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THE CITY High In School

Meet John: boy next door, drug dealer
By Vicki Gayle Gnuse |

AS JOHN STRODE across the stage last May and reached for the diploma certifying he had completed three years at Sam Houston High School in Arlington, he appeared to most of his relatives and his fellow graduates as just an average 17-year-old, eager to get on with the night’s revelry and his life.

With his collar-skimming blond hair, boyish smile and lean body, he looked like the All-American boy stereotype, destined for college and the good life. At least a few of the parents in the audience would have been surprised to learn that John not only uses drugs himself, but he also sells them to many of their children.

John does not fit the image the word “pusher” conjures up in the minds of most adults; nor does he look like the sleazy characters depicted in the drug education films their children are shown at school. To the contrary, he was an A student during his high school years, who worked after school and on weekends in a local record store. He comes from a comfortable, middle-class family; his parents have always been involved in their children’s lives. Nevertheless, teachers, counselors and police agree with John that he is representative not only of the kids who take drugs, but of those who deal drugs in area suburbs as well.

For years, the American dream has been to have a house in the suburbs, two cars in the garage and two children in a good school -safe from crime, traffic, high taxes and drugs. Arlington, Piano, Richardson and other cities were heralded as Utopias where cocktail glasses clinked at six o’clock, lawns were always manicured and the children got first-rate educations.

In recent years the spell has been broken. Traffic is so congested that it seems possible that one so inclined to do so could roller-skate from Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth to Reunion Tower in Dallas in less time than a Maserati could inch from one side of Arlington to the other. Taxes are soaring, and the crime rate in the suburbs is keeping pace with the exploding population. No longer can a parent feel assured that his children will be isolated from the temptation of drugs just because they attend schools in districts that have been touted for years as the best in the state.

In fact, according to most teachers and police, it is the affluency enjoyed by students in those suburban schools that is greatly responsible for the drug use found there. One narcotics officer likened the drug problem to an iceberg, with the tip revealed and 90 percent undetected.

Hank Wilson, an Arlington policeman who has served as a counselor and liaison officer within the city’s junior high and high schools, says, according to his own unofficial survey, at least 85 percent of the students have experimented with some type of drug by the time they have graduated. Many are like John, who discussed the particulars of his drug use and dealings soon after Arlington police arrested 16 students at Bowie High School last spring (the result of a two-month undercover operation in which a young officer posed as a student, buying marijuana and amphetamines).



AS JOHN ENTERS the Pizza Inn near the UTA campus for our first meeting to discuss his “avocation,” he is wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt with “Foreigner” emblazoned across the chest and expensive leather tennis shoes. He looks like most other teen-agers enjoying late-night snacks.

Slipping into the booth, he apologizes for being five minutes late, explaining he had a late customer at the record shop.

After exchanging amenities, John announces that he is starving and briefly glances at the menu before ordering a medium special. There’s nothing unusual in that, except that he keeps addressing the near-30-year-old waitress as “Ma’am,” a seldom-heard politeness nowadays, and one that obviously evokes mixed emotions in the woman, who doubtless considers herself no older than “Miss.”

John turns his attention back to his job. He says he has worked in the record store for almost two years, putting most of the money he earns aside for a post-graduation trip to Mexico.

“Sometimes it’s hard to put in the hours after school, but usually it’s okay,” he says. “I guess my folks would have given me the money or sent me on the trip, but it’s something I wanted to do myself. There are lots of trips they’d like to take themselves and haven’t. Besides, I was just kinda taught that people ought to work and pull their own weight.”

The waitress arrives with the pizza. After a few bites John turns his attention to the purpose of the meeting: discussing his drug habits.

Like many teen-agers, John first experienced drugs during junior high school. During the summer between seventh and eighth grades, an 18-year-old friend of a girlfriend offered him some marijuana and, wanting to win approval, he took it.

“I just did it to impress the guy,” admits John. “But after he turned me on to it, I found out I liked it, so I kept it up.”

