Turning Off

"You know what's going to happen, don't you?" Felix Donawa asks the pretty, 20-year-old heroin user. "You're going to be out on the street turning tricks." "Let me see your hands," demands another questioner. "No needle marks. Not yet, anyway. You're lucky so far," he continues, then grimly goes into the details of how addicts have to keep looking for new veins to shoot heroin into as old ones collapse. "How would you like it, having to shoot up in your neck?" "I wouldn't," mumbles the girl.

The scene took place last week in the office of a new Manhattan organization called Encounter, formed seven months ago in Greenwich Village by three young ex-addicts to combat the growing drug addiction among teenagers. The method is group therapy, and if the approach is brutal, so is the problem. Across the nation, teen-age addiction is soaring, and it is no longer confined to the slums. For in pills and pot and LSD today's teen-agers are finding not only an avenue of escape but a cool symbol of rebellion.

Bennies & Goof balls. As increasing evidence of teen-age addiction is uncovered, a counterrevolution is beginning. Colleges, universities and high schools are suddenly eager for effective antidrug literature. Authorities agree that the young pre-addict is the one to zero in on. The problem is how to reach him. The new federal Bureau of Drug Abuse Control, which, with the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, recently co-sponsored seven regional conferences, discovered that the difficulty most often cited by students and educators alike was lack of communication: today's teenagers, rebelling against adult authority, turn off at the first hint of moralizing or preachment.

Part of BDAC's answer is to tap such teen-age idols as Paul Newman, whose hip and he-man manner make him an ideal narrator for its film Bennies and Goofballs, some 200 copies of which are now circulating among schools and youth groups. Even more effective are hard-hitting documentary films in which the cameras simply train on the young addicts themselves. Almost every junior high school student in Boston, for example, has seen the movie Hooked at least once in the past two years. In the film, one teen-ager straightforwardly tells how she once stole her uncle's heart pills because of her craving for drugs; another recounts how his mother tried suicide when she learned of his habit.

In Narcotics, Why Not?, another documentary now being widely circulated, the camera focuses on a young boy as he breathes deeply from a paper bag full of airplane glue, then leans back and lets the bag drop from his limp hands; another shot shows police pulling a dazed addict from behind the wheel of a smashed automobile.

The Games Addicts Play. Of all the different highs, the one that has gripped the imagination of teen-agers most is LSD. Says San Mateo, Calif., High School Superintendent Leon Lessinger: "The issue is LSD. Sooner or later you confront it." Lessinger himself was so shocked when he discovered at least 20 hard LSD users in his own affluent school district that he went out and raised $21,000 to finance an antiacid color documentary, now in the works, called LSD 25. Lessinger got his second shock when Film Maker David Parker asked the high school students whom they would trust as the narrator, got the reply, "Nobody."

"The only thing for addicts is ex-addicts," insists Lynn Sexton, 19, one of the founders of the Encounter program. "We know all the self-delusions and games addicts play, and the addicts feel we are sympathetic to the problem." For no matter how stark a film is, it is far less forceful than the impact of the face-to-face confrontations that are the key to Encounter's success. "I just tell them that almost every friend I had when I was on drugs is either dead or in jail," says another Encounter founder, Jan Stacy, 19.

So far, 20 teen-agers have enrolled in Encounter's program, and a dozen have already stopped taking drugs altogether. "We keep up the pressure," explains Brendan Sexton, 21, Lynn's husband and the third founder. "Our advantage is that we have been down that road too. We can say to them, 'Look, here we are, and believe it or not, it does pay off to face these problems.' Happiness is a big thing with these kids, and we tell them and show them that they can be happier without drugs."

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