This Is Your Country On Drugs Part 5

In its fiscal year 2009 budget, the Bush administration made increasing the use of student drug testing its highest antidrug priority.

It seems like common sense that if students are warned that they could be caught getting high any given day in school, they'd be less likely to risk it. Plus, princ.i.p.als and the drug czar 's office argue, this constant threat "gives kids a reason to say no." But a student who chooses to do drugs already has more than a random chance of getting caught: Adults and other potential snitches are everywhere. Someone could smell smoke, see bloodshot eyes, or wonder just what the h.e.l.l is so funny. And because most schools test only students who do something more than just show up-join an after-school club, park on campus, or play a sport-kids can avoid those activities rather than quit puffing.

According to two major studies, drug testing might not change much more of student life than that. "[D]rug testing still is found not to be a.s.sociated with students' reported illicit drug use-even random testing that potentially subjects the entire student body," determined the authors of one study. The first, published in early 2003, looked at 76,000 students in eighth, tenth, and twelfth grades in hundreds of schools between the years 1998 and 2001. It was conducted by Ryoko Yamaguchi, Lloyd Johnston, and Patrick O'Malley of the University of Michigan, which also produces the Monitoring the Future report. Johnston is considered something of a dean of drug-trend a.n.a.lysis.

The Michigan study compared the rates of drug use, as measured by Monitoring the Future, in schools that did some type of drug testing to those in schools that did not. The researchers controlled for various demographic differences and found across the board that drug testing was ineffective: there was no statistically significant difference in the number of users at a school that tested for drugs and a similar school that didn't. The White House criticized the study for failing to look at the efficacy of random testing. So Yamaguchi, Johnston, and O'Malley added the element of randomness and ran their study again, this time adding data for the year 2002. The follow-up, published later in 2003, tracked 94,000 middle- and high-school students. It reached the same conclusions as its precursor.

Even if drug testing is done randomly and without suspicion, it's not a.s.sociated with a change in the number of students who use drugs of any kind-with one exception: in schools that randomly tested students, twelfth graders were more likely to smoke marijuana.

At a December 2004 joint press conference with Johnston and drug czar John Walters, the czar was asked why random testing was being funded if Johnston and his colleagues had demonstrated that it's bogus. Walters told the a.s.sembled media that the jury was still out: "We don't have detailed pre- and post-random-testing data." Not quite true, countered Johnston. "We looked at schools doing any kind of testing, mostly for cause, and didn't find any statistically significant differences in drug-use rates between schools that tested and those that didn't," he said. "We also looked at schools that did random tests of student athletes, which was allowed by the Supreme Court in 1995, and again there were no significant differences in the rates of marijuana use or illicit drug use in general."

Results like these would mean budget cuts or death for some government programs. The White House has devised its own system, known as the Program a.s.sessment Rating Tool (PART), to help it cull failed initiatives. In 2002, PART deemed "ineffective" the Safe and Drug Free Schools State Grants program, the umbrella for school drug testing. The Office of Management and Budget, which runs the PART evaluations, discerned, "The program has failed to demonstrate effectiveness in reducing youth drug use, violence, and crime." The PART evaluation didn't single out drug testing, which is a small part of the overall state grants program, but if you combine those findings with those of the Michigan studies, student drug testing would appear to be taking a bureaucratic pounding.

Workplace testing is in retreat, too. "I think what a lot of companies saw was that the White House rhetoric didn't match up. There was no reduction in workplace absenteeism or any other benefit," a lawyer with the ACLU's Drug Law Reform Project told me. "Your own eyes and budget line will tell you to turn away from that program." That hasn't stopped President Bush from sounding an upbeat note, however. "I proposed new funding to continue our aggressive, community-based strategy to reduce demand for illegal drugs," Bush declared in his 2004 State of the Union address. "Drug testing in our schools has proven to be an effective part of this effort."

Meanwhile, the evidence-or lack thereof-continues to come in. A 2007 report by the American Academy of Pediatrics affirmed that random student drug testing doesn't reduce drug use. A 2006 survey published in the Journal of Adolescent Health found that 83 percent of pediatricians opposed in-school testing, citing the tests' complexity and propensity to produce false positives.

