Pot’s Deep Roots in Unlikely Ground

The young pot smokers of Manhattan Beach light up for laughs and the rush of a good high, not because of urban despair or lack of other pursuits.

They tend to be articulate, self-assured and free of any great worries about the future. For many of these teenagers, marijuana is nothing worse than a bit of spice--a secret ingredient--in a lifestyle meant to be fun, daring, a bit on the edge.

Some are second-generation pot smokers, the children of baby boomers who first “blazed” in the 1960s. Others are influenced by friends, music, movies and the shifting tide of popular opinion. They claim few misgivings over the double lives they lead: stashing “bud” in their closets and sock drawers, arranging deals over their own phone lines, slipping away to get high in garages, backyards or homes where the parents have stepped out for the night.

“I’ll tell you straight out--I toke, and I have for years,” said one 17-year-old senior at Mira Costa High School, a rolling, wooded campus ranked among the top high schools in the nation. “You’ve got every type doing it . . . the jocks, the ‘brainiacs,’ the preppies, the surfers, the hippies. . . . I know people who blow you away with their intelligence, and they’re snapping bongheads every night.”

Marijuana’s foothold here is strong--and, by most accounts, growing stronger. The teenagers of Manhattan Beach and its only high school, Mira Costa, appear to be right in step with recent national surveys showing a sharp upsurge in teenage use of marijuana.

What makes Manhattan Beach so striking is not just the rising numbers, but the extent that marijuana has sunk its roots into a community that defies most cultural stereotypes about drug abuse. Pot thrives here on the hardpan of a predominantly white, upscale town where crime rates are low and social problems are all but invisible. This coastal garden spot--”Beverly Hills by the sea,” in one woman’s words--has no festering pockets of poverty, no gang wars, no brazen street-corner drug dealers.

The 2,043 teenagers who enrolled this fall at Mira Costa make up one of the top student bodies in Los Angeles County. High test scores, impressive graduation rates and bountiful extracurricular activities are reasons that Mira Costa has been designated a “National Blue Ribbon School,” an honor that inspires much community pride. The school boasts 40 different clubs and organizations, 22 varsity athletic teams.

“Everything is here--everything,” one parent said.

Bedeviling to School, Community

Marijuana’s intractable presence has bedeviled the school and the community. One way or another, in ways both subtle and profound, pot touches the lives of every Mira Costa student. It is the subject of mandatory classroom lessons in a curriculum that has evolved to present a strong anti-drug message. It causes some students to avoid parties and shrink their social spheres; it causes others to perform poorly, or, in a few instances, to drop out of school entirely.

Rampant marijuana use has raised pointed questions in some minds about teenage values and the vigilance of today’s parents. The drug has smudged Mira Costa’s sparkling reputation: A few parents have expressed reluctance to send their children to the school, an attitude that distresses Principal John Giovati.

“It’s very easy for people in the community to say, ‘Well, you know, Costa has a drug problem,’ ” Giovati said. “My pat answer is, ‘Schools don’t have drug problems--kids have drug problems.’ ”

Intent on cracking down, Mira Costa arranged for an undercover police sting operation two years ago, resulting in the arrest of five students--and complaints that the probe was botched when teenagers got wise to it. Last school year, 15 students were suspended for marijuana possession or intoxication on or near campus.

Pot is one of the main reasons that a Manhattan Beach police officer now strolls the campus four days a week. It is the source of endless student banter and speculation in gym classes, in the open-air quad and at the lunch tables: Who uses it? Who has it? How good is it? Where did they get it? Who is staying clean? Why?

The most brazen light up on campus, clustering behind the gym or roaming open areas with joints wedged in casually dangling fingers. Far more often, smokers leave school to blaze, exploiting off-campus lunch passes or congregating after class in the hours before parents get home.

One 15-year-old remembers hanging out during lunch and before school in a stand of towering eucalyptus trees just north of the Mira Costa football field--an area now closed off with a chain-link fence. He would leave his house 40 minutes early every morning just to smoke pot there with his friends.

“I’d be mad if I couldn’t make it,” he said. “We’d either get high and go to school or get high and cut school.”

That student, who began nipping tequila in the sixth grade, said he progressed from marijuana to mushrooms, speed and LSD before winding up last year in a residential drug treatment center.

Only a small percentage of students get that deeply involved with marijuana and harder drugs, but the attitudes of today’s teenagers seem somehow different, scarier, than those of earlier generations--or so some believe.

Geography teacher Bob Timberlake, who likes to be a “fly on the wall,” eavesdropping on student conversations while eating lunch or grading papers, hears talk about wild parties, binge drinking, pot smoking to all hours of the night. The widespread pot use reminds him a little of the 1970s, a time of record drug abuse in America, when some of his friends treated marijuana as if it were the “lifeblood of their existence,” Timberlake recalled.

