HIGH TIMES AT NEW TRIER HIGH

By JAMES L. GRAFF/WINNETKA

Even with his leather jacket, wraparound shades and permanent slouch, Matt can't quite pull off the menacing air people attach to drug dealers. Maybe it's the fact that he operates under the stately trees of Chicago's wealthy North Shore, or that he is only 17 and wears braces. He parks his late-model Lincoln in the student lot and saunters through the after-school crowd loitering on "Smokers' Corner," a short block from New Trier Township High School. Matt talks the language of business, not crime. "The way to make a large sum of money is with repeat customers," he explains. "With me, these kids can walk out of school and get good quality at good prices--$35 for an eighth [of an ounce of marijuana]. I'm not a pusher, which is disgusting; I'm a dealer--people who want it can get it from me."

Marijuana is Matt's top seller, but today he is hawking some psilocybin mushrooms to two ninth-graders, Russell and Jared. As a bonus, Matt drives his young clients to a Chicago head shop, where they spend $50 on an elaborate porcelain hookah shaped like a mushroom. Afterward they stop at Matt's place, where everyone repairs to the garage for a few bongfuls of "excellent bud" before heading home for dinner.

It is a classic afternoon's adventure for young suburbanites, with a touch--but no more--of peril. In Wilmette, Winnetka, Glencoe and Kenilworth, the posh white suburbs served by New Trier, drug use isn't associated with gang violence, crack houses, addiction or dead-end despair. Getting high has become almost boringly conventional. Drew (names and some other identifying features have been changed), a regular at the Corner, has even kicked around the notion of buying "New Trier Smoking Club" jackets with his friends and awarding mock varsity letters.

Most New Trier kids who smoke pot--by all accounts more than three-fifths of the student body--wouldn't be caught dead in a jacket like that. Only a fraction of New Trier's pot smokers--the denizens of the Corner among them--view getting high as the main part of their identity. For most, marijuana is an ancillary pleasure of growing up comfortably in the '90s, not the least bit incompatible with varsity athletics, the spring musical or advanced-placement chemistry. After all, most of the kids at New Trier will go on to succeed, just as their parents did. The fact that they have tried pot won't cancel out the perks of good breeding and unbounded opportunity.

Situated in Winnetka, where last year the median sale price for a house was $515,000, New Trier regularly sends 95% of its graduates to four-year colleges, many of them the same elite institutions that produced the lawyers, doctors and corporate executives who live here in large part because of the excellent school system. New Trier offers its students--85% white, 12% Asian, 2% Hispanic and 1% African American--everything from international relations and classical Greek to operatic choir and gourmet food. At New Trier, there's nothing called gym class or phys ed; it's kinetic wellness.

"Everybody here overplays marijuana, like it's some horrible thing," says Melinda, a senior who wants to attend an East Coast college. "It's not just something that 'bad' people do. My dad went to an Ivy League school, and he and my mom both tried it in high school." Her parents' concern, she says, is that she'll buy pot laced with speed or crack. But Melinda, who seems representative of the average user at New Trier, smokes only occasionally and seems able to take it or leave it. "The people with problems are the ones who want being high to be reality," she says. "That's not me."

Once a badge of hipness, marijuana today welcomes everyone at New Trier--jocks and literati, nerds and debutantes. "These days it's everywhere," says Dottie, 17. "Cheerleaders puff. Sixth-graders puff." The very ordinariness of drug use leads some to conclude that it is without risk. But there are plenty of kids on the Corner at New Trier who started out as recreational users and now admit they can't stop. One prematurely wise senior voices disdain for "gumpy sophomores who think it's harmless." Some end up in rehab programs, which far more often than not fail initially with adolescents. The sad fact is that many will have a substance-abuse habit all their lives.

If teenage drug use were the kind of problem a school could solve, New Trier would probably ace it. It was among the first high schools in Illinois to face up to the last teenage drug explosion, in 1981. "We made a decision then to go public and say we have a problem," says Jon White, assistant principal for student services. When school officials decided in 1985 to go outside to hire a full-time person to deal with substance abuse, they opted not for an enforcer or an educator but for Mary Dailey, a social worker from an adolescent treatment center.

Dailey, now in her 12th year as the self-styled "drug czarina" of New Trier, heads the oldest and one of the best-funded student-assistance programs in the state. In 1988 she received an award, signed by William Bennett and presented by Nancy Reagan, honoring New Trier's "excellence in drug-prevention education." "I've devoted a career to this," says Dailey, "but I know that drug use is more prevalent in the freshman class than ever before." Despite all the societal angst generated over drug use during the 1980s, she feels that attitudes since then have softened. "In the late '70s and early '80s there was plenty of denial but also the idea that drugs aren't good," says Dailey. "Honestly, today a lot of parents don't feel that way. They hark back to the days when they used. And they don't realize what's happened to drug content or what the implications are of using at such young ages."

