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Fighting drugs an uphill battle for parents, cops
This is the second of two parts. The names of the students and parent in this story have been changed to protect their anonymity ­ Ed.

By Carolyn Smith

Though isolated in many ways, Jackson is not immune to the drug trafficking and drug culture that affects today's youth.

Searching for solutions can be an exhausting and frustrating process for parents, teachers and those involved with the area's teens. Educational programs exist in schools and the community, but too often the only way to help a young person who abuses drugs is to intervene after he or she lands in trouble.

One of the most visible and often criticized educational programs in Teton County is D.A.R.E., an in-school program that employs two law enforcement officers and has a $7,200 budget. The acronym stands for Drug Awareness Resistance Education.

Pat Goe, a D.A.R.E. officer in the school district for four years, is somewhat resigned when she talks about the lessons she teaches her kids every week.

"I'm not sure [D.A.R.E.] is the perfect answer," Goe said. "But it gets me in with the kids and gets them another source of information and somebody else to talk to."

Goe, a Teton County sheriff's deputy, and D.A.R.E. officer Mike Smith, a Jackson police officer, are faced with the difficult task of educating Teton County students about the dangers of drug use.

"I can't imagine that D.A.R.E. hurts," said Smith, who teaches the sixth-grade D.A.R.E. program and also teaches drug awareness in health classes at Jackson Hole High School. The problem with the D.A.R.E. program, the officers said, is that most kids stop being receptive to the lessons after elementary school.

"In kindergarten through fifth grade, the kids run up and hug me," Smith said. "When they get to middle school, they just become disrespectful."

Deputy Goe said the window of opportunity for teaching kids about drug use is limited. "If you can't reach them by the time they are freshmen in high school, they have their own opinions," and those opinions usually are shaped by the students' peers, she said.

In addition to the age-old problem of peer pressure, teens also are barraged with messages from their surroundings. Jackson's resort-town party atmosphere can give the impression that drinking and drugs are a part of everyday lives.

"It's a social norm in Jackson to experiment with drugs and use them abusively," said Trudy Funk, a teen alcohol and drug counselor at the Curran-Seeley Foundation. Drugs are readily available because of widespread use in the population at large, and many kids in Jackson Hole have the money to purchase them.

"We have an affluent community," officer Smith said. As a result, young people have more disposable income to spend on drugs, he said.

Dave and Jim, teens featured in last week's article about student drug use, said Jackson Hole High School's drug information classes do not deter them from trying drugs.

"There are no programs in our school that prevent drug use," Dave said.

Jim added that students "might be a little scared, but [the information] might make them more curious."

Deputy Goe said the D.A.R.E. program is going to change next year to focus on younger, elementary-aged students. Today, D.A.R.E. is a 17-lesson program that is taught every week in sixth grade. In kindergarten through fifth grade, it is taught a few times each semester. Kids don't receive D.A.R.E. lessons again until 10th grade, when the curriculum is integrated into a health class.

Next year, D.A.R.E.'s most concentrated lessons will be in fifth grade. Courses will be taught again in seventh and 10th grades.

But some research suggests changing the D.A.R.E. curriculum might not be enough. Studies in 1998 showed that D.A.R.E. has no long-term effects on student drug use, according to an article in the 1999 edition of the Education Reporter, a monthly newspaper dedicated to education rights. A different study in the same article indicated drug use actually increased among suburban students exposed to D.A.R.E. programs.

The officers said D.A.R.E. tries to teach kids good life and communication skills and educates them about the dangers of drug use. "The final choice is theirs," Goe said. "If you don't teach D.A.R.E., where else are they going to get their information?"

Officer Smith said for drug education to work, it has to extend beyond the classroom. "This has got to be a cooperative effort between schools, law enforcement and parents," he said. "We can deal with the supply side, but we can't be there every time [kids] are deciding whether to smoke or drink. Somebody has got to teach them to make the right choices."

