Behavior: The Junior Junkie

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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.