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Dirty
A Search for Answers Inside America's Teenage Drug Epidemic
By Meredith Maran
NY:HarperCollins:2003
Reviewed by Lon Woodbury
The author is a journalist, and the mother of a son who
went through all the trauma that accompanies having an out-of-control
teen, complete with drugs and arrests, moving from program
to program, and failure after frustrating failure. When the
worse seemed to be behind her, she started looking for answers
by exploring the adolescent treatment industry.
Focusing on three young people she met in various treatment
facilities, she gained their trust and shadowed them through
their trials, failures and successes. This book is a chronicle
of her experiences, and what she learned.
The mark of a good writer is the ability to describe people
in a believable manner, and after finishing the book, the
reader will feel they have actually met these young people
in all their frustrating contradictions. As a parallel theme,
through flashbacks, the author shares her own experiences
with her own son, sometimes using that to point out the inappropriateness
of some of the viewpoints asserted to her by professionals.
What she describes is not a pretty picture. First, she captures
the fear, anger, manipulation and ongoing frustration of
the young people who are caught up in the legal and rehab
systems. She also captures the inadequacies of the system
in its attempts to help these young people. For example,
she notes several times that half or more of the young people
in drug rehab do not have drug use as their central problem,
but the focus of their treatment is drug addiction. Where
there is this kind of misdiagnosis, failure becomes certain,
along with a tremendous waste of resources.
Another problem is the reluctance to prevent children from
leaving programs. All children in the programs she looked
at can run away, and they know that. The author asserts this
manifestation of children's rights is a major contributor
to the ineffectiveness of attempts to help out-of-control
children.
This book is a good dramatic presentation of the hell some
parents and children go through while official attempts to
help are under funded, undermanned, and often miss the real
needs. It is a good read for the person who wants to see
the tragedy of the actual children who are behind the statistics
of juvenile drug use and crime.
In a summary, the author asks two questions, and provides
the answers as she has learned them.
Why do teenagers abuse drugs: Because it's fun, because
they have no hope, and because they don't believe us.
What should we do to keep teenagers from abusing drugs:
Support good parenting, support healthy communities, revamp
the school system, revamp the juvenile justice system, and
revamp the adolescent drug-treatment system.
Although this is an insightful book, from the perspective
of this newsletter, which is devoted primarily to private
residential resources for these children, the book was disappointing.
Although the author mentions private wilderness programs,
therapeutic boarding schools and emotional growth programs,
her only description is a caricature that sounds like how
manipulative adolescents would describe programs they didn’t
buy into. She states that their prices range from five to
forty thousand dollars a month, though actually we work with
many quality programs that are less expensive than that.
Her description of a wilderness program outside Bend Oregon
that one of the three subjects attended emphasized a stern
insensitive staff operating in miserably cold conditions.
She dismisses them with no investigation.
Her opinions do a disservice to the private programs that
are of good quality that actually benefit these youth. But
as an investigation into the majority of mainstream attempts
to help these children, her critique is very good. She makes
a good case for a major rethinking of what we are doing for/to
our vulnerable young people who are making very poor decisions. |