New Trier has always prided itself on its enlightened policy toward drug infractions. Some schools, such as nearby Glenbrook High, will permanently expel a student for merely having a roach clip. At New Trier, a student found for the first time under the influence of drugs or alcohol is suspended for five days, but four of those days are placed "in abeyance" if the student and his or her parents agree to go through a substance-abuse program together.

If a law is broken--possession of marijuana, for instance--charges are filed by Scott Harty, a Winnetka police officer permanently assigned to the school. For amounts less than 10 grams, that can mean a minor fine under a village ordinance; for more or for dealing, kids land in county court. "I don't give warnings," Harty says. The friend-to-friend commerce is hard to infiltrate, he says, so a bust "really puts blood in the water" as kids try to figure out whether someone was "narked" on. But Harty has been around long enough to know that many kids can't be scared straight by the law. "I've arrested kids who just love to see the squad car pull up," he says. "Some of them see a rap sheet as a badge of honor."

The school does what it can to insulate its students. Two years ago, New Trier, formerly an open campus, started keeping its 3,000 students on school grounds all day, except for about 300 juniors and seniors whose parents give permission for them to leave. But even a wealthy, concerned alma mater like New Trier can't fill the shoes of parents who either don't care that their kids are smoking or fail at the task of stopping them. "How could a school eradicate it?" asks New Trier's superintendent, Henry S. Bangser. "Schools have a responsibility to address the problem, but students didn't learn to do drugs here, and mostly they don't do it here."

There are many cooler places for them to do it. Most evenings a party evolves at Dottie's apartment. She moved there after her parents forbade her to smoke marijuana at home. The scene is right out of the '70s: a black light, a beanbag chair and an African drum in the corner. Pink Floyd is cranked up loud. There seems to be a curious lack of sexual tension among the 15 or so adolescent boys and girls, most of them from New Trier, sitting in a rough circle on the floor in the eerie light. No one necks in the corner; attention is focused on the bong slowly circling the assemblage. Everyone who has pot shares it. "The ethics here is if you're 'holding,' you contribute," explains a kid as he fills the bong one more time.

Among kids who admit they can't control their pot smoking, trouble at home often lurks in the background. Even in Chicago's relatively tranquil North Shore, dysfunction blooms in a thousand ways. Drew, for instance, a thoughtful 16-year-old junior who began getting high in the eighth grade, has had trouble handling marijuana from the start. He claims that his absent father once had a substance-abuse problem. By the ninth grade, he says, "my priorities were totally screwed up. I didn't even buy the books I needed. I was selling pot in the boys' room."

Drew ended up in outpatient rehab. "They tell you you're a drug addict, and if you say you're not, you're in denial," he says. "If you say you only use it occasionally, they say you're rationalizing." Still, things improved. Some therapy sessions included Drew's mother. "There was complete honesty," he recalls. "It was the best our relationship has ever been."

Last school year Drew not only stayed clean, he even talked to younger kids about the perils of drug use. But doubts were gnawing at him. "I didn't think my use justified a whole life in a 12-step program," he remembers. He started to think, as he still does, that recovery was "a blue-collar thing." He says, "It's fine for people who are going to take their dads' places on road crews, but as a creative person, it holds you back. Just look at groups like Aerosmith or the Red Hot Chili Peppers--they got sober, and they started to suck."

When school was out, Drew gave his demons free rein: he rented a cheap cottage in Wisconsin with some friends and laid into a quarter-pound of pot and lots of booze. "We got sick all over everything--it was definitely my failure self. I was like a dog that had been tied up in front of a steak and then finally let loose." Late last summer, a grandparent interceded to put him in a residential treatment center out of state. A week after his return, he says, he was using again.

Drew knows he has an addictive personality. "Even as a kid, I was the one who had to have every baseball card, every comic book," he says. And while he thinks about quitting every day, he doesn't believe he can just stop. So he converts his vice into a twisted virtue. Bolstered by a smattering of existentialism, Beat poetry and rock 'n' roll, Drew and plenty of teenagers like him justify what they do as a glorification of immediate pleasure over conventional restraint, a familiar theme from the '60s. For Drew, smoking copious quantities of pot confers membership in the select club of "the failures," people who were dealt a good hand of money, talent and support but who opt for a path of all-but-deliberate self-destruction.

