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Irwin Tobin, who runs the New York City program, insists that "the drug problem was not created by the schools, and it will never be solved by the schools alone." He adds: "Some principals still don't think they have a problem, or just don't want to admit it." At Manhattan's Robert F. Wagner Junior High School, Principal Bernard Walker has group sessions for parents and kids, and every day he reads a news article about drugs over the school public address system. Are drugs available at Wagner? "I don't think so," Walker answers carefully. "I don't think so."
Education programs are of no use to children who are already using drugs. "They can keep showing those movies in school for ten or 20 years and the kids are going to keep snooting up in the bathroom," says an 18-year-old New Yorker who has been on drugs most of his teen-age life. "When I was shooting up, I liked to read about other junkies in the papers. It fed my sickness. I liked to hear about the ODs [overdose cases], and I'd think I was brave for taking it." For kids on junk, of all the forms of treatment or temporizing that have been tried (see box, page 20), the residential group therapy center seems to provide the strongest support. The theory is that kids get each other on junk, and kids can help each other get off it. Parents are not quite helpless, but their children are often more immediately influenced by schoolmates and friends.
Blacks are understandably resentful that the problem of teen-age heroin addiction is suddenly getting attention because it has reached the white middle class. They have lived with it for two decades in the ghetto, and they are rightly enraged when a Narcotics Bureau official says that it was a problem—"but it was one we could live with." A 20year-old in the New York City Phoenix House program, who started on heroin in Harlem at twelve, complains: "Up there it's easier to get it than to avoid it. This is a good reason why the blacks are so mad that the police don't bust all the very obvious pushers. They don't because they are paid off."
Warren Blake, a black police community relations officer in Harlem, asks: "You know what the people up here are saying? Now that white people's kids are involved, the politicians are worried." There is undoubtedly truth in that plaint, though everyone dealing with teen-age addiction vehemently agrees that governmental efforts in law enforcement, education, treatment and rehabilitation are so far barely more than a gesture; most U.S. cities have simply no facilities whatever for handling teen-age addicts, and even New York officially has no public funds specifically for treating addicts under 18.