At least one report did find random testing of student athletes to reduce drug use, but its results show why the program isn't likely to be effective in the long run. The study, published in a 2003 issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health, compared one school that randomly tested athletes and one that didn't. The tested athletes got high less frequently but drank just as much as their nontested counterparts. The testing also seriously influenced their att.i.tude toward drugs: the drug-tested athletes, according to their survey responses, believed drugs-now under regular discussion as part of a school-mandated activity-to be less dangerous than did their counterparts who were not tested. Less surprisingly, they also had a much poorer view of their school than they did before it began random testing.

That view was turned into action in 1997, when a group of students at the Rochester Inst.i.tute of Technology founded the Rochester Cannabis Coalition. The RCC was denied a charter from the school, despite having been approved by a student board, and its founder was expelled in what appeared to be retribution from the administration, but the group has since grown to become Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a national organization with 50,000 members and chapters at more than 130 colleges and a handful of high schools. One of its princ.i.p.al goals: ending forced student drug testing.

Like Bush and Walters, the $766 million drug-testing industry isn't ready to give up on testing students, for which it charges between $14 and $30 per cupful of urine. Melissa Moskal, executive director of the 1,300-member Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry a.s.sociation, pointed me to a preliminary study that she likes better than Michigan's and that Walters also frequently references. The study was funded by the Department of Education and produced by the Inst.i.tute for Behavior and Health, and its lead author is Robert DuPont, a former White House drug official. DuPont is also a partner at Bensinger, DuPont & a.s.sociates, which specializes in, among other things, "workplace drug/alcohol prevention services." His firm boasts corporate offices in four cities and more than 1,200 branch offices.

DuPont told me that Bensinger "doesn't have anything to do with drug testing." But the company's Web site states, "BDA offers a range of products designed to help employers establish and manage workplace drug and alcohol testing programs." These include "[m]edical review of urine and hair drug tests," "turn-key administration of random testing programs," and evaluation of "new and existing on-site testing devices for reliability, sensitivity, and reaction to major adulterants." DuPont's study, which he called "descriptive," chose nine schools that met certain criteria, the first of which was "student drug testing program's apparent success." Rather than gathering information from students and a.n.a.lyzing it, DuPont relied on a questionnaire that asked administrators how effective they believe their random drug-testing program to be.

DuPont isn't concerned about any flaws in this methodology-and he's not worried about neutrality, either. "I can't quite get the argument that [drug testing] wouldn't work," he said. He's now working on an evaluation of eight schools. The results aren't out yet, but let's venture a prediction: random student drug testing will come out looking good.

It had better, because workplace drug testing of adults has been in steady decline since 1996. It's no surprise that BDA and similar companies have a strong interest in expanding their services to a new market. In a 1999 publication t.i.tled "Drug Testing: A Bad Investment," the ACLU noted that in 1990, the federal government spent $11.7 million to test 29,000 workers in 38 agencies. Only 153, or 0.5 percent, tested positive for drug use. For many private companies, such a cost-to-benefit ratio just doesn't make sense. In 2004, according to a study by the American Management a.s.sociation, only 62 percent of U.S. companies drug-tested employees, down from a peak of 81 percent eight years earlier.

In the summers of 2007 and 2008, Walters focused his PR efforts on expanding student drug testing, traveling to school districts to pitch the model and hosting regional summits on the idea. Those journeys represent a culmination of sorts. Each year of the Bush administration, the emphasis on drug testing grew. By 2008, to the consternation of career drug warriors who'd become disenchanted with the practice, expanding student drug testing was officially made the number one priority of the White House's national drug-control strategy.

The practice needed that extra push. In 2007, the state of Hawaii announced that the random-drug-testing net would be cast around teachers as well as students. The teachers, with the help of the ACLU, beat the policy back, and in 2008, the state board of education rescinded it. In March of that year, again following a challenge by the ACLU, the state neighboring the one that had begun suspicionless random testing of students struck it down. The Washington State supreme court ruled that such testing of students who partic.i.p.ate in extracurricular activities was unconst.i.tutional, citing the state doc.u.ment's Privacy Clause: "No person shall be disturbed in his private affairs, or his home invaded, without authority of law." Call it the revenge of James Acton.

What about the antipot ad campaign? Since 1998, the federal government has spent more than $1.5 billion on ads designed to dissuade teens from using marijuana. You've seen them: while high, stoners commit a host of horrible acts, including running over a little girl on a bike at a drive-through window.

The drug czar's office and the National Inst.i.tute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the arm of the federal government that funds research on drug abuse and addiction, partnered to study the campaign's effectiveness. The White House provided the funding, and NIDA contracted with a research firm, Westat, which gathered data between November 1999 and June 2004. The report Westat produced cost the government $42.7 million. It shows that the ad campaign isn't working. Instead of reducing the likelihood that kids will smoke marijuana, the ads increase it. Westat found that "greater exposure to the campaign was a.s.sociated with weaker anti-drug norms and increases in the perceptions that others use marijuana." More exposure to the ads led to higher rates of first-time drug use among certain groups, such as fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds and whites.

NIDA and the White House drug office sat on the Westat report for a year and a half beginning in early 2005-while spending $220 million on antimarijuana ads in fiscal years 2005 and 2006.

The Government Accountability Office's Nancy Kingsbury, managing director for applied research and methods, told me that her office encountered serious resistance from NIDA and the White House when it insisted that it was ent.i.tled and mandated by Congress to review the publicly funded Westat study. Kingsbury thought the drug czar's obstruction had to do with the study's unfavorable results. " I' ll be really surprised if it didn't," she said.

In the beginning, said Kingsbury, the drug czar "was touting this evaluation as an important study that would demonstrate the efficacy of this program, and they kind of got a ride in their appropriations for a couple of years because they were willing to put this evaluation on the street." Indeed, the drug warriors continuously justified funding for the lavish ad campaign based on the notion that the program was being scientifically evaluated. Walters promised in Senate testimony that he would "show results within a year or admit failure," reported Government Executive magazine, and Congress subsequently agreed to extend the campaign through 2003. As long as the jury was out, the money could continue to flow.

The GAO has company in its frustration with the drug czar 's foot dragging. In July 2006, the Senate subcommittee that oversees federal drug funding vented about the lack of cooperation from the White House drug office. Angry committee members wrote:The Committee is extremely displeased with the performance of [Office of National Drug Control Policy] staff regarding their communication with the Committee and their responsiveness to congressional inquiries. ONDCP's lethargy and the inadequate information provided severely impacts the ability of the Committee to conduct its oversight and make budgetary decisions in a timely manner. This kind of unresponsiveness on the part of ONDCP results in an unnecessary waste of time and energy; numerous follow up communications are required in almost every instance. The Committee is particularly concerned that ONDCP has attempted to prevent the Committee from meeting with the directors of ONDCP programs. Therefore the Committee has reduced the salaries and expenses budget to more closely reflect actual performance.

When news of the Westat results finally broke, the White House argued that the study should be ignored. Why? Because the data were more than two years old.

Yet the conclusions of the study are in line with other research that casts doubt on the effectiveness of drug education. So far, at least, it appears to be pretty much impossible to warn kids away from drugs with an ad campaign, no matter how cautious or nuanced an approach you take. Beyond the D.A.R.E. program, a project in Montana that sought to reduce methamphetamine use by plastering the state with gruesome photos of the consequences of addiction backfired; it has been a.s.sociated with an increase in use and a decrease in the perception of the risk of using meth. A youth drug-prevention program called ALERT was found to be equally useless by a 1993 study.

Talking about drugs seems to give enough young people the idea of trying them that drug-education efforts are frequently counterproductive.

If it's not the fear of a drug test or scaremongering that's dissuading kids from using marijuana, what is it? Available survey and seizure data indicate that the supply remained plentiful-excluding LSD-which means that there was indeed a downturn in demand, probably due to cultural factors.

Pot smoking among teenagers tumbled after September 11, 2001, and perhaps that's not a coincidence. Former LSD king Leonard Pickard speculates via a letter that the decline isn't real, arguing that "conservative political climates, e.g. post-9/11, can account for failure to self report." That might be part of it, but a conservative political climate could also lead a kid to fail not only to divulge, but also to indulge. The feeling of patriotism and national unity that pervaded the nation during the time following the attacks was very deep and very real. George W. Bush's approval rating hit 90 percent. Comic Bill Maher lost his job for saying that the terrorists weren't cowards. A protest against globalization that had been planned for late September, expected to attract tens of thousands, was canceled. A replacement antiwar demonstration drew only a few thousand.