But that era was driven by forces of social rebellion: Vietnam, Watergate, racial turmoil, the Cold War. Today’s youth are not looking for escape; they are looking for thrill rides.

“They just feel this need to go out and party like a madman,” Timberlake said. “[And] if you don’t party, you don’t raise hell, then you’re strange, you’re out in left field, you’re a geek, you’re a leper.”

Jaded pot smokers even look with disdain on other pot smokers who are not sufficiently cool about lighting up.

“The geekier ones think they’re really being bad,” as in feeling guilty, said Debbie, one 15-year-old sophomore. Like many other minors quoted in this story about their personal use of pot, Debbie’s name has been changed.

Mike, 17, a senior, said: “To me, it’s just like drinking beer. I consider a joint about equal value to a pitcher of beer.”

Differing Influences, Divided Attitudes

To some degree, divided attitudes about pot are the product of sharply differing influences at home, which tend to polarize many of the students at Mira Costa.

Hundreds turn away from marijuana, spinning off into realms where pot is inconsequential. Many are the bright, ambitious offspring of corporate attorneys, architects, bankers and other professionals who make up much of the population of Manhattan Beach.

These teenagers are reared in conservative households where there are clear rules and expectations, where drugs and alcohol are not allowed. Their busy days and evenings are consumed with class assignments, sports and other extracurricular pursuits.

Lesley Fant, 17, is one of those top-tier scholars, a 4.0 student and member of the model United Nations. She is aware of the school’s pot smokers, but they occupy only the fringe of her world. At least five times in the last year she has turned down party invitations because she expected some of the celebrants to be getting high or drunk.

The most dramatic encounter she has had with marijuana occurred during a 10th-grade health class: Four or five students in a group discussion spoke up about getting high, getting in trouble, going to Juvenile Hall.

“I was pretty shocked,” Fant recalled.

Her experiences--and her values--differ sharply from those of Ricky, 15, a “B” and “C” student whose father is a successful professional and a pot smoker dating back to his own teen years, Ricky said.

Laughing, Ricky boasted of stealing from his father’s cache, a bedroom drawer, even while he derided the pot’s poor quality. (“He gets some dirty-ass weed.”) His father, who has caught Ricky under the influence of marijuana, disapproves of Ricky’s pot smoking, but his own habit gives him poor leverage in their strained conversations about it, Ricky said.

“He said he’d rather I smoked with him instead of [with] my friends, because my friends are troublemakers,” the sophomore said. “I said, ‘Hell, no.’ He’s told me to quit a couple of times. I said I’d quit if he would too.’ ”

Neither one has accepted the bargain.

“He doesn’t know I do it as much as I do,” Ricky said.

Most students who smoke pot hide it from their parents, but some tell stories about getting high with the parents of friends. Greg, 15, the student who entered a residential treatment program last year, spoke with amazement about toking weed with another young teenager whose father entered the room, sat down and started blazing with them. Greg was perhaps 14 at the time. It made him think pot really wasn’t so bad.

“This guy had good money, a good house, a good job, and he smoked marijuana,” Greg said. “I kind of looked at him like, ‘Yeah, I could do that.’ ”

He couldn’t--but some people do manage to work marijuana into their lives without losing control. They pass their classes, hold down important jobs. It is part of what makes marijuana such an enigma--a reason why even many adults have trouble deciding how they feel about it.

A Gray Area of Thought

Pot occupies a gray area in American thought. Scientific research has found evidence that pot is addictive and that it damages the lungs, but its status as a health threat is murky and subject to widely differing opinions, even among scientists. Tobacco and alcohol present some of the same problems, and those substances are legal. A significant number of marijuana users go on to harder drugs, but a larger share--80%, according to experts--do not. The growing movement to legalize pot for AIDS and cancer patients would seem to signal an expanding tolerance of the drug--California voters approved such a ballot measure in November--yet federal policymakers have vowed to turn back that tide.

One very confused mother is Sabrina, a woman in her 40s whose son recently graduated from Mira Costa. Sabrina was reared in a fairy tale world of “Ozzie and Harriet” values, but discovered pot, as so many others did, in the 1970s. She became an occasional user and remains one, toking on weekends, because it helps her to relax.

“Sometimes I can’t go to sleep because my mind is going,” she said.

When she learned a few years ago that her own two children were using marijuana, she fought them over it--but in vain.

“You can’t follow them around 24 hours a day,” she said.

Her children still smoke it. Sabrina--who spoke on the condition that her real name not be used--said she has slowly reconciled herself to that. She even lights up with them every once in a while, although it troubles her.

“I don’t know if there is any turning back,” she said. “I keep wondering if it’s my generation’s fault. Here we are saying don’t do it, and a whole bunch of these grown-ups are doing it.”