Marijuana soon became a routine part of John’s life. Within a year he smoked an average of three to four joints a day, usually beginning with a toke on the way to school. In high school, he would give the morning high a boost when he left campus to go running around during lunch break. Occasionally, he would risk a smoke on campus in the restroom or outside in the parking lot. But, basically, he says, it was just too big a gamble.

According to John, most kids are too smart to smoke at school, but many are fairly confident nothing will happen to them if they do. John claims he once walked undetected past the principal’s window smoking a joint. Although teachers may know a student is high, they seldom say anything.

When John was in the 11th grade, a teacher threatened to send him and a friend to the principal because she suspected they were high; but when John stood up and said, “Let’s go,” the woman changed her mind. “I guess she realized it wouldn’t do any good, anyway. It’s hard to discipline someone you think is high, when so many kids do it,” says John. He readily admits his good grades and clean-cut image probably protected him in those situations, saying “adults just don’t want to believe nice kids do drugs.”

Actually, John thinks teen-age alcohol use is a more serious problem than drug use. Students often leave campus for lunch and return to class drunk and rowdy; John justifies smoking marijuana by pointing out that pot smokers are almost always laid-back, peaceful people, unlike those who drink.

“It seems like when people get drunk they get mad or want to fight. But I never knew anybody high on grass who got violent,” he says. “Smoking’s a cultural experience, an experience everyone should have,” John says, in explaining why he indulges. “It makes you more harmonious with things around you, more peaceful.”

Perhaps as a reflection of his youth, John often expresses the desire to try everything. He wants to go everywhere, see everything and try anything -at least once. He admits that he has tried amphetamines; he says he only dropped acid a couple of times when he wanted to “expand his mind.”

“It wasn’t the marijuana that led me to the other stuff,” he says. “It’s just that I had heard so much about the other things that I wanted to try them.

“It makes you a more philosophical thinker. Like if you’re tripping out, and you see a lightbulb, you want to know how it works. You think about things you usually don’t think about.”

On the other hand, amphetamines (or speed) have come in handy in helping John endure the long hours at his job after school and on weekends.

“It’s like drinking 10 cups of coffee, and then you want to work because you can’t just sit there,” he explains, adding that he rarely takes speed even though it is readily available. He usually confines his consumption, like his dealing, to grass.

Dealing -the subject is the promised treasure of the interview. But before the topic can be pursued, John excuses himself, explaining that he has to get home to study for an upcoming exam.

“It’s basically downhill from here, but I don’t want to blow all my hard work now,” he says. “Anyway, if I’m not in by 11 o’clock Mom worries, and she has to get up in the morning.” John has been an “A” student most ol his life, making the honor roll every six weeks, except in the eighth grade when he says he was an “immature kid.”A FEW DAYS LATER, John arrives at a local hamburger place dressed a bit dif-ferently than at the previous meeting. On this Saturday afternoon, he is wearing khaki slacks, an Izod shirt and loafers. Only his baseball cap seems to be an in-congruity; he removes it as he steps inside the door.Running a hand through his layered blond hair and smiling sheepishly, John looks down at his clothes and explains that he can only take a brief lunch break because he always goes to visit his grandfather in a local nursing home on the last day of the week.

“I don’t really have to go,” he says, “but I like to. My granddad is really a good guy. We’ve always gotten along, and he knows a lot. He’s got some great stories.”

While waiting for his burger, John recounts some of his favorite “grandfather stories.” When the food arrives, he starts talking about some of the recent senior activities he has attended. This leads to a discussion of partying and, finally, to dealing.

John began selling drugs when he got his car at age 16. He emphasizes that he follows certain ethics in dealing. First, he will not sell to “little kids,” saying “17 is as low as I’ll sell to.” When pressed on the point, John explains that although most of the people he knows started smoking in seventh or eighth grade, “in my mind it shouldn’t be encouraged until you are mentally mature enough to handle it.”

It is also against John’s rules to sell to strangers; he only deals with friends and people he feels can be trusted. He says he would never get busted like the students who were recently charged with dealing at Bowie High School. Smart dealers, John says, never sell to people they have known for only two months.

However, John’s “friends” come from all strata of the student body, from those people classified by their teachers and peers as the “dopers” to the urban cowboy “ropers” to the “socials.”

Several times during the interviews, young girls who look like candidates for Miss Teen-age America stop to say hello to John, professing a need to talk to him later. After one particularly pretty blonde walks away, John confesses with a hint of disappointment that the talks usually concern nothing more romantic than arrangements for a baggie of grass.

“Even the people who don’t smoke all the time do it at least socially, like at parties,” says John. “Nowadays, guys pick up girls by asking them if they want to go smoke a joint. People usually just roll a couple of joints before they go cruising- just enough so that it’s easily disposed of, but enough to share. But there is not a ’type’ of kid who smokes. They range from above-the-ear-haircut kids to people with hair down to their butts.”

All these people want pretty much the same merchandise: grass or speed. For the most part, cocaine is unavailable at school, says John, although a few kids may come across it off campus. Hashish is even more rare. Pot and speed, however, are abundant.

Ranking high on the shopping list of most suburban students who use drugs are black mollies and RJS, counterfeit pills considered speed by the kids, but identified as mere caffeine by the police. At first, police did not expose the pills as fakes. They finally tried to spread the word, but now the teen-agers think it’s a ploy to keep them from using speed. They continue to spend 50¢ to $3 per pill on capsules and tablets that can be bought at health food stores and in mail-order catalogs for less than $10 a bottle.

Occasionally, John says, methampheta-mine will be offered through the school grapevine. Statewide, it is the most popular drug after marijuana, according to Drug Enforcement Administration officials. They say the metroplex is swarming with garage laboratories that manutacture it. Most kids either cannot afford meth-amphetamines or prefer to steer clear of a drug that must be injected into the body with a needle. “Too risky,” says John.

Excluding alcohol, marijuana is, without a doubt, still the drug preferred by most teen-agers. John, who insists he only deals marijuana, proudly says he can always come through for a customer within 24 hours. He buys from five different people, some of whom know each other. Although he was reluctant to divulge much about his suppliers, he says they range in age from 17 to 50 and include a couple of “Dallas businessmen.” When he receives imported pot, none of his contacts brings the marijuana into the country himself, but a few of them do reap “red-haired sin-samellia” marijuana from East Texas.

If one were to believe the suppliers, every baggie of marijuana sold is Columbian or Maui. No one ever admits to trying to pawn off a lid of Mexican dirt grass – including John. The cost depends on what the seller can get the buyer to believe about the quality. The price is often erratic -a lid can go from as little as $30 (rare) to as much as $100 for sinsamellia.

John usually buys a half-pound from his supplier every two weeks. For the most part, he sells it in 1-ounce lids to people who approach him on campus or after school. He charges enough to cover the price of the dope, to pay for his own “stash” and a $25 to $50 extra profit margin for the risk.

He does not deal with students from other schools because he says it is too dangerous, and he does not like to deliver orders on campus. John meets his customers at a predetermined spot, often Vandergriff Park in South Arlington or in one of the business parking lots on Cooper Street, a favorite cruising strip for local teen-agers.

Most of his friends are very careful about where they keep their grass because they usually do not want their parents to find out. John has one friend whose parents also smoke, but the families of most of his peers are not as understanding. In fact, two years ago, John’s mother found his stash while she was cleaning his bedroom.



JOHN’S PARENTS are fairly typical suburban adults. His father is a mid-management executive for a large corporation, and his mother recently returned to work selling real estate. John has an older sister and a younger brother, who John says “tokes occasionally.” For the most part, his parents considered themselves lucky. Until they discovered John’s dope, they had never had any problems from their kids more serious than traffic tickets or rare curfew violations.

John believes his parents could handle his smoking if they really understood the “facts” about marijuana. Instead, he says, they have been misled by “myths” perpetrated by Ross Perot and others.

“My folks reacted very bitterly. They were very resentful and called me a delinquent troublemaker,” recalls John. “Mom cried and said it was her fault since she went back to work, and they both sat around and asked where they went wrong. But what they never could understand was that my pot smoking had nothing to do with what they did because it wasn’t such a terrible thing. I smoke grass because I want to, not because of them, and it does not make me a bad person.”

