(6 of 9)
It certainly seems so. Afraid that his younger son would get involved in the drug scene, Eric's father joined a group of parents determined to plumb the depth of the drug problem at the local high school. "One of the other fathers hauled out the school yearbook and demanded that the kids show us who was doing drugs," says Eric's dad. "They told us it would be easier to show who wasn't. My God, there are 2,000 students at that school, and their fast-track, two-income parents don't have any idea what their kids are doing."
WHILE THE MOST SUCCESSFUL young dealers may be venal and vicious, at least some of them have first-rate intellects that in a better environment could have been put to healthier use. "What is really frightening," says Al Schuman, director of Washington's probation program, "is that the kids who are selling these drugs are the bright youngsters, the articulate ones. They understand how to work the system. They can keep track of money, and they know how to run a business. It's almost a corporate mentality."
But these are youngsters who, by the time they reach puberty, have given up on the dream of leading normal lives free from crime and brutality. "The youth say, 'I'm going to live as good as I can today,' " says Bernard Parker, executive director of Operation Getdown, a Detroit community-service group. "They don't see their life continuing. They don't have any hope." They are unfazed by the notion that drug dealing could send them to prison or the grave.
Crack's corruption of children is becoming, in the Bible's phrase, a millstone around the neck of American society. Never before has public awareness of the crack crisis been so widespread. But most of the sweeping solutions being offered seem specious, if not unworkable.
At a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington last week, city executives drafted a resolution condemning the Reagan Administration's antidrug efforts as ill conceived and poorly executed. When Attorney General Edwin Meese appeared before the group to defend the Administration's record, the mayors were not impressed. "All you're doing is putting a lot of fingers in the dike that is about to collapse and drown us in the trenches," fumed Mayor Joseph Daddona of Allentown, Pa.
Police crackdowns throughout the country have had negligible impact. In a highly touted weekend-long raid of drug-dealing gangs in Los Angeles last month, police arrested 1,453 people, including 315 juveniles. Half had to be released for lack of evidence. The frequent raids in Los Angeles have provoked a backlash among civil libertarians, who accuse the police of busting any young man who happens to be black or Hispanic.
Moreover, greater numbers of arrests will make no difference if the jails are too crowded to contain new inmates. The Los Angeles County prison system, designed to hold 12,800, now houses 22,600. The county's juvenile system, designed for 1,317, is bursting at the seams with 2,006 youngsters. Prisons and juvenile facilities in New York, Detroit and other major cities are overflowing.