Conflicting messages tumble down onto teenagers from all directions, like steel balls in a pachinko game. Those messages come from parents and movies and rap and rock lyrics and television and professional athletes and magazines, and they directly shape the complex sociology of Mira Costa High.

Hard-line smokers and nonsmokers tend to segregate, but the nature of the campus--and the town--is one of great mixing: Many groups, many interests, pooling and flowing to the swift beat of clocks and parties, concerts and football games.

Weekend parties spring up constantly, a prominent feature of the affluent beach lifestyle. Some attract 50 or 100 teenagers, often at homes where no adults are present. Neighborhoods are relatively stable: Many teenagers have known each other since kindergarten. They may still gab in the street or watch “Beavis and Butt-head” together, even though one is now a surfer and the other plays tennis. Further churning occurs on dates, at dances or at hangouts: McDonald’s, Frogs teen nightclub, Yesterdays coffeehouse.

Pot leaks into the network at various points and migrates across all social circles. It seeps up into the ranks of the top students; it trickles down among the sophomores and freshmen.

“There are very few people who haven’t tried it at all,” said Robert, 17, a varsity athlete with better than a 3.6 grade-point average, who sat blazing one afternoon with two friends before their parents got home from work.

Robert works the network whenever his pot supply runs out. If he wants a joint, he might ask a neighbor, like borrowing a cup of sugar. A number of people on his block, about a mile east of the high school, have pot at home, he said.

To get a larger amount, Robert accompanies his good friend, Andy, to a home in Lawndale where they can score a full ounce of “swag weed” for $60, or half an ounce of premium-quality “chronic” for $170. Sometimes they put up $30 apiece to buy an ounce of swag, then sell it for a profit. Robert and Andy divide the ounce into “eighths,” a unit large enough to make five or six joints. They sell each eighth for $20, reaping a total profit of $100, minus whatever they smoke themselves.

The buyers are usually other students at Mira Costa. Robert passes the word at snack break or lunch: “Hey, anybody looking for some good bud? Give me a ring.” Sometimes a friend acts as a middleman, putting Robert in touch with a buyer. For getting the buyer “hooked up,” the middleman gets a complimentary share of the contraband.

“He’ll get smoked out . . . or [the buyer] will kick him down a bong-load,” Robert said. It is tantamount to a tip or finder’s fee.

Deals are often consummated after classes, in the parking lot at school or McDonald’s, typically in the students’ own Jeeps or Hondas.

Availability and Cost

Marijuana is easily available and economical in much of America, but especially in Los Angeles, one of the nation’s pot capitals. Authorities say that huge volumes of it flow in from Mexico, Northern California, Hawaii and elsewhere. Much is low- and moderate-grade stock; a lesser amount is specially cultivated, hybridized, vacuum-packed buds that are many times more potent than the weed of the 1960s.

“We’re seeing more of it at all levels--not only in the youth, but adults are using it more,” said Lt. Bernie Larralde, head of narcotics enforcement for the Los Angeles Police Department, which has seized twice as much pot this year as in 1995, even though narcotics officers are too busy with harder drugs to target marijuana. “There’s an unlimited number of consumers and dealers.”

Lee, 19, a former Mira Costa student, said he knows of dealers who drive to San Pedro and Long Beach to buy cheap Mexican weed that comes in by boat. The dealers are typically adults who live in Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Venice. They spend $200 to $275 for a brick, or pound, and a few dust the pot with cocaine or speed or soak it in LSD, hoping that their buyers will become users of those drugs.

Affording marijuana is not a problem for most Mira Costa teenagers. They have ample allowances, credit card privileges or friends who are willing to share.

Before drug problems put him in the residential treatment program, Greg used to filch twenties from his father’s wallet, confident that the cash would never be missed.

Andy boasted that his network of pot-smoking friends has expanded “on a logarithmic scale: I don’t spend any money on it any more. Every day, whether I’m looking for it or not, I get smoked out. It’s just the way the universe works. It’s in some kind of loop.”

Youthful braggadocio and paranoia--many teenagers and parents are fearful of admitting to marijuana use--make it difficult to gauge pot’s pervasiveness. Students estimate that 70% to 90% of their Mira Costa classmates have tried marijuana at least once; and the percentage of regular smokers may be anywhere from 25% to 60%, they say.

Not only are more teenagers using pot, but they are starting at younger ages, according to drug abuse counselors. Ten years ago pot smoking seemed to begin at 17 or 18, some counselors said. Today it seems to start at 13 or 14.

“It’s really gotten bad,” said Andrew Casey, an adolescent and family therapist who specializes in substance abuse at the Psychoneurology Institute in Mission Viejo. “Ten years ago . . . [the problem] was limited to pot, alcohol and some cocaine here and there, or LSD. But nowadays I see kids getting into everything. They’re not as selective as they used to be. They are more risk-takers.”

A number of nonsmokers at Mira Costa talked of being startled to learn that an especially good or clean-cut classmate was experimenting with weed.

