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Last school year Drew not only stayed clean, he even talked to younger kids about the perils of drug use. But doubts were gnawing at him. "I didn't think my use justified a whole life in a 12-step program," he remembers. He started to think, as he still does, that recovery was "a blue-collar thing." He says, "It's fine for people who are going to take their dads' places on road crews, but as a creative person, it holds you back. Just look at groups like Aerosmith or the Red Hot Chili Peppers--they got sober, and they started to suck."
When school was out, Drew gave his demons free rein: he rented a cheap cottage in Wisconsin with some friends and laid into a quarter-pound of pot and lots of booze. "We got sick all over everything--it was definitely my failure self. I was like a dog that had been tied up in front of a steak and then finally let loose." Late last summer, a grandparent interceded to put him in a residential treatment center out of state. A week after his return, he says, he was using again.
Drew knows he has an addictive personality. "Even as a kid, I was the one who had to have every baseball card, every comic book," he says. And while he thinks about quitting every day, he doesn't believe he can just stop. So he converts his vice into a twisted virtue. Bolstered by a smattering of existentialism, Beat poetry and rock 'n' roll, Drew and plenty of teenagers like him justify what they do as a glorification of immediate pleasure over conventional restraint, a familiar theme from the '60s. For Drew, smoking copious quantities of pot confers membership in the select club of "the failures," people who were dealt a good hand of money, talent and support but who opt for a path of all-but-deliberate self-destruction.
While some New Trier parents are disengaged, as Drew claims his were, others are more hands-on--and angry. But the results of greater parental discipline are not necessarily much better. Michael, a preternaturally bright 16-year-old sophomore, is a case in point. Last year he was smoking up to five times a day, and his grades were suffering. But it wasn't until his scoutmaster caught him getting high on a Boy Scout outing that his parents found out. Their reaction was to ground him for the summer. The punishment gave him a chance to read Dante's Divine Comedy and some Shakespeare but did nothing to change his attitude; his friends came over to his place to get high.
At the end of the summer, Michael says, "I realized this wasn't good for me," and he stopped smoking. In what he now describes as a cry for help, he came clean with his parents and told them about the pot, the acid, the mushrooms, everything. "I thought they'd help me, but they were furious," he says. Michael has shelved further attempts to bridge the gap. "It's one thing to punish me and another to alienate me," he says. "Now there's no way I'm going to talk straight with them again. I do, and I'm heading right for a military academy." Michael seems neither disposed nor able to quit entirely. "I've been cutting down a lot, and really only do it on the weekends," he says. "But I can't go cold turkey."