TEEN-AGE DRUG ABUSE: FOR POLSON, A ‘LOVE PROJECT’

Award-winning TV producer Beth Polson says that upon applying to KNBC for her first television job 10 years ago, she told her prospective employers, “All I know I learned from Mary Tyler Moore.”

It’s appealing to believe her because the former print journalist not only got the newswriting job but also earned an Emmy nomination that first year for a half-hour documentary.

Now, with one Emmy Award for a documentary on child pornography and two more for producing the Barbara Walters specials, the energetic 38-year-old Polson also has found time to turn a documentary about teen-age drug use into a book, and the two of them into a TV movie, “Not My Kid,” starring George Segal and Stockard Channing, coming up Tuesday night on CBS.

She calls the trilogy her “love project” because it has consumed her since 1981. When she set out to do “Getting Straight,” the documentary that was the genesis of all this, she thought it would be just another show on the widespread use of drugs by teen-agers.

What she found after spending time at the program’s focal point, a Florida rehabilitation center headed by Dr. Miller Newton, was that she continued to be haunted by the stories she’d heard. One was about a boy who didn’t visit his dying father for two years because it was more important for him to get high.

The feeling she should do more led to a collaboration with Newton, a clinical drug therapist, on a book, “Not My Kid,” published last October. It recommends a no-nonsense approach for parents who don’t know about--or refuse to recognize--their kids’ drug problems.

The essential message in the book is that drugs are everywhere.

“I don’t care if you live in Bel-Air or Watts,” Polson said the other day. “Your child will be exposed whether at a record store, shopping mall, an expensive private school or church.”

Another important message is parental denial which Polson and Newton believe is the biggest stumbling block to getting early help when kids are still salvageable. She thinks denial is prevalent because “parents feel they have failed. Yet it’s an awareness level that’s going to save your child.”

The TV movie, though it shares the book’s title, is a fictionalized version, focusing on one composite family. Channing is the stay-at-home mother and Segal the doctor-husband, close to his daughter. Both are unaware of her problem until there’s a crisis, a typical response.

They represent the storybook family Polson saw so often during her book research that included interviews with 300 family members. That was when she became acutely aware that drugs are everyone’s problem, “all American, nondiscriminating and bypartisan.”

Polson became committed to the project when she learned there was a drug-related suicide in the small farming community of Corapeake, N.C., where she was once homecoming queen and editor of the school paper.

No one commits suicide in the movie family. There are even moments of humor, such as a scene in a psychiatrist’s office which shows the Polson-Newton disdain for “the psychotherapist who will overanalyze things to death. In most of the 300 families I interviewed, the things the psychiatrists were treating the family for were a result of the drug use and not the other way around,” she said.

Newton, who has treated more than 3,000 youthful addicts and their families in Florida and New Jersey, states unequivocally in what is a controversial view that if a therapist says drugs are a symptom of other problems or that all kids do marijuana, move on.

“First, stop drug use, then move on,” he said in an interview. Most of those he has treated, he adds, “were not kids from bad families but kids who succumbed to peer pressure.”

Polson has been on tour to promote her book and the question most frequently asked was, “How do we know? What signs do we look for?”

Polson responds, “That’s how people get in trouble. They’re looking for the falling-down-drunk episode or the zombie to come home, oily-haired and droopy-eyed, and when you get to the zombie stage you’re in the fourth stage of drug use, way too late for a parent to do anything.

“The signs are subtle and the confusing issue is that they also look a lot like adolescence in general, so you have to look for a series of things: If their friends start to change or they don’t bring them home, or if those they bring give you a real uncomfortable feeling, that’s a major caution flag. If they lose interest in passionate hobbies or if grades start to slip, not from A to F, but gradually, that should raise parent awareness.”

Because the book deals with so much that the movie can only allude to, there will be a CBS/Library of Congress “Read More About” spot at the end of the film, done by Nancy Reagan, whose interest in adolescent drug abuse is well known.

Among some of the startling facts Polson learned during the last three years was that a child’s first drug exposure is frequently in fifth or sixth grade, when “we’re used to figuring out if the kid is ready for a bigger bike.” She discovered kids are extremely creative in hiding drugs around the house and in hiding the symptoms, such as using Visine to mask red eyes.

Polson wants to startle out of their lethargy parents who think that, because their kids go to strict private schools or attend church, they are immune. “A number of kids I talked to started getting high at church,” she said, “and on amazing substances: Raid, tea bags and even embalming fluid.”

She also learned some important medical facts, including the rapidity with which kids, as opposed to adults, become hooked.

Polson didn’t write the screenplay (it was done by Christopher Knopf) but shares story credit and is executive producer. Both the book and film story line were written in her spare time because producing the Barbara Walters specials is a full-time job. She says she didn’t go out to dinner for six months and that her workaholism during that period made the dichondra die. She boosts her own energy level with the aid of chocolate.

The reason she worked so hard on the film, says the perfectionist, is that she wanted those feelings elicited during the hundreds of interviews to be real. “I wanted the roller coaster of emotions to be present in the TV family.

“When Stockard Channing says to her daughter Susan (played by Viveka Davis), ‘Every mother knows when her child is born that she’ll have to give her up, but you’re 15; I’m not ready to give you up, not this way, not now. You’re my child and I love you’--when she said that, tears ran down my face.

“I look at her and she’s not an actress to me. That’s a very real mother’s feelings. As tears are rolling down her face, I know she’s forgotten she’s an actress, too.”