“It’s sad,” said freshman Tara Bender, 15, who has experienced that disillusionment. “More and more people are starting to do drugs. . . . I don’t think it’s right, but teenagers are going to do it if they want to. They don’t have respect for laws.”

School administrators and faculty have been trying for years to curb marijuana use. Pot is part of the lesson plans in ninth-grade English, physical education, biology and physiology. A DARE officer comes in for a week during required 11th-grade health and adult-living classes. Students see a half-hour film on marijuana that explores how the drug diminishes motivation and cognitive reaction time, how it is stored in fatty tissues, how it may damage the lungs and reproductive system.

Mira Costa offers two counseling programs for marijuana users: One is mandatory for any student who has been caught and suspended. The other provides help to those who have not been busted. Usually they are referred by a teacher or counselor.

Therapist Julie Rodriguez, who treats about a dozen students a year in the latter program, sees many who have followed their love of a good high to other substances--mushrooms, LSD and speed, or crystal methamphetamine, a drug especially popular among teenagers. Often, they don’t see marijuana as part of their downfall.

“A lot of them . . . if they develop problems with those kinds of drugs, they think, ‘I’m just going to do pot now. Then I’ll be sober’--which is incredible,” Rodriguez said.

A Social Price for Sobriety?

Students who do work hard to stay off marijuana and alcohol sometimes have difficulty finding sober friends, she said.

“What I see on campus is that 90% of the kids are doing something,” Rodriguez said. “Sometimes they just drink alcohol. Sometimes they are just using pot . . . . Pot is like a staple; it goes along with everything else you’re doing. If they’re using crystal meth or they’re using LSD, they’ll also smoke pot.”

Parents voice differing levels of concern about the problem. Some seem completely unaware of pot use among students; others agree with Carol Reznichek, who stated bluntly: “Yes, it’s a problem. Yes, it’s happening in this community. I’ve had kids who have made choices both ways.”

Her youngest, a sophomore, is a 4.0 student, Reznichek said. But her two older daughters dabbled in pot; the middle one left incriminating evidence once in her car.

“That was it; she lost the car,” Reznichek said. “She never drove it again.”

Reznichek blames absentee parents who stop providing child-care after fifth grade, and parents who don’t want to enforce the rules or instill a work ethic: “A lot of kids, if it’s not fun, they don’t want to do it,” she said. “Instant fun . . . you can get that when you smoke a joint.”

She also blamed the pressures that are put on many teenagers, pressures to go to Harvard, pressures to be way cool, like the people on MTV and “Melrose Place”: “To be cool, to be thin, to be a woman killer. I think that pressure’s on every single kid who turns on the TV. They can’t be that cool.”

Mindful that many teenagers equate pot with alcohol, parents at a November PTA meeting held a soul-searching discussion about the example they set with their own drinking and partying.

Carl Moore, 55, a real estate broker whose son is a junior, spoke later of a “major social problem . . . which is the whole array of intoxicating substances, especially alcohol. It’s one that many parents don’t want to address because it pinches too close to home.”

Moore’s wife, Leah, a PTA vice president, admits to trying marijuana while going through the “hippie scene,” but she keeps a close eye on their son, Aaron. She watches for signs of intoxication. She has always picked him up after school, and she discourages him from hanging out at the pier or the McDonald’s near school, two hangouts of pot smokers.

Moore said she is not sure whether she has told Aaron about her own marijuana use. “I think I told him. I guess it was peer pressure. I wanted to be cool. . . . It seemed like everyone was into it.” She only used it for a summer, she said.

At the McDonald’s one afternoon, a number of Mira Costa students talked about their own varied histories with pot. One had spent seven months in a drug treatment program. One had seen her older brother go to prison because of drugs. One considered government reports about marijuana’s harmfulness a bunch of lies. A few stopped using it because they felt they were becoming mentally slower, or because they decided they wanted to accomplish more with their lives.

Nick Van Gordon was not part of the group. He is 13, a serious, heavily freckled eighth-grader at Manhattan Beach Intermediate School.

Like most children his age in Manhattan Beach, Van Gordon will soon face decisions about whether to light up a joint. His parents have counseled him against it, but he has heard the contrary viewpoints of other teenagers, and he has seen the older students blazing behind the supermarket.

“It’s everywhere now,” he said.

How he will respond to the peer pressures ahead is unclear even to him. Van Gordon is curious. He can conceive of circumstances in which he might dare to get high.

“Maybe once,” he said. “If I do get pressured into doing it, I’m never going to do it again.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Pot Makes a Comeback

After dropping for more than a decade, the percentage of 12th-grade students nationwide who said they have used marijuana during the past 12 months has begun to rise sharply.

1995: 34.7%

Source: Office of National Drug Control Policy, Drugs & Crime Clearinghouse, January 1996