Source: The Bulletin, 1526 NW Hill St, Bend, Oregon 97701 Author: Greg Bolt and Jeff Nielson Pubdate: Feb. 8 1998 Contact: 541-385-5802 HARDLY A DAY GOES BY THAT DOESN'T FIND JESSE X STONED. He's 17 years old and only a senior at Bend High School. He's been smoking pot for years, a habit that hasn't escaped his mother's notice. The fact that she doesn't approve hasn't stopped him, though. He and his friends pile in a car and find an isolated spot to light up. If he's at home, he'll smoke a bowl in the bathroom with the fan going. During his junior year he'd even get stoned before heading to school. His grades took a dive, not surprisingly, and he cut back when he finally realized pot was standing between him and graduation. "Last year I was smokimg at school and messed up," he says. Jesse, who asked that his name not be used, now plans to quit smoking dope this summer. He wants to enlist in the U.S. Coast Gaurd after graduation and knows there'll be a drug test. But until then, he's still buying pot at school. "I could find it and be back in twenty minutes," he says from the Bend High parking lot one recent afternoon. " It's just a matter of finding the right person." Dozens of interveiws by the Bulletin with teachers, administrators, students and police reveal what some have long known and others find hard to believe: Despite zero-tolerance policies, drugs and alcohol are almost as easy to find as soda pop at every high school in Central Oregon and no harder to get than cigarettes in middle schools. Although suspensions and expulsions for drug possession or distribution still are rare, students sat it's not at all unusual for drugs to be sold openly on campus or for some kids to show up at school buzzed on pot or liquor. "If you knew the right people,it was easy," one 17 year-old says about finding pot when she was a student at Pilot Butte Middle School. " You just had to know the right people. I could always tell who had it." The girl, interviewed at the Deschutes County Juvenile Detention Center, says she started smoking pot when she was 10, drinking when she was 12 and snorting lines of methamphetamine by her last year in middle school. She was injecting heroin by her freshman year at Mountain View. The girl, whose name is being witheld because of her age, said drugs of all sorts were used at parties with high school classmates and said they were freely bought and used at school. "They'd snort lines in the bathroom; they'd smoke pot outside," she says from a locked-off hallway in the cramped detention center. Back in detention for passing bad checks, she says she kicked drugs and has been clean for more than two years. The marks that drugs and booze leave on the region's young people can be as plain as the graffiti along railroad tracks or as subtle as the faint needle marks on a young boy's arm. But the problem rises into clear view in the hard, black and white numbers. In a 1996 study compiled by the state Department of Human Resources, more than half of Deschutes County's 11th graders said they had used alcohol within the past 30 days, a number that is 23% higher than the staewide average. Amoung the same group of children, the use of tobacco, marijuana and LSD also were above the state averages. It's the same story with alcohol and marijuana use among Deschutes County eighth graders. Marijuana use among those students is 16% higher than the statewide average and almost 8% higher for alcohol. For those in the business of treating children who abuse drugs, being on the wrong side of so many statewide averages adds up to big trouble. "That is not good," says Roger Kryzanek, director of alcohol and drug programs for Deschutes County Human Services Department. " To me, this is the most concering bit of data we have." "What it says to me is we've got big-city problems. We've got the same kinds of problems you would expect to find in larger urban communities." That's not news to to area police, who have been fighting a rising tide of illegle drugs for more than 10 years. And even though police often see only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to drug use among youngsters, they know there's no such thing as a drug-free school. "Any kid who's been in school from middle school to high school has been exposed to it. They have seen it. They have seen it used. They've seen people buying and selling it," says Dennis Porter, a Deschutes County sheriff's deputy who is the school resource officer in La Pine. Peter Miller, principal of the 139 student alternative Marshall High School in Bend and former principal of the much larger Bend High School, was blunt: " For a principal to say a school drug-free is a lie." And what drugs are Central Oregon teens using? Again. the numbers paint a billboard size picture: It's alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, in that order, with a small but rising number using methamphetamine. "Alcohol is the drug of choice, for kids as well as adults." says Sherry Pressler, direstor of the Youth Enforcement Services program run by the Bend City Police Department. " What kids tell me is they do more drinking on a casual basis or at parties than other drugs." "Tobacco, widely considered a gateway to harder drugs, is close behind alcohol. Thirty percent of 11th graders indentified themselves as smokers in the state's survey and another 17% said they chew tobacco. One of the biggest problems with teen smoking is getting adults to take it seriously, says Kryzanek. But treatment providers say the link between tobacco and other drugs, especially marijuana, couldn't be clearer. "I think it is clearly a gateway drug," Kryzanek says of tobacco. " If we can reduce it, we know from studies we can seriously reduce latter drug use". It's no coincidence, experts say, that the percentage of young people who smoke marijuana is nearly as high as the percentage who smoke cigarettes. A far more dangerous threat to teens is the growing use of methamphetamine, a powerful " upper " that's growing in popularity because it is relatively cheap- $25 buys enough to stay high for 24 hours- and easy to find. Police and juvenile authorities believe more teens are being drawn to the drug, sending more into treatment to break meth addictions along with more serious health and mental after-affects. "When I first got here in 1985, we saw most of our problems with pot," says Brad Mondoy, director of the Jefferson County Juvenile Department. "Now we're seeing methamphetamine creating a lot of different problems. We're finding it hard to repair some of the damage they've done to themselves."