John looks down at the table and says, “They think you’re a bum, trash. They put the blame on you and themselves. What they don’t see is that how parents treat their kids has nothing to do with whether the kid smokes. It depends on the kid himself. It feels good, and when you’re high, you don’t let things bother you.”

John’s parents could not accept his actions or reasoning and threatened to send him to military school. So, in typical adolescent response, he ran away from home the next day. John’s parents found him and brought him back home, and they tried to work out the problem.

John swore to smoke only on weekends; his parents promised not to hassle him. But he claims they broke their word within days and would search for his grass and throw it out. Nevertheless, he says he has kept his end of the bargain and now only lights up on Friday and Saturday nights. But John admits that his pot smoking has had a terrible impact on his relationship with his parents.

“People talk about marijuana and drug abuse, but they should understand it’s not the drug doing the abusing; it’s the people who abuse the drug. Too much smoking can cause cancer, and too much alcohol will make a person an alcoholic. [Ross] Perot says marijuana causes kids to lose ambition and to do poorly in school. But that’s not true. I smoke and I’m an ’A’ student. If people do fall asleep in school, it’s not because of marijuana, it’s because school is boring.

“People say marijuana leads to other drugs, but it doesn’t. It’s up to the individual. I know a lot of people who smoke marijuana, but have never tried anything else.”

ALTHOUGH JOHN is probably right in his assertion that most people who experiment with marijuana never try harder drugs, many kids do. Suburban cops and teachers say it is a mushrooming problem that is not confined to any one city or socioeconomic group.

Richardson Police Chief Ken Yar-brough concedes that Richardson is not immune from teen-age drug use, pointing out that it has much the same socio-economic base as North Dallas and that people should not be surprised to find the same problems on both sides of the city limits signs.

Detective Jim Willett, formerly an Arlington narcotics officer, is just as pessimistic about the situation there, claiming he has seen the problem increase two-fold among juveniles in the past four years.

“Before, suburban police departments handled burglaries, armed robberies and traffic offenses,” he says. “Now we have the same problems as Dallas, Fort Worth or Chicago. It’s just on a different scale. Our problems have changed as the city has changed.

“I got a call a while back from a DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] statistician in Washington, D.C., and he asked me why there were more pins in his map representing methamphetamine labs in Arlington than in Detroit.”

Frank McElligott, a vice and narcotics officer for Piano, says the problem in his city is also equal to those in the Northeast (he worked as a police officer in Greece, N.Y.). But he is quick to point out he does not believe drug use among juveniles is any worse in Piano than anywhere else.

In 1980, Piano police arrested 21 juveniles for drug-related offenses; Richardson police arrested 55. Arlington has made 37 similar arrests so far this year. Considering population, it does not seem as if the cities’ problems are that different, especially considering that those figures represent only the few juveniles who are apprehended and taken in.

According to area police and teachers in many of the schools, it is also impossible to pinpoint exactly which type of kid uses drugs. As one Piano High School teacher said, “We still have cliques, but it’s obvious that drug use crosses all lines in the student body today.”

Arlington detective Willett goes so far as to say that he and other narcotics officers know of several area high school football players who get high. He also says they know the kids sometimes smoke on school grounds, an observation backed up by fellow officer Hank Wilson. But they all agree that usually the kids save their “goodies” for after-school hours.

Yarbrough recalls an undercover operation his officers ran at a Richardson hangout for high school students: “Those little girls were doing everything they could to get the attention of those old hairy-legged boys, but those guys weren’t interested in anything but just talking about dope.”

While drugs are much more obvious in the high schools, teachers and police agree they can be found in the junior highs also. However, it is restricted to smaller numbers of students who still have to rely, for the most part, on older friends to give them a pill or joint.

Occasionally, elementary school kids will even turn up with some grass or pills but, as Hank Wilson in Arlington points out, it is rare to hear about it and even more difficult to track down. He does remember a high school junior he counseled last year who had been taking drugs since the fourth grade.

