Pubdate: Sun, 19 Oct 2003
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (CA)
Copyright: 2003 Hearst Communications Inc.
Contact:  http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/388
Author: Jesse Berrett

WHEN 'SCARED STRAIGHT' IS MEANINGLESS

Author Follows The Lives Of Three Bay Area Teens On The Complex Road To 
Getting Off Drugs

Dirty

A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic

By Meredith Maran

HARPERSANFRANCISCO; 311 PAGES; $24.95

Meredith Maran's exploration of youthful self-destruction, "Dirty," is 
wrenching as both advocacy journalism and parental confessional. Suffused 
with her own anguished guilt as the mother of a child who spent his 
adolescence flirting with prison or death, this passionate, affecting book 
reveals how eagerly many teenagers obtain drugs and how difficult and 
fraught it can be to help them stop.

Maran does not pretend to have figured it all out. Rather, by patiently 
tracking three Bay Area youths' varying paths through the juvenile justice 
and drug-rehabilitation systems, she demolishes the inadequate, 
one-dimensional rationales (lazy parenting! the media! bad kids!) and even 
more simplistic solutions (scare them straight! send them to boot camp!) 
with which we console ourselves.

None of these kids can be reduced to formulas like "child of a broken home";

even when their stories seem to roughly sketch a popular explanation for 
addiction, each one's stubborn, intricate individuality remains clear. 
Though that eye for complexity prevents a clear narrative resolution -- the 
book trails off rather than coming to a sharp point -- any reader who 
shares these young people's lives will emerge chastened by the sheer human 
difficulty involved in actually getting kids off drugs.

Maran acts as both a substitute parent and a compassionate friend to her 
subjects: Mike, a working-class crystal-meth addict from Santa Rosa; 
Tristan, an affluent, frequently stoned child of hippies from Marin; and 
Zalika, a middle-class African American girl from Richmond who deserts her 
stable family for the thrill of the streets. Maran paints each of them with 
almost unmatchable compassion and respect, even when they're relapsing, 
stealing or otherwise damaging others' trust. She gets them to share their 
most ungenerous thoughts as well as their spasms of insight. Each teenager, 
in fact, exhibits a very modern savvy about the usefulness of his or her 
tale. "I know I'm gonna make it," Mike opines. "Because I have a good story 
that's gonna help people understand. I may not be [rehabilitation] program 
material, but I'm definitely book material."

When these kids are at their most exasperating (and none of them walks a 
straight path from rehab to sobriety), the author's slangy emotional 
generosity keeps them interesting and likable, even charismatic. With all 
of their flaws, Maran draws them as complicated, self-aware, self-deceiving 
and confused -- in a word, teenagers, and you root for them to get help in 
whatever way happens to work. Which may well be the crux of the problem: No 
one solution fits every child, and many current solutions don't seem to fit 
any children.

Maran's depiction of the cavernous blind spots within the rehab bureaucracy 
should be an eye-opener. She is not a muckraker; if anything, nearly 
everyone we meet in this field seems driven by an urgency that is personal 
and moral rather than financial. Teachers and counselors in "sober 
schools," one of which Tristan attends, often faced their own problems with 
addiction as adolescents and come across as empathetic and endlessly 
compassionate in the face of almost certain disappointment. Administrators 
and staff members at the county-run rehab program to which Mike accepts his 
sentence do their best amid a bureaucracy that sets various agencies in 
competition for the same kids. The cynical, street-wise, yet miraculously 
hopeful members of Richmond's Drug Court, who ponder the solution that will 
give Zalika her best shot at escape, would make a particularly compelling 
book of their own.

Yet these good intentions are hamstrung by fundamental flaws: Salaries are 
ridiculously low, training often rudimentary, and many of the programs 
force adolescents into adult roles they have neither the ability nor the 
inclination to play. The Alcoholics Anonymous-derived tenets (take 
responsibility for your own failings; recovery truly works only when you 
have freely chosen it) adopted by most treatment programs, for instance, 
apply best to adults capable of weighing consequences.

Teens facing problems with addiction, in particular, tend to have severe 
difficulty facing up to those consequences -- it's often why they did drugs 
in the first place. While most of these kids are smart enough to figure out 
what adults want to hear and give it to them in whatever quantity they 
crave it, they also realize that beneath that mouthing of the approved 
rhetoric lies a total lack of enforcement: "[E]ach program is a tightly 
sealed container with a big hole at the bottom" because the kids involved 
can always run away without fear of punishment. "Dare a teenager to run," 
Maran observes, and "the AWOL stats speak for themselves."

An exorcism of Maran's demons (seeing your child suffer this way cuts a 
"hole in your heart," Mike's mom tells her) as much as a call to arms, this 
book is painful, powerful and saddening, perhaps most of all because, in 
the end, it turns up more questions than answers.

Jesse Berrett teaches at San Francisco's University High School and has 
written for the New York Times and the Village Voice
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens