Drug War Yields Large Lesson in Small Defeat

The people rose up against drugs in this Central Texas town.

They held nightly rallies. They marched on street corners and confronted drug dealers with bullhorns and protests. The police stepped up raids on dealers pushing heroin, cocaine and crystal meth. The National Guard bulldozed nearly 100 vacant structures that had been used as crack houses.

Over two years, Taylor mobilized virtually everything that modern law enforcement and private programs had devised. And it worked. Most hard-line drug dealers were chased out, and narcotics that were once easily available around town became almost extinct.

But town leaders are not celebrating a great victory. What was obliterated by the effort was in some ways overshadowed by what was not, and that has tinged the experience with disappointment and frustration.

Each round of police raids still brings in more of the town’s sons and daughters caught smoking marijuana. “I’d say marijuana is worse here actually” than even before, conceded Police Chief Fred Stansbury.

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As much as it tried not to, Taylor’s full-scale war on drugs has ended up providing a grim lesson for cities and small towns across America.

The battle in the streets is proving easier than the one in the teenage mind. Whether adults like it or not, dope smoking seems to be joining beer drinking and cigarettes as a standard rite of passage for many young people. Among Taylor’s once gung-ho community activists, some are now quietly accepting the reality that they may never reach a true “zero-tolerance level” for drugs, at least as far as marijuana is concerned.

“We are very disturbed and very alarmed by this,” said Richard Spence, a director of the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, which tracks drug use across the state. “Kids are tending to think that marijuana is less dangerous . . . , and when the perception of danger goes down, the drug use goes up. It implies a more accepting attitude toward marijuana.”

In ways it can hardly believe, Taylor equals Houston equals Los Angeles.

National statistics show a significant rise in teenage pot use--in some parts of the country hitting levels as high as the 1960s.

A Washington-sponsored study released on Thursday found that 18% of eighth-graders admitted using marijuana, compared with just 6% in 1991. Thirty-four percent of 10th-graders said they used it, up from 15%. And 36% of high school seniors said they had used it in the previous year, compared with 22% in 1992.

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In California, the state’s Student Substance Use Survey found that 43% of 11th-graders are smoking pot now, up from about 40% in 1992.

Here in Texas, marijuana was cited as the primary drug for 65% of adolescents admitted to publicly funded treatment centers this year, compared with 51% just two years ago.

Officials cite a number of reasons for the rise in pot popularity among the young: Parents smoked it themselves, parents look the other way, teenagers see it as harmless and teenagers favor it as a way to show independence and flout society’s rules.

“You’re probably always going to have young pleasure-users no matter what you do,” said the Rev. Harold Taylor. His Zion Chapel Missionary Baptist Church helped organize the effort against hard drugs here. Now he is unsure what to do about the persistent pot problem.

“A lot of the kids who are trying marijuana don’t think drugs are wrong,” said Anne Mehevec, a seventh-grade science teacher. “They’ve been brought up in homes where drugs were sold and used. And I’ve had to march on the students’ houses that I teach. It’s embarrassing for me and for them.”

Town leaders are not ready to give up. But they say that they have a new understanding of what they are up against and that they will have to attack it in a different way if they are going to break through the next barrier.

About 11,500 people live in this community once rich in grains and cotton, about 50 miles northeast of the state capital at Austin. But agribusiness is now surpassed by the payrolls from two military posts: Ft. Hood and Camp Swift.

A new federal prison complex is expected to open soon, which will bring new jobs. Meantime, many residents make the 90-minute round trip each day to work in Austin. The brick commercial strip in downtown Taylor has turned a faded brown. The wind blows up Main Street, where some local storefronts are now shuttered.

Another economy has settled in and brought its consequences. Several young men were shot when drug deals went bad along “The Line”--an area south of town that once sported several crack houses. Two high school football stars were tried on crack charges. One of them drew a 15-year prison sentence.

At the Taylor Middle School, according to science teacher Mehevec, half a dozen girls, some of them preteens, turned up pregnant and had to leave school after falling in with what the local leaders call the “wrong crowd.”

But civic pride is abundant too. A banner across Main Street hails the local high school mascot: “Once a Duck, Always a Duck.” Taylor has a new church and The Line is cleaned up.

A Wal-Mart has brought modern retailing to Taylor too. But it is around that store, in the parking lots and in the fields out back, all in the shadow of Taylor High, where police still cannot control many of the teenagers buying, selling and smoking marijuana.

A number of students interviewed outside school readily acknowledge knowing people who smoke marijuana. Maybe a couple of friends. A common refrain came from 16-year-old Alan: “It’s something to do.”

Town leaders decided to do something in 1994 when they first created the “Turn Around Taylor” project. Only a year earlier, drug arrests were at an alarming high. Nearly 50 indictments were brought against cocaine dealers working The Line.

Using federal and local money and tapping the expertise of outside volunteer activist groups, town leaders met in local planning sessions and then took to the streets.

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In rallies, marches and parades, they openly confronted drug dealers, bar owners and slum landlords. They were led by the unlikeliest of scrappy street protesters--two elderly sisters named Mae Willie Turner and Gladys Hubbard, who lived near The Line. “Drugs are drugs to me and I wanted it all gone,” said Turner.

The exposure chased the hard dealers away. Next came the undercover police operations to scoop up those harder to scare off. Absentee property owners were persuaded to tear down their buildings. Bulldozers manned by National Guard troops began rolling into town.

Last year, to promote the efforts here and to push for similar programs around the state, Texas Gov. George W. Bush led a parade past the old downtown stores to the leveled-out Line section of town.

But the mixed blessing remains. What is there to do about the remaining marijuana problem here? Chief Stansbury said it probably is as high as 20% for local teenagers.

Taylor said that he believes his town suffers because there is simply not enough here to occupy the young mind. He said that there is no youth activity center and no bowling alley. Tennis courts are covered with weeds, he said, and the baseball diamond lies on a flood plain. The movie house on Main only recently reopened.

“In all honesty, that’s our big problem now and we’re working on it,” he said. “Because if we don’t, the kids will keep standing on the corner or sitting on a park bench and the drugs will just keep coming in.”

Even Turner, the senior citizen-turned-community activist, acknowledged that some level of marijuana use may be here to stay. “I don’t know that we’ll ever be totally drug-free,” she said. “But we do hope we’re drug-better.”