“I tried to make her see what she was doing-the changes in her appearance, her attitudes and friends. But she just didn’t want to see it. I’m afraid someday she’ll end up on the street, dead.”

During the years she had been experimenting with drugs, the girl had tried countless new highs. Although marijuana is decidedly the most popular way to get high, police say it is possible for students to get anything they want in the schools.

Not only are the look-alike speed pills popular, but teachers say they often find kids holding drugs they slipped out of Mom and Dad’s medicine cabinet.

One Richardson High School teacher, who asked not to be identified, said she had a female student in one of her classes last year who kept dozing off during class. One day the teen-ager dropped her purse on the way out of the classroom, and while helping her pick it up, the teacher saw a bottle of Valium with the girl’s mother’s name on it.

One of the biggest problems, according to Richardson and Arlington detectives, is that today’s teen-agers are mixing pills with alcohol.

“We’re seeing more and more kids using alcohol,” says Sgt. Martha Willbanks, former head of the Arlington Police Juvenile Division. “It’s easier to get. If you don’t have a friend who will buy it for you, you can drain some out of Mom or Dad’s bottles. And drinking is more acceptable among a lot of the kids. Some of them say, ’I’d rather be a roper than a doper,’ but those kids are abusing drugs, too. It’s just that they use beer instead of marijuana.

“The ropers dip Skoal and drink beer, and the dopers drink beer and smoke marijuana,” she says.

Hank Wilson, the Arlington school liaison officer, says that in another of his informal surveys he asked a class of 40 seventh graders how many of them had used alcohol; 26 admitted to taking an occasional drink.

Of all the drugs that appear in junior high schools, alcohol shows up most often. It can be a particular problem when the students bring it on campus as they did at an Arlington junior high last year, Wilson says.

More unusual highs also surface, says Detective Bruce Johns, another liaison officer for the Arlington schools. “Every now and then you hear some talk about the use of angel dust, and I had a few deals last year where I counseled with people who sniffed glue, paint and aerosols.

“We had one kid who was arrested several times a week for intoxication. He would sniff anything he could get hold of. Last I heard, he was in a mental institution after drinking paint.”

The use of LSD (or acid) is also reappearing among today’s teen-agers. Apparently, they are too young to remember the problems people had with the drug in the late Sixties, say narcotics officers.

Everyone interviewed seemed to agree that drug use among teen-agers is a reflection of society’s values today. Richardson Police Chief Yarbrough considers part of the problem to be the increasing numbers of celebrities and “heroes” who admit they use drugs. But affluency gets a gold star as a major factor in teen-age drug use.

“Affluency is the single biggest problem,” says Arlington detective Willett. “The money is easily available to the young people, and they have the mobility to get there and the access to drugs. The majority of juvenile drug offenders come from affluent middle- to upper-middle-class families.

“It used to be that the drug problems were in the inner cities. But now it’s worse in the suburbs. At least in the big cities you can usually name the part of town where the problem is prevalent. But you can’t isolate the problem in one part of town in the suburbs. It’s everywhere, so it’s harder to enforce drug laws, and you can’t concentrate your efforts.”

Besides, he adds, drug dealers have no respect for city limits signs.

Police admit that juvenile drug abuse is a difficult problem for them to handle. Particularly, says Richardson Police Chief Yarbrough, because most young dealers, like John, will sell only to those people they know, which makes it almost im-possible to build a case against them.

Most teen-agers are arrested for drug offenses when an officer stops them for a traffic offense and then smells grass, says Yarbrough. But most of the kids who are stopped don’t ever get taken to the station.

“Why should they be?” he says. “There are no penalties in the juvenile system, so it’s just a waste of time. As a matter of fact, the juvenile process now probably increases delinquent behavior.”

“It’s hard for an officer to give a juvenile a record over a minor drug offense,” says Willett. “We’d rather handle it by other means – through school, or counseling with the parents. The guys on the street just will not bust a juvenile for a joint.”

John supports that statement by recalling the times he has been caught with marijuana by police.

