(5 of 6)
Many parents seem similarly unable to turn their outrage about drug use into a clear and compelling message. When Marta, a willowy junior who sports a nose ring, was caught smoking pot on the street last spring, her mother arrived at the police station in a fury. "She just kept slapping me in the face, left and right," the 17-year-old remembers. But the anger only went so far. "My mom and I didn't tell my dad," Marta says. "He would have gone ballistic, and I would never get my car." Marta figures her mother thinks getting busted has scared her straight, but it has not. And she still expects her promised new car.
The cops on Chicago's North Shore see that kind of enabling behavior all the time. "Parents tell me they never go into their kids' rooms--then they wonder why they have a problem," says Officer Harty. No student has been convicted of a drug felony at New Trier in recent memory. When a kid does get caught in the prosperous communities of the North Shore, police and prosecutors frequently come up against formidable legal talent. "The first reaction of any parent is protection," says John Fay, juvenile officer for the Glencoe police department. "They hire the best because they can afford it. And let's face it, we've got judges who live in this area. They'll explore every avenue before sending a suburban kid to [Cook County Jail at] 26th and California."
The school and the police can't do much about pot use without the support and concern of parents, many of whom can't seem to decide whether to be the good cop or the bad cop with their kids. Emily, 48, turned into an enforcer when she found a pipe as she was redecorating her 16-year-old son's room. "I told him I didn't approve, that I didn't think it was necessary," she says. Emily's reaction wasn't as cool when another parent called to tell her that her 14-year-old daughter was smoking pot too. "That really shocked me," says Emily. "I didn't try it until I was 20, and she's all of 14--that's a big difference. What I worry about is the acceleration of gratification: if she's doing marijuana now, what'll she do as a senior?"
Before she caught her kids, Emily attended several meetings of Parent Alliance for Drug and Alcohol Awareness, which is linked to the New Trier school district. "I remember thinking these parents seemed so radical about marijuana," she says. Now she wonders whether random searches of lockers and mandatory drug testing ought to be introduced at school, two options Superintendent Bangser regards as unnecessary. But while she still considers the tone of PADAA too apocalyptic, she finds other parents too lackadaisical. "There's a definite head-in-the-sand attitude here," she says. "People figure our kids' SAT scores are so high they can't be doing it." PADAA sponsors public forums and blankets the community with literature to combat precisely those attitudes, but it's an uphill battle. "It used to be that the parents who got involved were the ones who had problems," sighs PADAA activist Sandra Plowden. "Now it seems like it's the ones without them."