The Junior Junkie

On Coney Island's Mermaid Avenue, New York City police break up a thriving sidewalk traffic in heroin. The pushers: three boys, aged 15, 13 and 11, whose sales averaged $900 a week. The daughter of a Manhattan psychiatrist, located at the far end of a drug spree, boasts to newsmen: "I take hash, pot, LSD, heroin, speed--anything I can get." She is twelve. In Hollywood, a boy of eleven who has been pushing "ups" (amphetamine and methedrine pills) and "downs" (barbiturates, tranquilizers) since he was nine, is found out by his parents and locked in his bedroom. Through a window, he transacts business as usual.

These are not isolated examples of drug abuse by the very young. They can be multiplied many times over, and they add a frightening new dimension to the newly evolving drug society. What was once the quick trip to oblivion for the hopeless and despairing ghetto dweller has become the quick kick of the children of middle-class America. More ominously, a few of the neophyte users, some of them still short of their teens, are flirting not just with nonaddictive drugs but also with those that can hook and kill. Says Sociologist William Simon of the Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research: "Even in the neighborhoods of the silent majority, there has been a staggering increase in the use of drugs."

The evidence appears to bear Simon out. In a survey conducted recently at a girls' high school in New York City, 8% of the students confessed--perhaps boastfully--to being heroin addicts; in the eleventh grade alone, 58% of the girls said they were multiple drug us ers. Last year in New York City, where many national trends begin, heroin killed 224 teenagers, 55 of them 16 or under. The youngest victim was twelve. Authorities predict that heroin's death toll among teens and pre-teens in New York will reach one a day in 1970.

The problem is of staggering proportions. Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber, founder and psychiatric director of New York's Odyssey House, a rehabilitation center for drug addicts, calls it an epidemic. The first young heroin users began appearing at her clinic only last June, she says. Today the traffic is more than Odyssey House can handle--four to six junior junkies every day. To accommodate the overflow, Dr. Densen-Gerber has opened two branches solely for youthful addicts. One of her first applicants: a nine-year-old boy.

In experimenting with drugs, the very young have only adopted a practice common among teenagers. They join their older brothers and sisters in using drugs to flee from a world they do not like and feel helpless to change. "What the young in some cases want," say Sociologists Simon and John H. Gagnon in a jointly written paper, "and what appears to adults as unreasonable, is that the prize be located at the top of the Cracker Jack box, not at the bottom." Another attraction, they add, is that drugs can screen out reality and allow the youthful user to withdraw to the private sanctuary of his self.

In this quest, more and more pre-teeners are exploring the fantasy landscapes produced by heroin. Its sudden popularity, says Dr. Michael Baden, associate medical examiner for New York City, is related to the success of Operation Intercept, the Administration's recent campaign to stem the tide of marijuana flowing across the Mexican border (TIME, Sept. 26). As the supply of pot dwindled and the price rose, heroin pushers dropped their price to within reach of even modest pre-teen allowances.

The very dangers of heroin appeal to young users. Youth is a time of chance-taking. The bold can persuade themselves that they are immune from the risk of addiction. To the boldest, heroin offers the same thrilling opportunity as Russian roulette: a joust with death.

Sociologists Simon and Gagnon take issue with some authorities who insist that youthful addicts can emerge unharmed from their encounter with narcotics. "The real danger," they write, "is that they will lose a sense of their real capacity for experience and that they will abandon claims for an influential role in the collective enterprise of the society. Their future will become a progressive drift toward a totally privatized existence."

Unequipped to Cope. The adult society that bred this problem--and, by example, still encourages it--is unequipped to cope with it. No machinery exists even to measure the incidence of youthful drug use, much less to control it. There are scarcely any treatment centers in the country exclusively for youthful addicts. In New York City, petty-minded authorities are trying to close one of them. This month in court, Dr. Densen-Gerber will defend Odyssey House against charges of operating without a license and violating the building code.

Sociologists Simon and Gagnon suggest that as a first step toward solving the problem, adult society must admit its own responsibility: "Both the actual miracle and the myth of modern medicine have made the use of drugs highly legitimate, as something to be taken casually and not only during moments of acute and certified distress. Our children, in being casual about drugs, far from being in revolt against an older generation, may in fact be acknowledging how influential a model that generation was."

Society must recognize as well that the child drug user is the casualty of great and upsetting social change. In one sense, says Clinical Psychologist Stephen Rush of the Los Angeles Free Clinic, he has become a displaced person in a culture that his grandfather would not recognize--or much care for, either. Parental permissiveness, the growing conviction that the young and old generations have lost contact--such factors erode the old-fashioned family solidarity that once granted children a comforting sense of place. "The real solution," says Rush, "is in finding ways for young people to become active members of our civilization." That is a tall order, one that uncounted generations of discipline-minded parents have been unable to fulfill. By turning to drugs as one antidote to the shortcomings they see in adult society, today's young have made the solution far more difficult than it has ever been before.

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