Busting the Wrong Druggies

By Jake Ginsky, MotherJones.com. Posted April 1, 2000.

As he waited for the drug counselor to return, Bill hunched his wiry frame forward, his leg jittering. He wasn't going through withdrawal -- he was just nervous. He didn't know what to expect or exactly what the point of this questioning was. All he knew for sure was that he needed to enter a drug-treatment center, or be kicked out of school.

Minutes earlier, the sandy-haired 15-year-old (whose name has been changed) had answered a series of questions. Yes, he occasionally smoked marijuana with his friends -- but not on a regular basis, and always in moderation. No, he had never tried any other illicit drug and did not drink alcohol.

Bill's drug use, in other words, was by most people's standards nothing remarkable for an American adolescent, certainly no worse than that of hundreds of thousands of other healthy, thriving teenagers. But the counselor at New Bridge Adolescent Treatment Center apparently thought otherwise.

"She told me I was 'between abuse and dependency,'" the highest level of drug abuse, Bill says.

The counselor told Bill's mother, Karen (whose name also has been changed), that Bill would have to attend after-school treatment four times a week for the next two to three months, and then once a week for the remainder of the year. Karen herself would have to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings each week, a requirement for all parents with kids enrolled in the treatment program, one of the several at the Center. She would also have to remove all alcohol from her house. To top it off, Bill's father was to administer random urine tests whenever the facility's officials ordered him over the phone to do so. The program costs $100 a day, of which Karen's health insurance would only cover half.

Such intensive treatment for such a relatively minor problem -- if one even considers drug use at Bill's level a problem -- may sound extreme, but is increasingly common across the US. Bill is just one of tens of thousands of adolescents whom a raft of experts say are coerced into entering drug treatment each year by schools, parents, or the courts, despite not having any serious drug problem.

Over the past 10 years, more than one million adolescents have been removed from school for drug-policy violations, according to Joel Brown of the Center for Educational Research and Development, who is currently studying the effect schools have in forcing youths into treatment. In a great number of those cases, Brown says, students have only one way to get readmitted to school: enroll in a treatment facility. No one knows the full extent of this trend, because there are no centralized statistics kept on drug-related school expulsions. The trend does, however, seem to help explain why adolescent treatment admissions have shot up by about two-thirds since 1990, according to a recent study by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Brown estimates that "less than 10 percent" of the kids who enter treatment at the insistence of their schools actually have a problem.

"The assumption is that if a kid gets caught in school with drugs, they automatically have a drug problem, but there's a great number of kids that are experimenting with substances and still succeeding in school," says Brown, who stresses that he does not encourage adolescent drug use.

"You know who gets put into treatment? It's the kids who get caught," seconds Ernest Drucker of New York's Montefiore Medical Center, who headed a methadone clinic for 20 years from 1970 to1990.

Bill says he was pushed into treatment by officials at his school in Northern California. In January, Bill's principal told Karen that he suspected Bill of "using" and urged her to have him assessed at a treatment facility.

Karen, in fact, knew that her son occasionally smoked marijuana. She wasn't happy about it, but she believed he was using the drug responsibly. But before Karen had a chance to do anything about the principal's advice, one of Bill's teachers caught him smoking marijuana in the school parking lot with one of his friends. Karen says she was called back to the school and given an ultimatum.

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