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"Everybody here overplays marijuana, like it's some horrible thing," says Melinda, a senior who wants to attend an East Coast college. "It's not just something that 'bad' people do. My dad went to an Ivy League school, and he and my mom both tried it in high school." Her parents' concern, she says, is that she'll buy pot laced with speed or crack. But Melinda, who seems representative of the average user at New Trier, smokes only occasionally and seems able to take it or leave it. "The people with problems are the ones who want being high to be reality," she says. "That's not me."
Once a badge of hipness, marijuana today welcomes everyone at New Trier--jocks and literati, nerds and debutantes. "These days it's everywhere," says Dottie, 17. "Cheerleaders puff. Sixth-graders puff." The very ordinariness of drug use leads some to conclude that it is without risk. But there are plenty of kids on the Corner at New Trier who started out as recreational users and now admit they can't stop. One prematurely wise senior voices disdain for "gumpy sophomores who think it's harmless." Some end up in rehab programs, which far more often than not fail initially with adolescents. The sad fact is that many will have a substance-abuse habit all their lives.
If teenage drug use were the kind of problem a school could solve, New Trier would probably ace it. It was among the first high schools in Illinois to face up to the last teenage drug explosion, in 1981. "We made a decision then to go public and say we have a problem," says Jon White, assistant principal for student services. When school officials decided in 1985 to go outside to hire a full-time person to deal with substance abuse, they opted not for an enforcer or an educator but for Mary Dailey, a social worker from an adolescent treatment center.
Dailey, now in her 12th year as the self-styled "drug czarina" of New Trier, heads the oldest and one of the best-funded student-assistance programs in the state. In 1988 she received an award, signed by William Bennett and presented by Nancy Reagan, honoring New Trier's "excellence in drug-prevention education." "I've devoted a career to this," says Dailey, "but I know that drug use is more prevalent in the freshman class than ever before." Despite all the societal angst generated over drug use during the 1980s, she feels that attitudes since then have softened. "In the late '70s and early '80s there was plenty of denial but also the idea that drugs aren't good," says Dailey. "Honestly, today a lot of parents don't feel that way. They hark back to the days when they used. And they don't realize what's happened to drug content or what the implications are of using at such young ages."
New Trier has always prided itself on its enlightened policy toward drug infractions. Some schools, such as nearby Glenbrook High, will permanently expel a student for merely having a roach clip. At New Trier, a student found for the first time under the influence of drugs or alcohol is suspended for five days, but four of those days are placed "in abeyance" if the student and his or her parents agree to go through a substance-abuse program together.