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If a law is broken--possession of marijuana, for instance--charges are filed by Scott Harty, a Winnetka police officer permanently assigned to the school. For amounts less than 10 grams, that can mean a minor fine under a village ordinance; for more or for dealing, kids land in county court. "I don't give warnings," Harty says. The friend-to-friend commerce is hard to infiltrate, he says, so a bust "really puts blood in the water" as kids try to figure out whether someone was "narked" on. But Harty has been around long enough to know that many kids can't be scared straight by the law. "I've arrested kids who just love to see the squad car pull up," he says. "Some of them see a rap sheet as a badge of honor."
The school does what it can to insulate its students. Two years ago, New Trier, formerly an open campus, started keeping its 3,000 students on school grounds all day, except for about 300 juniors and seniors whose parents give permission for them to leave. But even a wealthy, concerned alma mater like New Trier can't fill the shoes of parents who either don't care that their kids are smoking or fail at the task of stopping them. "How could a school eradicate it?" asks New Trier's superintendent, Henry S. Bangser. "Schools have a responsibility to address the problem, but students didn't learn to do drugs here, and mostly they don't do it here."
There are many cooler places for them to do it. Most evenings a party evolves at Dottie's apartment. She moved there after her parents forbade her to smoke marijuana at home. The scene is right out of the '70s: a black light, a beanbag chair and an African drum in the corner. Pink Floyd is cranked up loud. There seems to be a curious lack of sexual tension among the 15 or so adolescent boys and girls, most of them from New Trier, sitting in a rough circle on the floor in the eerie light. No one necks in the corner; attention is focused on the bong slowly circling the assemblage. Everyone who has pot shares it. "The ethics here is if you're 'holding,' you contribute," explains a kid as he fills the bong one more time.
Among kids who admit they can't control their pot smoking, trouble at home often lurks in the background. Even in Chicago's relatively tranquil North Shore, dysfunction blooms in a thousand ways. Drew, for instance, a thoughtful 16-year-old junior who began getting high in the eighth grade, has had trouble handling marijuana from the start. He claims that his absent father once had a substance-abuse problem. By the ninth grade, he says, "my priorities were totally screwed up. I didn't even buy the books I needed. I was selling pot in the boys' room."
Drew ended up in outpatient rehab. "They tell you you're a drug addict, and if you say you're not, you're in denial," he says. "If you say you only use it occasionally, they say you're rationalizing." Still, things improved. Some therapy sessions included Drew's mother. "There was complete honesty," he recalls. "It was the best our relationship has ever been."