Jackson Hole High School Principal Kevin Thibeault said he thought D.A.R.E. did a good job warning kids of consequences. "You try to inform these kids and give them as many straightforward and honest answers as you can," Thibeault said. "Hopefully, this helps deter them from making a critical decision [about drugs]."

Dave and Jim said the best deterrent for them is not in the schools or at home. "For me, it's a lot of cops busting parties," Jim said. "There's always a chance."

Other educational programs in the school system are trying to teach kids to make good choices.

Teachers at Wilson Elementary School began a new program this year called "Life Goals," which encourages kids to think through their decisions. The program evolves each year to encompass more aspects of decision making, including short- and long-term consequences.

Joannie Epstein, a second-grade teacher at Wilson Elementary, said the program can act as a supplement to drug education. "Hopefully, [kids] will use the same critical thinking process when they get into their real life scenarios," Epstein said. "They will make a choice and think about the trade-offs and their options."

Nancy Shibuya, a fifth-grade teacher who helped bring Life Goals to the school, said an important aspect of the program is to let kids know from an early age that they always have responsibility in their choices.

Whether picking out clothes in kindergarten, studying for a test in third grade or saying no to drugs later in life, "They're in control of their choice, and as a result, they are in control of their consequences," Shibuya said.

Community groups such as the Teton County Tobacco Prevention Project also are trying to make a dent in drug use among teens. Project coordinator Niki Mueller secured a $31,000 state grant this year for a program that aims to reduce teen use of chewing tobacco and cigarettes. "It's a program in the school to provide youth with the education and the tools for quitting," Mueller said.

If kids are caught smoking or chewing tobacco, there are few resources in the area that can help them stop, she said. "Most adults who are addicted to smoking start when they are 16," Mueller said, adding that tobacco-related illnesses are the most preventable cause of death in the United States.

Although drug prevention programs such as D.A.R.E. and Life Goals are available for kids at an early age, the biggest battle with teen drug use occurs after a child has started using drugs or alcohol. A teen who is using drugs likely will shun treatment unless he or she starts to get in trouble with the police or at school.

A program called ADDOPT, an acronym for Adolescent Drug Dependency Outpatient Treatment, meets every day after school for 12 weeks. ADDOPT is an arm of the Curran-Seeley Foundation.

Students usually enroll in the program after running afoul of the law or their parents, counselor Funk said. The hardest part about counseling teens is that they often don't realize why they are in treatment, she said. "They'll say, 'I don't have a problem, people are just making this into a bigger deal."

Counselor Rosalyn Terry said the kids have a hard time not using drugs because of their peer groups. "They say that it's impossible to hang around different people because every single person uses as much as they do," Terry said. Surrounded by other drug users, the teens don't think they have a problem and are unreceptive to treatment.

Unlike in adult programs, teens don't need a diagnosis of dependency to require treatment, Funk said. "All you have to show is an abusive use of a substance that continues to cause problems in your life."

Younger patients are harder to treat because they have not seen the long-term effects of alcohol and drug use in their lives. "At age 16 or 17 you're having fun and you don't want to stop," Funk said. "It's hard to make [teens] see their use has consequences."

The goal of treatment cannot be simply discouraging teens from drugs, the counselors said.

"We give them a period of sobriety to see what it would be like," Terry said. Teens in the program must submit to random urine tests. Students who fail tests must restart that section of the program.

Counseling emphasizes character building and decision making through five lessons. On Mondays, counselors focus on education, or "what a drug does to your body," Funk said. "They already know what a drug feels like." Tuesdays, the group focuses on step work, which is modeled after the Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous program. Wednesday nights are utilized for family nights and often can be the most intense sessions of counseling.

"For some parents, it's like pulling a rug out from under you," Funk said of the openness teens suddenly display with their parents. For the parents, "It's surprising and it's scary," she said.

Because drug use often destroys family trust and personal relationships, family night also can be the most rewarding, the counselors said. The frank discussions and sharing can help rebuild broken bonds.

Thursday counseling sessions aim to introduce teens to relaxation skills and creative exercises they can use to express themselves. On Friday, the counselors take the teens on recreational activities such as rock climbing, hiking and tennis. "It helps to show them other ways they can blow off steam," Terry said.

