Drugs easier to find than a tennis court

CINTRA, I Seek Your Guidance:

It's a parent's worst nightmare: My kid is apparently at that age when
drugs have started to look interesting. I've done my best to educate him
without being too moralistic (thus making drugs look supercool by being
vehemently opposed to them), but it looks like he's taking them anyway,
despite my attempts to steer him away.

I don't know what the point of it is he's got an uncle who is clearly
screwed up past the point of no return (he's in jail), so it's not like
he's unaware or had no example in his life of what drugs can do to you. I
know he smokes pot, and I don't really care so much about that, but
anything harder really terrifies me.

Why is it that drugs are so damned fascinating? Is there anything at all,
short of enacting some "Tough Love" drama, that can be done? I know you did
a lot of drugs in your youth, so I'm asking you. Sign me Mother of the
Bombed

Dearest Ms. Mother: Illegal narcotics are a behemoth bogey that strikes
down our nation's children in the dead of night and makes them behave in
sinister and adult ways. However, most drugs are still 10,000 times easier
to find than a tennis court in most lower income neighborhoods, and this is
no accident, so drugs, unfortunately, are a reality to be contended with
and accepted as a fact of American life, especially in regards to our youth.

Drugs, if you include marijuana, are almost an inevitability for young
people nowadays: at a certain age, you're a rarity if you're a virgin and /
or you haven't done any drugs. In high school, everything hurts, emotions
and hormones and the horror of the future come on like a terrible chemical
spill, confounding all teens and leaving them with no dignity, no power,
and no control.

Teens, in order to survive, feel they need to embrace this epidemic lack of
dignity, power and control, and this is where illegal drugs, alcohol, sex
and allencompassing music scenes appear to come in handy.

A JosephCampbellianesque reason for teen drug fascination, I believe, is
that drugs are the only available American teen ritual that includes
everybody; unlike communions or bar mitzvahs. In more spiritually refined
cultures, there are mass tribal circumcisions or walkabouts wherein young
people are sent out alone into the outback to kill Gila monsters with the
femur of their ancestor and drink mud from a sock, but American teens can
only achieve any primal experience of living adulthood by lamely fumbling
at sex and experimenting with whatever else they can get their hands on,
vicewise.

Teens, in the act of discovering their identities, like the tang of
filthiness in their souls; they get lost and damaged and wear it around
fashionably like a new tattoo, and this is important to the establishment
of an identity, to a certain extent.

Some higher working of the collective human psyche has set it up that drugs
are a part of our lives, perhaps, since nobody is making us don loincloths
and kill sharks with a hammer as a comingofage ritual: Young adults have
some mysterious, timeless need to flirt with death. If society doesn't
provide it, Satan will.

Unless your kid gets messed up enough to be sent to an inpatient
rehabilitation center, there really isn't that much you can do to stop his
willful experimentations, short of footbinding or electroshock therapy.
The important thing is to try to keep him honest by not freaking out when
he tells you what he's doing. That way, if he develops a real problem, he
can talk to you and you can discuss the issue headon, without having to
wade through layers of preexisting halftruths or terrible surprises.

Steel thyself, woman, and hope your kid has enough sense to walk back out
of the swamp once he's gotten his knees wet, and make sure he knows where
he is welcome when he wants to get dry.

Dionysian? Please write to: CINTRA WILSON FEELS YOUR PAIN, San Francisco
Examiner, P.O. Box 7260, San Francisco, CA 94120, or Email the Psychic
Supergenius at zintra@well.com