The all-night binge took place in a tent on the beach at Blakely Harbor, with featured inebriants including beer, marijuana and cocaine.
With each hit, the four Bainbridge High School seniors present would declare, “See you in the emergency room” – a gleeful disavowal, one recalled, of “everything we learned in school and the media about the evil of drugs.”
They and other students interviewed were quintessential products of a fine Bainbridge school system – all got good grades and had specific career goals in mind. Yet so forthright were they in recounting their tales of “partying” and drug use, many allowed a reporter to use their real names in print.
“I drink and get high,” one girl said with complete
candor, “because it’s fun.”
It was an alarming tale, and a sad one. It was read by the nation on Nov. 10, 1989, on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, after a reporter visited Bainbridge to chronicle the apparent failure of a decade of “intensive and innovative” drug and alcohol education here.
For those who can find a copy, that news story makes informative reading and casts today’s problems in a familiar context – for then as now, “then” sounds a lot like “now.” In last year’s survey of public school students, 37 percent of BHS seniors said they had smoked marijuana during the previous month. The numbers for alcohol and tobacco use were likewise dismaying.
The frustration of running in place – another decade of anti-drug programs, another decade of many kids ignoring them – was evident Thursday evening, as school district officials and the school board discussed ways to better “institutionalize” drug education here.
We expect that discussion to pick up in the coming months, as the district’s Health Committee takes up a new charge of examining substance abuse in our schools. The committee has initiated a series of focus groups around the campus, identifying the varying perceptions of student drug use and the “barriers to success” in keeping kids steered right.
We suspect we’ll be hearing some familiar refrains: Kids are caught up in social pressures, or are looking for relief from depression or other problems of adolescence; some are bored, and will inevitably cite the “nothing to do on Bainbridge” mantra; tragically – and no one should deny that this is true – some get their alcohol and drugs from their parents. In all of that, nothing will have changed in the last decade, or the decade before that.
Yet we applaud the renewed discussion, and hope parents and community groups will get involved, particularly as many kids say they feel “disengaged” from the adult community around them. The constancy of the numbers also suggests that, regardless of what education programs are available at the front end, the district and this community must be well-equipped with intervention, counseling and treatment for students who stray. Such programs must be part of the discussion.
It’s small consolation that we face the same problems and frustrations as those who came before. In the Journal article, even the school district’s top administrator lamented: “I’m not sure there’s a drug education program in the country that can make a difference. Society is too big an opponent.”
Things certainly haven’t gotten any easier in a decade,
but perhaps that’s even more reason to try.
