Troubled Teens Resources

Connie got through the sixties and drug experimentation just fine and she took a rather smug view over the hysteria, as she called it, surrounding teenage drug abuse. So she had little patience for Kate’s late night call begging her to come out to California to be part of a crisis intervention being organized for her teenage daughter. It had been years since Connie had seen young Sarah, but she had been an integral part of her childhood, almost a second mom. There wasn’t anything about Sarah’s personality that suggested she was headed to a life of dereliction and addiction.

Connie also felt a twinge of shame, which annoyed her even more, when she considered the tacit consent she had given to her own son’s experimentation with marijuana. After all, she had spent her four years of high school “high as a kite” without any tragic consequences. She had completed college, married well and she expected full well that her son would have the same benign future. She wasn’t going to make him “sneak around” if she could keep him safely at home where she could monitor his use. He’d grow out of it. She did.

Crisis intervention ! What melodrama.

But Connie wouldn’t let her friend down and she left for California with the idea that she would protect Sarah from her mother’s over zealous control. In fact,after Kate had met her flight, driving to Kate’s beautiful hillside home where the crisis intervention team was assembling, Connie confided that her own son was “playing around” with pot and gently scolded Connie for being a drama queen. Instead of laughter, Kate just looked at her in silence, her eye’s welling with tears. “Tell me if you feel the same way after you see Sarah and if you do, well, you can skip the intervention. In fact, I don’t even want you talking to Sarah if you are OK with drugs.”

Connie sighed, and was ready to launch into another mini-lecture on progressive parenting when they pulled into the drive and she caught sight of what appeared to be a hooker getting out of the car in front of them. As more members of the crisis intervention team arrived, Connie got out of the car, choosing to ignore the strange woman in front of her now as they all progressed into the house. Then the “hooker” turned around. It was Sarah.

Sarah of the sky blues eyes and golden hair. Sarah who could read by the time she was 3, who had the most infectious laughter Connie had ever heard, who loved butterflies and snakes alike and who had an insatiable love of life…

What in God’s name had happened?

Sarah was only 17 but looked 30. Those once sparkling eyes were narrow, dull and mean. The pallor of her skin was blotched with scabs and her hair coiled in dirty tendrils around her tattooed neck. Instead of greeting her childhood mentor and friend with joy she just snapped out a cold, curt hello and went to huddle in a corner of the couch.

Connie was stunned, and suddenly very frightened. Kate had mentioned that Sarah had only been using marijuana a year ago. Now it was heroin. One year. Her son had just started smoking pot and had as much promise as Sarah had ever had. If it could happen to Sarah, it could happen to her son.

Connie was very sobered by her experience, fortunately. On her flight back she wasted little time calling the school for recommendations for teen drug therapies, scheduling an appointment with the recommended doctors before her flight even hit the ground.

Intervention starts with vigilance and education. If you are one of the many “children of the sixties’ who played with drugs and came through it unscathed, do not dismiss your own teenagers experimentation. As chaotic as the sixties were, they don’t hold a match to the pressures to use and abuse drugs that confront today’s teenagers. Especially if they have parents who just chuckle and look the other way.