Behavior: The Junior Junkie

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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.