This is the first of a three part series on teen drug and alcohol use. The second part will run at the end of February.

In a one week period in January, three students were suspended from Tahoma Junior High for possession of marijuana.

Surprised?

Teens, law enforcement officers and a drug prevention specialist don’t think you should be surprised.

WHO AND WHAT

A group of Tahoma High students spoke to The Reporter about what they’ve observed among their peers. They are not being identified at their request.

Several of the students explained more than half of their classmates have at least tried some kind of drug or alcohol since middle school.

“I’ve noticed just from a lot of people at the high school that drugs are easily accessible,” one girl said. “I don’t personally do them, but, I feel like if I wanted to I could just say (to someone), ‘Hey, can I have some drugs?”

The teens identified marijuana or pot as a popular choice among their peers, while another student said she has heard classmates in her English class talk about doing cocaine frequently.

“There’s really not anything that isn’t here,” one student said.

Prescription drugs are popular, particularly Vicodin, because as one teen explained, “it’s pretty easy to get a hold of Vicodin,” and that when a sibling had broken bones the doctor gave 140 Vicodin pills for pain before she left.

Prescription pills are cheap, with the exception of OxyContin, but there’s more to that situation. We’ll get back to that.

Students also said alcohol is pretty easy to get.

Detective Jason Stanley, who joined the Maple Valley Police Department Jan. 1, said, “easily the most popular drug of choice is alcohol.”

Next on the list is pot followed by Ecstasy, which Stanley described as “wildly popular and super cheap,” costing between $5 and $7 a pill.

There is also cocaine and heroin.

“OxyContin has basically dried up because they changed the formula,” Stanley said. “They changed the formula (so) you can’t smoke it, you can’t crush it. It’s time released so you can’t get high. The old pills are expensive, $100, $140 a pill. Now a lot of those oxy kids are doing heroin because it’s cheaper, way cheaper.”

At $40 a pop, Stanley said, heroin use has seen a rise in popularity but it is “especially dangerous because you never know what purity it is,” so if a dealer changes his source and gets a different version that could cause problems, particularly overdoses.

Stanley said that teens in Maple Valley are getting into drug and alcohol use at a similar rate as other parts of the region. This is not a dramatic rise in usage or an indicator that the city is any less safe or not a wonderful place to live and raise a family.

But, Stanley and the teens The Reporter spoke with both feel like adults in the community can do more.

A cooperating witness Stanley spoke with painted a picture that would surprise many adults in Maple Valley.

This witness, whom Stanley described as in his 20s and a veteran of the drug scene, told police “it’s a lot of different kids, it’s kids you would never expect.”

“Good kids are doing it,” he said. “It’s not those stereotypical kids anymore. It’s your kids that you’d never expect.”

One of the teens said, “Some of the parents are in denial and some don’t care while some just don’t know. A lot of parents, too, want to believe their kids are good kids.”

WHAT’S THE APPEAL?

There are a number of reasons why local kids get pulled into drug and alcohol use.

One student said with all the talk going on about it at school, some kids get curious and want to try it, while “some of it, too, people get bored. They run out of things to do.”

Monica Robbins, a drug prevention and intervention counselor, spends three days a week at Tahoma High and two days at Tahoma Junior High.

Robbins said it is a common practice for school districts to have such positions. She is a contractor for the Tahoma School District that has had such a position for a number of years. She’s been working in the district since fall 2009.

“A big part of what I do is prevention,” Robbins said. “I do counseling, staff referrals, parent referrals, self referrals, classroom drug and alcohol presentations. At the junior high I talk in the health classes during the addiction unit.”

She also runs counseling groups for students that have addiction in their families, who are in recovery, as well as an empowerment group for girls.

Robbins advises a group at the high school called the Prevention Squad, which has nearly two dozen students who meet regularly and plan alternative activities for teens who don’t want to be around drugs or alcohol at other social events.

She often sees teens get hooked after they’ve been exposed by an older sibling who is addicted.

“Addicts don’t want to use by themselves,” she said. “The majority, it’s social, parties, friends. It’s around the party scene or just hanging out with friends, boredom, nothing to do out here. I hear that all the time, there’s nothing to do out here.”

Sometimes kids get hooked because they’ve suffered some kind of trauma but, Robbins said, “I work with a lot of students who are making bad choices who have never had any trauma or negative lifestyle issues. It really is a peer pressure kind of thing,” she said. “I want to be cool. I want to fit in.”