“One time we were at the park after the curfew, and a cop came up on us before we knew it. So naturally, when we rolled down the car window to talk to him, he got hit in the face with the smoke. But all he asked was whether we were ’smoking or toking.’ Then he took our dope and left.”

John also recalls a time when an officer saw him and a friend with a joint. The cop just took his small baggie of grass, dumped it on the ground in front of them and sent them home.

Apparently, police would rather concentrate their efforts on adult drug offenders. “A police officer has to work eight hours a day and decide how best to spend his time,” says Yarbrough, explaining that not only is it easier and more productive to deal with adults, but that most of the suppliers are adults. If the police can arrest them, it may reduce teen-age use.

“We’re more concerned about the dangerous drugs like methamphetamine, heroin, angel dust and LSD,” says Willett.

In any case, police say one of the biggest problems they face in dealing with teenage drug abuse in their cities is the fact that schools do not like to admit the problem even exists.

Arlington police say that for years the school district refused to admit drugs were circulating on the campuses. Although the police had long wanted an undercover operation in the senior high schools, it was not until this year that the district administration requested it.

Yarbrough seems to believe the schools bear much of the fault for the drug problems in classrooms. He points out that if he arrests a person, he is totally responsible for the safety and security of that individual’s person and property until his release. Likewise, he believes schools are responsible for the students’ safety and security.

“The first time a school district is sued because a kid ODs there, we’ll see some changes; they’ll have to prove they have taken all reasonable precautions with programs and security -like locker checks. There is not a school district anywhere around now that could stand that.

“They take civil defense precautions – what about precautions for drugs? Parents must force the schools to do something.”

Yarbrough also wonders how many teachers use drugs and how those teachers have affected drug abuse among their students. And large numbers of prospective police officers reveal under polygraph testing that they have experimented with drugs, Yarbrough says. He believes those numbers would be higher among young teachers. People who want to be police officers are probably more in line with law enforcement attitudes about drugs than teachers, he claims.

Several teachers admit they have tolerant attitudes about marijuana use, although they hate to see a student get so heavily involved in drugs that his grades drop and he loses motivation.

One young teacher at Piano High School admits she smokes marijuana herself, which makes it hard for her to chastise students she thinks come to class high. But, like many of the cops, she feels the real problem with juvenile drug use lies within the teen-ager’s home.

Time after time, teachers and police talk about parents who are not even interested enough in their children’s lives to attend counseling sessions.

“Without the parents’ help, there is little we can do,” says Yarbrough. “It’s like curing a kid of hepatitis and sending him home again. We have to have the parents’ help or it’s not worth it.”

Arlington Sgt. Martha Willbanks believes it is a sign of the times.

“We used to have lots of calls about drugs, but in the last year I’ve had only one request for a talk and it was about juvenile crime, not drugs,” Willbanks says. “People don’t seem concerned about it. They even make drug use glamorous, like when Time put a martini glass filled with cocaine on its cover.

“What really bothers me is the number of parents that use it [drugs],” she says. “A man came in last year and wanted to file burglary charges against his stepson who broke into his bedroom and stole his marijuana. I told him to get out of here quick.”

In many cases, parents are also accused of providing drugs for their children.

Detective Willett says he knows of at least one case in Arlington where a parent provided marijuana for his child to sell at his high school. And Yarbrough recalls a mother in Richardson who gave her 16-year-old son a kilo of “very, very good-quality grass” for Christmas. When the boy got busted, he squealed on his mother.

Regardless of the causes for growing use of drugs among teen-agers, no one seems to have a solution to the problem. Indeed, not everyone perceives it as a problem. Nevertheless, most teachers and law enforcement officers emphasize the need for parent awareness about drugs, the importance of communications within a family, and the need for better drug education in the schools. They also believe community groups formed to combat drug use are effective. But John, the young dealer, says parents who follow the suggestions of such groups will only alienate their children.

Perhaps narcotics officer Frank McElli-got summarizes the situation best whenhe says, “It’s just the problem of today.In the Fifties it was kids going out and getting alcohol. Who knows what it will be inthe future.”

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