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 - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens