Red-Ribbon Reruns

This has been anti-drug week for the schoolkids of Greater Los Angeles. In our suburb, this has meant a veritable extravaganza of sobriety. The high school plans alone have included, among other things, an anti-drug pancake breakfast, two anti-drug pep rallies and a grand anti-drug finale in which a group of kids will paint their faces white and play dead.

This is diverting, the high schoolers say, but pretty old hat--it’s their 10th indoctrination, after all, in 10 years. Moreover, they say, they’re no longer convinced the adults have been truthful. In grade school, they were led to believe that one toke from a joint could kill you. So far, all of the pot smokers they know are very much alive.

Has there ever in U.S. history been a generation of children whose elders have sought so obsessively to scare them straight? Our own teenager has been paying tribute to this week’s particular observance, Red Ribbon Week, since she was a 4-year-old in Montessori school.

As a grade-schooler, she and her classmates were made to sign little contracts in which they promised to stay clean. They weren’t sure what that meant, precisely, but the idea of writing their names in cursive made them feel very grown up. Later, there was the ubiquitous Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, headed by the local police, and still later, letters from the district superintendent announcing that our school had joined the one-strike-and-you’re-expelled movement toward zero tolerance.

Over the years the propaganda has become a sort of seasonal marker. It wouldn’t be October now if someone didn’t come home with a little red hospital bracelet--Red Ribbon Week’s signature gimmick--tied around a little wrist with instructions to leave it on for seven days, no matter what. In the local elementary school, lectures from the neighborhood cop have become as autumnal as Halloween parades. “Who knows what this is? Anyone?” he always demands, hoisting a big picture of a marijuana leaf.

“He’d always ask if we knew what to do if we found a syringe in the park,” one of our teenager’s friends recently laughed. “They way he sounded, you always wanted to answer, ‘Duck, cover and roll!’ ”

Which would all be merely diverting, if it worked. Last year, in our same suburb, a bunch of cheerleaders went on a diet in which their main source of sustenance was speed. Seems they’d gotten so bored with Red Ribbon Week rhetoric that they’d tuned out everything but one handy factoid--that methamphetamines burn oodles of calories.

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What is it that makes the war on drugs so compelling and yet so goofily tiresome? For a generation now, we’ve plugged away, and our efforts still don’t ring true.

We focus on kids, when the vast majority of abusers are grown-ups. We fret over the pros and cons of marijuana, when people are being killed by heroin and cocaine. We allow ambitious politicians to whip up attention by painting drug use as a moral failing, when our own experience tells us that, really, people get high and stay high for only two basic reasons: curiosity and neurosis. The desire to experiment and the feeling that, without additives, they are incomplete.

From that standpoint, the war on drugs should be a campaign for mental health. We should be fighting, not for mandatory drug tests or sterner classroom lectures, but to make good, effective counseling as available and ordinary as P.E. and honors English.

“It would be so much better,” one of our teenager’s friends offered, “if they’d just tell us the truth about drugs, and then give us someone to talk to, who knew what they were talking about, someone who we could, like, trust.”

But counseling is expensive, and trust doesn’t come easy when the kid begins to realize that a lot of what passes for a war on drugs is, in fact, part of our war on kids.

So much more fun for us, the adults, to lecture the little ones on our moral superiority. So much more satisfying, after so many years as America’s questing, neurotic children, to make somebody else duck and cover and roll.

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When our teenager was in grade school, she complained every night about her homework, which would incite me to deliver a lecture, inciting her to argue, inciting us both to stomp off in tears. One night, exhausted, I forgot to fight back. You’re right, I told her. This stuff is donkey work.

I wouldn’t want to do it either, I told her. Unfortunately, this teacher seems to need it to justify a passing grade.

Taken aback, she sat down and did the homework. She hadn’t wanted to skirt responsibility; she’d just wanted some understanding. The problem had been all in my delivery.

It would be great, wouldn’t it, if life were like a sitcom, and you could change people’s behavior with one great speech. What a relief it would be if you could just send your kid to a pep rally and a stern but stirring lecture, and know that with the snap of a red plastic bracelet, you’d never have to worry about that stash of pot behind his surfboard on the closet floor.

Never have to worry, either, about what that stash might mean about him, or worry about what it might mean about you. But even little people hate to be hectored, and we are afraid of a gentler delivery. Who has the answer? Anyone?

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Shawn Hubler’s e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com