academy in Santa Ana. Not much older, they feel far wiser now than their drug-using former schoolmates.

These students said they had perceived drugs as the key to popularity. “The only people at my school who were popular and who everybody knew were people who were using,” said Tyrisha Adams, 14, about Buena Park Junior High School.

Everything from marijuana to LSD was affordable and laughably easy to obtain, the students said.

One girl said she got drugs from her mother. “At first she didn’t want me to. But then, it became a relationship for me and her. I never understood her. She never understood me. But once we started using drugs together, it was like a relationship for us, you know? That was the only thing we had in common.”

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What their friends don’t understand, the students said, is how much they can lose, and how quickly.

Several said they had attempted suicide. David said he and some friends once went looking to kill some people who had threatened them. “We didn’t find them. Then the next weekend, we were going to go kill the guys on a Friday night and Thursday night I tried to kill myself so I never (did it).

“You lose all your judgment and stuff. You go crazy. You don’t realize it when you’re on the drugs and then afterward, when you realize what you did when you were on the drugs, you realize how stupid it was.”

Jennifer Perez, 16, of Walnut, the daughter of a Los Angeles policeman, said: “I lost my mom, my dad. I had one sober friend. I lost her. I didn’t have a house. Finally I didn’t have anything except myself.

“I never thought I’d do the things I had to do to survive on the street. I had to steal from old ladies and I had to do things with males that I didn’t want to do to have someplace to stay. I had to sleep in places I didn’t want to sleep.”

Tyrisha said: “It all happens so fast. Within a year and a half, I’d lost like 40 pounds. You don’t realize how much you’re doing. You can’t see it.”

When it became unbearably clear that their children were out of control, parents tried psychiatrists, counselors, drug treatment programs and hospitalization. The students said they paid lip service to the counselors until they could get out and use again.

Holly went to four programs, three counselors. “I hated the psychiatrists,” she said. “It’s like I would use them just to get trust back with my parents, to make them think we’re actually moving on. Really, it was just an act. It was like a blanket to cover everything up.”

Finally, they found the Phoenix Academy, a residential high school run in cooperation with the local school district by Phoenix House, a 27-year-old drug treatment program whose rigidly structured methods resemble a military boot camp with intensive psychotherapy. The Orange County facility, one of five nationwide, treats 50 volunteer and court-appointed youths. It costs about $24,000 per year per student, paid for mostly with public funds.

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Now, their days begin at 6 a.m. with making beds--hospital corners required--and doing chores. Their parents visit for family therapy and a weekly evening tea. They confront one another in intensive encounter groups; elsewhere they appear calm, serious and polite. Good behavior earns such privileges as music, TV and outside visits. Sometimes they tour local schools to lecture students on the pitfalls of drugs.

“People who use drugs, adolescents especially, are all about doing what feels good to them, what they want to do and disregard everybody else. It’s very important to them to have structure,” said William Smith, director of clinical services for Phoenix House programs in California.

“If you talk to our kids, they’ll tell you they didn’t realize it, but they wanted structure in their life. They wanted adults to be responsible, not to tell a 14-year-old, ‘It’s your life, you decide what to do with it.’ ”

Smith said it remains unclear why one teen-ager can be devastated by drug use, while another, sometimes even a sibling, can take it or leave it.

Still, he attributed the recent increase in teen drug use partly to “the permissiveness of society and parents.” (Many parents don’t realize, he said, that “the marijuana that people smoked in ‘60s and ‘70s is not the marijuana that kids are smoking today. They don’t have an appreciation of how that can impact growth or retention. They’re dealing with information that’s antiquated and doesn’t apply today.”)

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Since they started living at the academy, the students have been regularly drilled in honest emotional expression and group responsibility, and been taught to move beyond feeling victimized by their backgrounds: The majority have been sexually molested and nearly half come from homes where parents are addicted to drugs or alcohol.

It’s not easy. Staffers say at least 40% drop out in the first three months.

“Every single night I (have) to talk about my feelings and I hate it, too,” David said. “It’s hard to get into. It hurts so bad to start getting into it and you start crying and I don’t like crying in front of people. I feel like a wuss or something.”

Of those who complete the average 14-month program, 85% will be drug- and crime-free, employed or studying full time after three to five years, Smith said.

After 15 months, Holly is nervous about re-entering the outside world.

“I don’t want to go back to the same high school I came from. I have a reputation there. I know so much about it there. I know a lot of the tricks and things. I know how they smoke in school. And I know all the drug addicts, the dealers, like where they go for lunch. That stuff gives me a back door. Say I go out for lunch one day, and I’m not having the greatest day. . . .”

The students said that, in general, they feel safer behind the academy’s stucco walls. Tyrisha said wistfully: “In some ways, I wish the whole, like, world could be in here, you know?”

She is afraid to return to school because she still wants to be popular. “My counselors and my family tell me there is cool and popular people who are sober and I’m sure there is, but I’m scared. I looked down on people before who weren’t, like, using. I don’t want people to look down on me.”

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In the end, the students offered few solutions for parents, teachers or government bureaucrats, other than making available more long-term therapy programs like the one they’re in. Some suggested banning gangsta rap music with violent street talk. Others disagreed. None wanted drugs legalized.

“Kids are going to have to figure it out for themselves,” Jennifer said. “I think they’re going to do what they’re going to do and experiment and just figure out the hard way that it’s just not worth it.”