Robbins commended district officials for having someone like her on staff five days a week in a time of budget cuts.

“This is a great school district and the fact they would value this position and put somebody here for the kids says so much,” she said. “It continues to underscore how they want to offer resources for kids… and for all the kids.”

NOW WHAT?

Maple Valley Police Chief Michelle Bennett has been working on this issue since she first took the job in 2004.

“When I came to the city… it wasn’t that long after that I had various members and segments of the community and community organizations approach me and talk to me about the drug and alcohol problems,” Bennett said. “It’s been on the radar since I got here. How can we work together to solve it?”

One of the tools the police department used to approach it in a proactive manner was the hiring of two detectives, including Stanley, to deal with the issue.

“What I think is going to be our best tools is our new detectives who will finally be able to address use in our community on a variety of levels,” Bennett said. “The council has allowed us now to have good tools to address the issue at its core. It’s not only a health and safety issue, but, it’s also a crime issue.”

Stanley said he and Tony Mullinax, the other new detective, “were brought into the city to proactively solve problems.”

“Drugs are the root of a lot of society’s problems due to addicts needing to buy more, which leads to theft, to violence issues,” Stanley said. “We will be buying drugs and arresting people who are selling drugs.”

A primary way police learn about who is doing drugs and where they’re getting them, Stanley said, is thanks to work done by patrol officers.

“Patrol officers generally make stops… and you’ll get the stereotypical billowing cloud of marijuana coming out of the car,” he said. “These people typically get arrested and that’s how we learn who is doing what. We can get them set up as cooperative witnesses to bring down bigger fish.”

Or, school staff members will learn of issues when students start telling them what they see.

“Schools often find drugs, too, because they have a much more lenient search policy,” he said. “If they have reasonable suspicion … they can search.”

But, that is still a reactive approach, and teens The Reporter talked to would like to see more proactive strategies used by parents, police and the school district.

Robbins and Stanley will be working together soon on a forum planned for March 31 at the Tahoma School District Central Services Room. The event is called “Marijuana: Our Teens At Risk,” and there will be two talks, one at 4 p.m. and the second at 7 p.m.

Parents had access to a less potent kind of marijuana when they were teens, Robbins said, and she wants to dispel that notion it’s not a big deal if kids smoke pot.

As an example, in the 1980s pot commonly had a THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, level of about three percent, but now it has a THC level of 15 percent, Robbins noted.

“It’s definitely a gateway drug,” Robbins said, whether kids realize it or not.

Stanley will be providing information at the event.

“I will be talking about drug recognition and paraphernalia recognition and how parents can get involved in their kids lives,” he said. “They are involved with their kids like partners when they need to be supervisors and guardians.”

Some of the teens told The Reporter they would like to see the addiction unit in health class at the junior high expanded, saying the two days wasn’t enough and, in fact kids were extracting the wrong message from the curriculum.

They said they see individual teachers as well as groups of students trying to do things in a proactive manner, but, it may not be reaching all of those who need to hear the message.

One student said it would be wise if there was an expanded curriculum at the middle school level because even in seventh grade there is a small group of children who are already experimenting.

“Something else I’ve seen, it was more junior high or middle school, people who brought alcohol to school in their water bottles,” one student said. “They need to get a program going and keep it going throughout.”

Tahoma has a prevention team that meets regularly, Robbins said. It is made up of staff from elementary schools through the high school. They work to tackle drug and alcohol issues before they become problems. The team works to educate parents and helps them see the reality of drug and alcohol abuse among teens.

“If there’s any message that we’d like to get out there is for parents to be nosy in their kids lives,” Stanley said. “Parents are responsible for their kids until they turn 18 and get out of the house. So, know what they’re doing on Facebook, know what they’re doing in their rooms. If the kids aren’t home, toss their rooms to see what they’re doing. You want to build trust but you also want to be cognizant of what’s going on in your house and with your child.”

Bennett said she would love for the community to engage not only their children, but the police department, in the battle against drug use.

“I’d like to see it be a community driven, grass roots campaign,” she said. “In order to really serve the community, we need to have some community buy in. Tell us what you want and we’ll provide it for you. The police department is dedicated to and invested in addressing youth drug and alcohol issues in Maple Valley.”