To the extent that pot smoking is a rebellion against, or a rejection of, authority, it might have become less attractive during a time when many Americans believed that a certain amount of authoritarianism was necessary for their nation's survival, Criminal Justice Policy Foundation president Eric Sterling, former counsel for the House Subcommittee on Crime, told me. "For young people who are experimenting and rebelling, [drug use] is a wonderful opportunity for a kind of rebellion that is unique in our society. There are very few ways that you can rebel in a cultural way," Sterling said. "I mean, you can rebel against your parents politically, or you can act out s.e.xually. But culturally, drug use remains. I suppose you can become an Islamic terrorist, or you can become a kind of drug user. So at age sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-put on the pot leaf, adopt the old clothing of the late sixties and early seventies."

That ident.i.ty became less appealing as the country banded together following "the attack and the visual horror of that attack and the idea that we were going to mobilize," claimed Sterling. "The drug-using hippie is a cultural model of rebellion that's available [for a teen to adopt]. At a time when you' re going to take on a cultural model of the patriot, the defender-and it's appropriate and it fits in with a value-that is implicitly going to lead to a rejection of styles, activities, behaviors that carry rebellious or anticultural, antisocietal elements."

For the political climate to have such an impact on kids, one might suggest, they first would have to understand it. Do they?

Psychologists Adrian Furnham and Barrie Stacey, in their 1991 book Young People's Understanding of Society, cite one 1977 study of political literacy among British schoolchildren that determined that "[m]ost of the political knowledge which they do have is of a rather inert and voyeuristic kind and of little use to them either as political consumers or political actors." Subsequent research, the authors write, upholds the basic conclusion that kids tend to have little genuine awareness of political figures, political parties, or the political process.

But how much more ignorant are kids than the general population? Not much, it turns out. Furnham and Stacey point out repeatedly that "there is no evidence to suggest that an enfranchised adult population actually knows more than our teenage respondents." National political moods, it seems, happen without national political awareness. Just because a kid-or, indeed, an adult-doesn't know what the Patriot Act says doesn't mean that he can't get caught up in a wave of patriotism.

Howard Kaplan, writing in a 1985 issue of the Journal of Drug Issues, presented findings he culled from more than 9,000 survey responses. He found what Sterling later surmised, that rebellious teens embrace drug use as a symbol of "attacks upon the worth of the values according to the standards of which the youth was judged unworthy; by permitting intrapsychic or interpersonal withdrawal from the conventional value system according to the standards of which the youth was a failure, or by permitting the subst.i.tution of new (deviant) standards that are more easily achieved than the earlier conventional ones." Translation: For some teens, the ident.i.ty of the achiever is not an easy one to don. It requires being able to hit a baseball cleanly and/or a lot of homework, among many other challenging things. It's easier to pull on a tie-dye and puff on a joint.

But in times of deep patriotism, deviance becomes less attractive. For kids, it actually becomes easier to achieve that elusive conventional ideal-and all it takes is a flag.

Furnham and Stacey note that children as young as four can recognize their national banner. I was working in a middle school in 2001 and 2002, and I saw the red, white, and blue appear on back-packs and clothes practically overnight after 9/11. The nationalist sentiments brought to the surface by the attacks lingered as America went to war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Recall that drug use receded during the two world wars and drinking began to plummet amid the national fervor of the War of 1812. It should be unsurprising that the latest major a.s.sault on our sh.o.r.es could cause a similar reaction.

But could it be that simple? What else was going on around the turn of the millennium?

Whatever the political climate, weed consumption is typically a social act: someone's got a bag, leading some friends to get together somewhere discreet, sneak a few puffs, drop in some Visine, and head back home. The ritual can be as much about exploring boundaries with friends as it is about getting high.