A majority of teens relapse at some point while they are in the program, Funk said, but at least they'll take away important educational and therapeutic lessons from the counseling. "If they go away from here, they'll have some knowledge," she said. "They know when they need to get some help and can hopefully identify if their drug use becomes a problem."

Mrs. O'Neill, the mother of a boy who attended treatment last year, said the experience changed her son's life. The boy almost had completed the ADDOPT program when he was cited for minor in possession of alcohol. He had not been drinking but was the designated driver in a car that contained beer. He was cited for underage drinking a short time later and sentenced to inpatient treatment away from his family. "Most of the kids at that program had other substance abuse problems, from coke to meth," Mrs. O'Neill said.

After treatment, the teen was cited again for underage drinking. With a criminal record that included possession of marijuana, possession of alcohol and the second drinking citation, he was sent to the Wyoming Boys' School in Worland.

Mrs. O'Neill said teen use of alcohol worries her the most. "They can take it and get away with it," she said. "Alcohol turned out to be the drug that sent him to treatment."

Once in juvenile jail, her son spent six weeks with boys that had been arrested for everything from dealing methamphetamine to battery. Mrs. O'Neill said the experience scared her son, and he resented being sent to jail for what seemed to be minor offenses. She said she feels "blessed" that her son received a crash course in drug education.

"Kids that got into those programs are ahead of the game," Mrs. O'Neill said. "I worry a lot, but not particularly about my children."

The counselors agreed with Mrs. O'Neill. "The kids come out wiser," Terry said. "They spend two hours a day on themselves and their own issues."

Over the years, students repeatedly have chalked up boredom as a cause of drug and alcohol use. Jackson kids lament that they live in an isolated mountain town that lacks the excitement and activities of the big cities. Proponents of a teen activity center say that if there were a safe environment for young people to gather, they might not be tempted to experiment.

"We hear that from every kid all the time, that they're bored and don't have anything to do," counselor Funk said. That sentiment is not limited to Jackson, either, as Funk said she heard the same story when she did graduate work in Seattle.

Officer Smith cited the potential social network a drug-free teen center would provide. "High school is about being social," he said. "It about wanting to have friends and wanting to be accepted."

Elizabeth Garbe, the Healthy Communities, Healthy Youth coordinator at the Van Vleck House, is helping to spearhead a campaign for a teen center. "We'd like to have a place where teens can hang out after school," Garbe said. The group is trying to recruit students to direct the project. "This really can be whatever the youth of Jackson want it to be," Garbe said.

Brainstorming sessions have yielded ideas such as a cafe, movie screening area, places to dance, places to study and an area to hang student art. The center would have a board composed of adults and teens. "The youth of the community can have ownership," Garbe said. "They can keep up with the times and decide what's cool."

Garbe used the new Jackson skate park as an example of a successful teen campaign. "The skate park, which has been an amazing thing for our community, took eight years to create," she said. It creates an "option for something else to do."

At night, the only options kids have for entertainment are movies, which aren't social enough for teens, Garbe said. One popular activity is hanging out at the "PRs," the slang term for the public restrooms on Cache Drive.

The next planning meeting for the teen center is at 6:30 p.m. May 30 in the Antler Inn conference room.

The stakes are high in the battle to keep kids away from drugs, and an alarming number of counseling professionals, teachers, parents and law enforcement officers say the odds are not in their favor. A host of new designer drugs as well as the old standbys are potent and readily available to teens in Jackson Hole.

There clearly is not one program, lesson or treatment that will keep a teen from trying drugs. But all sides agree that one of the most vital deterrents is parental involvement.

Thibeault said while the high school is "not sitting back" on addressing drug use, school programs "don't hold a candle to Mom and Dad sitting down with their kids on a regular basis and letting them know drug use is not acceptable.

"Frequently asked questioning does a lot better than one sit-down questioning," Thibeault said. "Know who their friends are and what they do when they hang out."

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