Marin County’s Drug Scene: It’s Like Father, Like Son

MILL VALLEY, Calif. —  At the age of 10, Ben Daniels did the things that made his dad proud, the kind of pride that leads a father to puff out his chest and hold his head high.

Ben smoked marijuana and drank booze. Like father, like son. And like some of Ben’s classmates at Tamalpais High School.

“When I was with him, we did it together,” said Ben, whose name has been changed here to protect his identity. “He thought it was real cool that I could handle my liquor at such a young age.”

Ben, now 16, got off the booze and drugs with the help of someone who had been through the drug scene, and has rid his body of 5 1/2 years worth of booze, pot and pills. He’s been clean five months.

Here, in the rolling, tree-topped hills of wealthy Marin County, there are other cases like Ben’s, where one or both parents do dope and see nothing wrong with it. Parental drug use bothers school administrators, concerned parents and, especially, confused children.

“A few of the kids are introduced to drugs by their parents,” said Mike Campas, assistant principal at Tamalpais High School. “It’s difficult to get them to straighten out their lives when the parents are doing it. That’s why it’s such a monumental problem.”

Campas, who chairs a drug prevention committee at the school, said the problem is magnified because drugs are accepted in some circles in well-heeled Marin County and because some parents give their kids the impression that drugs are not harmful.

Campas said that several times after he confiscated students’ marijuana, the parents asked him what he was going to do with it.

“They said, ‘I’m an adult, can’t I have it’ ”?

Carolyn Kellogg, a parent of five former Tamalpais students, two of whom became dependent on alcohol and drugs, said drug use among parents goes beyond pot and alcohol to cocaine and pills.

“I see the parents modeling behavior for their children,” said Kellogg, a member of the school’s drug-prevention committee and the Marin Parents Support Group.

Russell Driver, 17, student body president at 1,280-student Tamalpais, said that among students he knows, “quite a few” parents are aware that their children drink and smoke pot, but probably do not know its extent.

Although there is no way of determining how much of a drug problem exists at Tamalpais or whether parental drug use is related, a recent drug raid on campus has focused scrutiny on the school’s drug program, called Impact.

Details are sketchy, but Campas said that two students apparently were dealing drugs on campus when five other teens tried to steal their drugs and money.

The students are on suspension, and Campas said that the Tamalpais School District Board of Trustees is considering expulsion.

Campas said the Impact Committee, comprised of parents, teachers, students and administrators, was started last year as an intervention program. This year, he said, the group has been more visible in the community and school, sending out newsletters and setting up a school assembly and training for teachers.

Impact’s most important new function, however, will be the peer counseling group, 15 students trained in drug prevention. The counselors are effective because addicted students will listen to peers who have been through the drug scene, Campas said.

One counselor, 17-year-old senior Ann Michaels, can summarize her background for the job quite simply: “I was a drug addict,” she said.

Her parents fought against it, but Michaels--another pseudonym--began using drugs in the seventh grade, starting with marijuana and going on to cocaine and LSD.

At one point, her parents asked her to leave their home and then arranged to have her see “every psychologist from here to Eureka.”

But what finally made the difference for Michaels was the insistence by some friends who had kicked their habits that she attend a drug rehabilitation meeting.

“That was when I totally woke up and found out I was addicted,” she said.

Michaels remembers the day she went sober--May 25, 1985. “Not even a sip of anything,” she said proudly.

For friends who continually ask her how she can possibly enjoy herself if she doesn’t party, she responds, “Why tempt fate?”

Michaels rejects arguments that the drug problem might be less severe in Marin, where there’s lots of money, little crime and less poverty.

“Here, it’s all under this pink cloud, like, we’re all so good. But it’s all a lie,” she said. “All the county seems to be in a big fog of denial.”