To smoke together, kids need free time, preferably right after school lets out, when the grown-ups are still at work and the world belongs to the young. That window of opportunity, however, is getting smaller. Psychiatrists Alvin Rosenfeld and Nicole Wise wrote about this trend in their book Hyper-Parenting: Are You Hurting Your Child by Trying Too Hard?, published in 2000. The book suggests that as more women have entered the workforce, and as the number of hours we all work continues to increase, parents have turned to schools, churches, and other local organizations to do some of their parenting for them. Rosenfeld found that over the past twenty years, " structured sports time" has doubled and "unstructured children's activities" have declined by 50 percent among children in all socioeconomic groups. It's probably not a coincidence that as kids have had less time to smoke pot, they've smoked less pot.

I asked Rosenfeld if he believes that overscheduling could diminish teen drug use. He didn't think so. In an e-mail, he wrote:I have no idea why use has declined . . . but I suspect that the connection is far more complex. Athletes use more alcohol than other students and they often are the most highly scheduled. Why is that the case if scheduled activities cause less substance abuse?

As a child psychiatrist, I consider psychology-and the family dynamics from which it emerges-the crucial issue. What makes one kid smoke pot and the other say no thanks? What makes one kid get involved in after school programs and makes the other drop out? What makes one kid play French horn and the other become a tackle? As to socialization, I would suspect (with little objective evidence) that teenagers who have one best buddy are less likely to use drugs; those who feel angrier, more depressed and anxious, isolated and socially awkward might be more p.r.o.ne. Furthermore, I think any teenager can make an opportunity if they really want to-motivation is at least as important as opportunity.

The a.s.sumption that teenagers who use drugs all do so to escape their misery-or because they are "depressed and anxious, isolated and socially awkward," or, as Kaplan suggests, because they' re compensating for some perceived failing to live up to conventional values-is rooted in a rather simplistic understanding of young people. Kids, first of all, are not all the same. Some are natural conformers and/ or achievers and some will rebel no matter what and some are everywhere in between. The notion that only kids who are messed up in some way use drugs isn't supported by the research. In a chapter in the 1987 book Drug Use and Psychology, teen-drug-use researcher Michael Newcomb wrote that teen drug users often have a "self-perception of maturity and adult-likeness which is then validated by their drug-using peers and confirmed by the respect from their nondrug-user cla.s.smates." In other words, rather than being failures or socially awkward and depressed loners, many teen drug users are popular and successful students.

"The respect," Newcomb offered, "is not so much based on drug use per se, which many nondrug users will disdain and reject, but by the accouterments of other desired adult behaviors exhibited by the drug users (e.g., precocious s.e.xual involvement, independence)." For some kids, then, not using drugs can lead to a feeling of having failed to live up to a set of conventional values-those created by their peers.

Rosenfeld is right about one thing, though: a true pothead will make the time. The number of kids who say in the surveys that they smoke daily has remained more or less steady, even as casual use has declined dramatically. In 1999, 6 percent of seniors said that they smoked on a daily basis. In 2000, 5.8 percent did, and that number stayed constant until it ticked down to 5.6 in 2004 and 5.0 in 2005. Rosenfeld is also right that it's not merely a tight schedule that's at work here. In recent years, the free time that kids do have has been vanishing into an abyss of technology, and their new drug habits reflect that.

For decades, smoking pot had been a cla.s.sically American way for teens to socialize, one that created an informal network of mostly casual users. For such users, friends, not some dealer on speed dial, are typically the best source for illegal drugs. If one kid has a bag, the four friends he meets up with after school also have access to pot. If that one kid stops smoking for any reason, those four kids have also lost their primary source, through no choice of their own. Trends among casual users feed or starve themselves in this way, and they can be seen moving in waves throughout the standard surveys.

If a kid has a bag but doesn't leave the house, that won't do much for his friends, either. At the turn of the millennium, as socialization drifted online, new modes of hanging out rose to prominence: AOL Instant Messenger (1997), gaming consoles that allow networked interaction (2000), Friendster (2002), Mys.p.a.ce (2003), Second Life (2003) Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006). The Pew Internet Project began measuring the reach of the Internet in 2000. It found that on an average day that year, 51 million Americans were online. By 2004, the number was 70 million. Of those millions, the bulk were young people. A 2005 Pew study found that 87 percent of twelve- to seventeen-year-olds were online, the highest percentage for any age group. Kids were also much more likely than other groups to play online games, use instant messaging, or download videos or music. Pew didn't ask about the youngest demographic in its earliest research, but it did break out eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds, who in later data trailed the youngsters just slightly in Internet usage.

