Teen Drug Abuse

NEW YORK – Paul Turgeon, a corporate engineer and father, is a teen of the Age of Aquarius - the 1960s and '70s when it was cool in many circles to get high, trip on mescaline, and experiment with hallucinatory mushrooms, also known as teen drug abuse.

In that, he is very much a member of his generation. But he is also an exception: He readily admits to his two teen-agers that he tried drugs - indeed "just about everything under the sun" - at their age.

"I'm of the belief that if they can gain from my experience, all the better," he says. "But I also put that in context. I have had to make it very clear that a lot of the things that I did were viewed very differently then from the way they are today."

Today's parents are more likely to have used drugs in teen-age years than any other generation. Yet, unlike Mr. Turgeon, they're proving more reluctant to talk about it to their children.

A new survey by the Partnership for a Drug Free America has found that 12 percent of today's parents have never talked to their kids about teen drug abuse and the risks they pose. That's twice as many as just six years ago. At the same time, parents are significantly underestimating their kids' use of and exposure to drugs in schools and communities.

This phenomenon is raising alarms in the teen drug abuse -prevention community, primarily because statistics show that kids whose parents talk with them regularly about drugs and abuse are 50 percent less likely to use them. But it's also because this generation of teens is facing a new drug-abuse landscape, where once-hip drugs like marijuana are being complemented by a variety of pharmaceuticals - from cough suppressants to painkillers - many of which can be easily found in their parents' medicine cabinets.

"Today's parents see less risk in teen drug abuse, and they admit there's significantly less communication going on with their own teens," says Tom Hedrick of the Partnership, a nonprofit anti-drug group. "Along with the changing drug threats ... that parents are simply unaware of, we have a very dangerous situation developing."

Mr. Hedrick calls this group of parents "a very tough audience" because, like Turgeon, they came of age when teen drug abuse was at its peak and many used drugs to no apparent ill effect into adulthood.

Thus, they have a lowered perception of risk. For instance, in 1998, 35 percent of parents surveyed saw slight or no risk in their teens trying drugs once or twice. By 2004, that number had jumped to 43 percent. Similarly, six years ago, 7 percent of parents saw slight or no risk in their teens trying cocaine once or twice. That's now jumped to 12 percent.

At the same time, most parents are like Valerie Flynn from Fairfield, Conn., who believes it's important to talk with her teens about drug abuse. And most do, like Ms. Flynn, but sometimes without the in-depth, consistent conversations researchers believe can be an effective deterrent.

"I talk to them about teen drug abuse, but I feel like they know everything. They know more than me," she says. "And I assume they won't do anything. I trust them that they won't go near it."

Ms. Flynn's 14-year old daughter, Audrey, says she has learned a lot about the dangers of teen drug abuse at school and has no desire to use them. "I've seen so many movies and clips - all these weird and disgusting things. I don't even want to try them," she says.

Teen drug abuse has gone down over the past three years. At the same time, a gulf exists between what parents think their teens are exposed to and the reality of what gets passed around the schoolyard. For instance, only 20 percent of parents think their teens have friends who smoke pot, but more than 60 percent of teens say their friends use the drug. And while only 18 percent of parents think their own teens have tried marijuana, 39 percent of teens admit to researchers that they have done so.

Turgeon believes one reason parents are reluctant to talk openly about teen drug abuse and their own experiences is that the culture has changed so drastically. When he was in college at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., drug abuse was an "entree into an opportunity to meet interesting new people. Now it's just the opposite." It's shifted from morally acceptable to morally wrong, he says, and that helps explain why parents are hesitant to be honest with their own teens.

"They don't talk to their teens in part because they don't want them to know they did anything wrong," he says. "So there's now a moral pall around drug abuse that stifles discussion, and I don't think it's a good thing whenever society stifles open discussion."

Researchers say the lower perceptions of risk evident in this generation of drug-savvy parents also explain why parents are less willing to talk with their teens. Many of them got high, some regularly, and they're doing just fine. They assume their teens will follow the same path.

But experts say that may also be misleading. New research shows that teen-agers' brains develop more slowly than once thought. While 18 has become the accepted age of consent for a variety of adult activities, a new study by the Treatment Research Institute (TRI) for teen drug abuse in Philadelphia has found that full development of certain mental processes - notably judgment - doesn't take place until about 24. To some, this accounts in part for teen-agers' risk-taking and seeming sense of invincibility. "This is a call for parents to take more action to substitute their own judgment for their teens'," says the TRI's Thomas McLellan.