While some New Trier parents are disengaged, as Drew claims his were, others are more hands-on--and angry. But the results of greater parental discipline are not necessarily much better. Michael, a preternaturally bright 16-year-old sophomore, is a case in point. Last year he was smoking up to five times a day, and his grades were suffering. But it wasn't until his scoutmaster caught him getting high on a Boy Scout outing that his parents found out. Their reaction was to ground him for the summer. The punishment gave him a chance to read Dante's Divine Comedy and some Shakespeare but did nothing to change his attitude; his friends came over to his place to get high.

At the end of the summer, Michael says, "I realized this wasn't good for me," and he stopped smoking. In what he now describes as a cry for help, he came clean with his parents and told them about the pot, the acid, the mushrooms, everything. "I thought they'd help me, but they were furious," he says. Michael has shelved further attempts to bridge the gap. "It's one thing to punish me and another to alienate me," he says. "Now there's no way I'm going to talk straight with them again. I do, and I'm heading right for a military academy." Michael seems neither disposed nor able to quit entirely. "I've been cutting down a lot, and really only do it on the weekends," he says. "But I can't go cold turkey."

Many parents seem similarly unable to turn their outrage about drug use into a clear and compelling message. When Marta, a willowy junior who sports a nose ring, was caught smoking pot on the street last spring, her mother arrived at the police station in a fury. "She just kept slapping me in the face, left and right," the 17-year-old remembers. But the anger only went so far. "My mom and I didn't tell my dad," Marta says. "He would have gone ballistic, and I would never get my car." Marta figures her mother thinks getting busted has scared her straight, but it has not. And she still expects her promised new car.

The cops on Chicago's North Shore see that kind of enabling behavior all the time. "Parents tell me they never go into their kids' rooms--then they wonder why they have a problem," says Officer Harty. No student has been convicted of a drug felony at New Trier in recent memory. When a kid does get caught in the prosperous communities of the North Shore, police and prosecutors frequently come up against formidable legal talent. "The first reaction of any parent is protection," says John Fay, juvenile officer for the Glencoe police department. "They hire the best because they can afford it. And let's face it, we've got judges who live in this area. They'll explore every avenue before sending a suburban kid to [Cook County Jail at] 26th and California."

The school and the police can't do much about pot use without the support and concern of parents, many of whom can't seem to decide whether to be the good cop or the bad cop with their kids. Emily, 48, turned into an enforcer when she found a pipe as she was redecorating her 16-year-old son's room. "I told him I didn't approve, that I didn't think it was necessary," she says. Emily's reaction wasn't as cool when another parent called to tell her that her 14-year-old daughter was smoking pot too. "That really shocked me," says Emily. "I didn't try it until I was 20, and she's all of 14--that's a big difference. What I worry about is the acceleration of gratification: if she's doing marijuana now, what'll she do as a senior?"

Before she caught her kids, Emily attended several meetings of Parent Alliance for Drug and Alcohol Awareness, which is linked to the New Trier school district. "I remember thinking these parents seemed so radical about marijuana," she says. Now she wonders whether random searches of lockers and mandatory drug testing ought to be introduced at school, two options Superintendent Bangser regards as unnecessary. But while she still considers the tone of PADAA too apocalyptic, she finds other parents too lackadaisical. "There's a definite head-in-the-sand attitude here," she says. "People figure our kids' SAT scores are so high they can't be doing it." PADAA sponsors public forums and blankets the community with literature to combat precisely those attitudes, but it's an uphill battle. "It used to be that the parents who got involved were the ones who had problems," sighs PADAA activist Sandra Plowden. "Now it seems like it's the ones without them."

The dilemma for Emily and many other parents of her generation is that she wants to enjoy her children, to be liked by them, so she feels constrained not to crack down too hard. "When we were growing up, there was a big black line between us and our parents," she says. Now she wears sandals, socks and jeans, just like her kids. In the car with her husband and two children, they can all agree on music by Santana, the Beatles and the Doors. "In a way, that makes things easier," says Emily, "but on the other hand, when we tell them something, they just say, 'Whatever.'" Emily even bought a T shirt emblazoned with that word for her son, who refuses to wear it.

So Emily and her husband, a doctor, are left in a parental limbo familiar to her peers: she is on to her kids about smoking marijuana, but she knows that won't be enough to stop them. Next time she catches them, she swears, "I'll lock them in every afternoon"--but she looks doubtful even as she says it. Ultimately, she hopes, the striving for success they've grown up with will check the urge to rebel. "I want to be like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye and stop these kids from going off the cliff," she says. "But then I look at the breadth of the problem and think I can't do it."