CECILIA WONG / Montage Staff

Now sober, Raymond (left) and Jack hope their stories inspire teenage drug addicts to seek the help they need.

By CECILIA WONG
Cooper City High School

Jack, 23, is an addict. When he was 8, he would sneak beer up to his room and drink himself to sleep. By the time he was 18, Jack snorted cocaine regularly.

Raymond, 21, has a similar story. At 13, drinking alcohol and getting high was a daily ritual for him and his friends.

Jack and Raymond's destructive paths crossed at the Spectrum Program, Inc., a nonprofit drug and alcohol rehabilitation center at 140 NW 59th St. in Miami. Here, addicts are educated on how to live life without the assistance of drugs and alcohol. In Spectrum, they are taught to run many areas of the facility and in the process, they learn responsibility, teamwork and coping skills.

"Here they learn anything from cooking dinner and washing dishes to running messages and all other types of administrative assistance," said Eileen Carlan, community project coordinator at Spectrum.

Addicts at the center also attend therapy groups and are taught to sort out their feelings and traumas. But the most painful part of that rehab process is looking in the mirror, confronting what led them to their addiction.

"I always thought I could stop when I wanted, but after a relapse I had, I realized I couldn't stop," Jack said.

The influence of friends leads many teenagers to alcohol abuse.

"There are many reasons for teens to start drinking," said David Cremer, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Miami. "The most common purpose for trying alcohol, though, is peer pressure. Kids usually smoke when they drink, and vice versa, so it's easy for them to become addicted [to drugs]."

Alcohol- and drug-dependent teenagers usually experience various emotional, physical and psychiatric disorders.

"Depression is a common disorder among teen addicts," said Cremer. In addition, "alcohol knocks out the energy level [of an individual] and dehydrates the body," he said.

In 1995, the Pittsburgh Adolescent Alcohol Research Center concluded a five-year study that stated the most common psychiatric problem among teens is conduct disorder. The report said that 70 to 80 percent of teens who abused or were dependent upon alcohol exhibited recurrent delinquent behavior.

Raymond said he started drinking mostly to fulfill his ego. He occasionally drank with his parents, but most of the time he drank whenever he hung out with friends. Before his 18th birthday, he had been arrested 12 times on several counts of gang-related misdemeanors. Once he turned 18, Raymond was arrested and tried as an adult. He was given 7 1/2 years in jail. He was given probation--but only after admitting he had a drug problem.

"I only agreed to go to a rehab center to escape from my sentence, not because I thought I needed help," said Raymond. "When you grow up using drugs and alcohol you don't realize that there's anything wrong with that lifestyle."

When it became clear to him that he needed help, Raymond contacted Spectrum. After 13 months at the center, he completed the program in 1995. But eight months later, Raymond went out with his friends and had a beer.

"One beer sent me back to my old ways. I didn't even get to my second beer. In fact, I didn't even finish my first beer, and I was addicted again," he said.

Now Raymond is back at Spectrum. He has been there for a month, searching for structure in his life.

"Structure is everything an individual does here from the time they get up in the morning to the time they go to sleep at night," said Carlan, the community project coordinator. "If they don't adhere to the structure [of the lifestyle at Spectrum], they get consequences. Then they can choose to obey the consequences or leave the program."

Raymond plans to go back to school and possibly become a chef.

"I really want to tell teenagers to listen to what older people tell you," he said. "They are probably right."

For Jack, it was a combination of influence from his father and a way to escape problems at home, which led him to seek aid at Spectrum.

"When I was about 3 or 4, my dad would let me take sips of beer when he drank," he said. "Also, since I was taught never to cry, I didn't know how to let my feelings out, so I turned to drugs."

By the time Jack was 15, he went to school, had a job at Winn-Dixie, and sold drugs on the side. After a while, Jack's main source of income came from selling drugs.

"I quit Winn-Dixie because I figured I could get all my money from dealing," Jack said.

"Pretty soon I also quit school. I thought, 'Why am I wasting my time here?'"

But soon enough he got in trouble with the law and was put on probation. His probation officer encouraged him to attend an outpatient program to help him with his drug abuse. After going to two programs and failing to overcome his addiction, Jack recognized he needed assistance from a resident program.

He contacted Spectrum, and has been clean for a month.

"Taking a drink now would be like putting a gun up to my head," he said. "It is painful for me to realize that no matter how much I try to warn others about this, most aren't going to listen to me. But all I can say is listen to what others tell you, they know what they're talking about."

By JENNY JIMENEZ
Lourdes Academy

The party was filled with people dancing, laughing and enjoying the night. This was the scene on the dance floor.

But the scene on the bathroom floor was very different. Christy, a Lourdes Academy junior, was sprawled on the wet tiles, overdosed on cocaine.

"At first, it was just pot," says Christy. "Then, it progressed so much I even experimented with crack."

Like Christy, many teenagers in the '90s are deeply involved in marijuana, heroin and cocaine.

According to Marlene Miziker Gonet, author of Counseling the Adolescent Substance Abuser, in 1990, 33 percent of all high school seniors in the United States said illicit drugs had been at least a small part of their life in the past year. Usage in 1979 was 54 percent. In addition, while cocaine was the third drug of choice in the 1980s, the abuse of cocaine decreased significantly between 1988 and 1990.

But the drugs teenagers are using in the '90s, although less in quantity, are stronger, purer, cheaper and more accessible, Gonet says.

"When I was young," says William Beret, a 36-year-old recovering drug addict, "the drugs that were mostly around were marijuana and on occasion, heroin. Now, drug users are taking tainted, more lethal drugs."

During the '70s, President Nixon, announcing the first official "war on drugs," passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. Some $750 million was used to enforce the law and to the construct drug rehabilitation centers.

Jorge Fernandez, a monitor in training to become a drug abuse counselor at South Miami Hospital's Addiction Treatment program, says plenty of treatment centers are available today.

Other centers include The Village South, St. Luke's Hospital and Camillus House.

Working among teenagers who have had drug overdoses or who have taken hard drugs, Fernandez says many of the patients just need the presence of another person.

"I make sure the patients who are depressed or suffering from lack of sleep always have someone to talk to" Fernandez says. "This way, I may be able to prevent them from becoming suicidal."

Jose Rua, the intake coordinator in charge of evaluations and second opinions for patients at the Addiction Center at Mount Sinai Hospital, says rehabilitation programs are designed for each individual.

"Some teenagers need talk therapy, education, or detox," says Rua. "Most of them need stress relief so we teach them stress management methods like yoga and other exercises."

Teens coming into these rehab centers go through sessions of therapy and days of hospitalization. Fernandez says addicts first stay at the center for four to six weeks and attend group sessions, either with each other or with family members, weekdays for two hours. They also provide transportation on buses for the patients to attend their mandatory Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

Fernandez says the group sessions are not like visiting a psychologist.

"In these sessions, the patients center on bettering themselves in general, rather than on a specific topic," says Fernandez. "Because drug abuse is a disease, groups are based on curing the disease of the addiction."

Christy attended a rehabilitation center in Florida and says what she learned there shaped the rest of her life.

"That hospital gave me hope," Christy says. "I felt alone but after a few weeks there, I began to feel that people actually cared and that other kids like me wanted to change, too."

Christy has been clean for seven months and says she owes it all to the rehabilitation center she attended. On the other hand, there are some patients who do not recover after these two- or three-month programs at the centers.

"There have been cases that patients have used drugs while in treatment," says Rua. "After that, they are dismissed from the center."

If patients need more help than the center can offer, they can be admitted to other rehabilitation hospitals across the nation. Rua says some centers are located in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and in areas in Florida like West Palm Beach.

"Thirty percent of drug abusers who go through rehab usually experience a relapse in the following two years of their lives," says Rua. Sending patients to rehabilitation centers in other states for months to a year can be one way to prevent this. However, many do not agree with the effectiveness of these drug abuse treatment centers located in other states, especially those known as boot camps.

Maria Alonso-Martinez, the chief operating officer at the Northwest Dade Center, a community mental health center for all ages, says these centers are not beneficial.

"A lot of adolescents get into trouble because of lack of love," says Martinez. "At these centers, no understanding is offered and too much structure is enforced. Because of this, many fail."

"The purpose of treatment centers is to teach young addicts to develop internal control," says Martinez. "Patients need to learn why they can't control themselves and how they can get the control they need."

Help is available for addicts by calling 358-HELP, the official crisis hotline.