Parents Question Youth Drug Study Results

It has, for at least two generations, been a fact of teenage life, lurking there in the space between sex and music. Ask at any schoolyard where the “stoners” eat lunch and you’ll be directed to a veritable tutorial on illicit drug use.

Nonetheless, the big news this week--at least on the presidential campaign trail--was a new national survey suggesting that families have resigned themselves to the use of illegal drugs. The head of the think tank that commissioned the poll urged parents to get “mad as hell” at the results: one teenager in five predicting they would someday use drugs, and nearly 50% of parents saying they expected their children would try them.

But on the home front Tuesday, the reaction among parents to that study fell short of what the authors may have had in mind.

For one thing, most said, the interpretation seemed off-base: Being realistic about the prevalence of drugs is not the same as being resigned.

And for all their frustration, many parents wondered whether anger was necessarily the most constructive response. After all, they said, this was a social issue that ranges from mildly troubling experimentation by otherwise well-adjusted teenagers to the deadly addictions symptomatic of deep emotional pain.

“Whatever they’re going to try, be it sex, drugs, alcohol, they’re going to do it,” said Jan Mankowski, an Altadena father. “[But] any kid that is brought up with intelligence or conscience is going to realize, ‘Hey, this is bad.’ ”

On Monday, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University released a national survey in which 22% of teenagers said it is likely that they will use an illegal drug in the future--double the percentage that gave that response in a similar poll last year.

Moreover, nearly half of the parents polled in the survey said they expected that their children would use drugs--and a fifth said they had been regular marijuana users in their younger days.

The results were seized on by the presidential candidates to blame each other for doing too little to halt teenage drug use. And Joseph A. Califano Jr., the former Cabinet member who now heads the center, charged that the survey revealed a troubling “resignation” among parents and teenagers to “the present mess.”

Not so, Southern California parents insisted Tuesday.

“I’m not going to give up and throw up my hands and say, ‘This is a done deal, no,’ ” said Barbara Inatsugu, a Santa Monica school secretary whose teenager graduated from high school last year.

But neither do she and her friends kid themselves about the availability of drugs, she said: “We know our kids are having to deal with this and the pressure from it.”

How intense is that pressure? From Orange County to the San Fernando Valley, the stories among parents were legion.

One mother of four in Whittier said she grounded her son for two months after she caught him smoking pot behind the local middle school when he said he would be skateboarding with friends. In Monrovia, a 47-year-old mother said that when she tried to curb her youngest son’s drug use, he threw her own youthful experimentation back in her face.

In Long Beach, a volunteer at a drug rehabilitation clinic mourned that she had failed to kick her habit before her daughter became a teenager, and stubbornly became an addict herself.

“A dysfunctional family will most often spit out a dysfunctional kid,” the 34-year-old mother said sadly.

Skip Feinstone, a Huntington Beach father of three teenagers, said his solution has been to involve himself as much as possible in his children’s lives. Currently, he’s the foundation president in his local elementary school district and a board director in the Orange County DARE program.

“As much as we’d like to,” he said, “we can’t control all these problems. We just make it a point of knowing where our children are.” As far as he knows, he said, his kids are clean.

Times staff writers Tina Nguyen, John Glionna, Jeff Leeds and Duke Helfand contributed to this story.