By 2005, according to the tech-slanted Forrester Research, 83 percent of teens were using instant messaging, and more than 75 percent had a mobile phone. Eighty-three percent of boys ages twelve to seventeen owned a game console; so did 63 percent of girls. A 2008 study by the market-research firm OTX revealed that although teens prefer "real friends" to "online friends," prefer romances with school acquaintances to romances with folks encountered on the Internet, and prefer going to bricks-and-mortar stores to shopping on the Web, they would also rather go without TV than go without Internet access, would rather get their information from online sources than from traditional media, and would rather have their lockers vandalized than have their online profiles vandalized. Fifty-four percent preferred IMING friends to calling them. Ninety-five percent of teens belonged to a social-networking site, and many belonged to more than one.

Dating and trips to the mall aside, as kids took to meeting online rather than in person, the casual-user network collapsed. That left many teens without ready access to marijuana, but it doesn't mean that they had no access to drugs at all.

Throughout the nineties, use of prescription drugs by both adults and children grew steadily, as did abuse. Between 1992 and 2002, U.S. prescriptions for controlled substances-stimulants such as Ritalin, narcotics such as OxyContin and Vicodin, and benzodiazepines such as Xanax and Valium-grew by 154 percent, though the American population increased by only 13 percent. The diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and similar ailments among children rose dramatically during roughly the same period. One study found a 250 percent increase between 1990 and 1998; another found a 657 percent increase between 1979 and 1996. U.S. production of methylphenidate, the generic form of Ritalin, jumped to meet the demand, from 1,768 kilograms annually in 1990 to 14,957 kilograms in 2000, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The United Nations concluded in 1999 that the United States manufactured and consumed 85 percent of the world's methylphenidate.

The number of people estimated to abuse prescription drugs roughly doubled between 1992 and 2003, from 7.8 million to 15.1 million. In 1999, savvy entrepreneurs saw an opening and established the first online pharmacies. Five years later, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse released a report showing that hundreds of pharmacies were in operation online and that the vast majority of them didn't require a prescription or anything else that could get in the way of obtaining pills. The DEA estimated in 2006 that controlled substances make up 95 percent of such pharmacies' business, whereas their brick-and-mortar compet.i.tors make only 11 percent of their living slinging such pills. Regulation and enforcement of this trade is difficult at best: prescription-free sites can open and close and disappear in a matter of weeks. Most studies find that kids are unlikely to order drugs directly from the Internet-many don't have credit cards or a place to mail their purchases without their parents finding them-but the flood of pills available online makes it that much easier for kids to find someone older who might be willing to part with a few.

"Pharmies," pharmaceutical narcotics like Vicodin or Percocet used illicitly, have skyrocketed in popularity among recreational drug users, including children. In 1997, when pot smoking started to flatten and turn slightly downward, use of "other narcotics"-which excludes heroin-was at 6.2 percent annually among high-school seniors. By 2004, it was up to 9.5 percent, more than a 50 percent jump. OxyContin use wasn't measured until 2002, but it rose steadily over the next four years among all ages. Sedative use went from 5.1 to 7.2 percent between 1997 and 2005; use of tranquilizers such as Xanax climbed from 4.7 to 6.8 percent. The increases among kids who reported popping pills in the past thirty days were even higher, meaning that not only were kids experimenting more with pills, they were also using them with more regularity.

A recent DEA publication t.i.tled "Stimulant Abuse by School Age Children: A Guide for School Officials" warns administrators of the many ways that kids can divert meds during the school day: by taking them from teachers' desks, sending a nonusing surrogate into the nurse's office, and hitting up ADHD-diagnosed friends on the bus. Amphetamines or pharmies that can't be begged, bartered for, or bought at school can be found in the home medicine cabinet or on one of the hundreds of sites selling them online.

For wired-in teens, pill popping is an especially attractive activity. It fits well into a solitary afternoon. There's no social ritual involved-just a gla.s.s of water and a pill. Amphetamines are perfect for a long night of interactive gaming or Web surfing. (Pharmies are, too, although they induce a more zonked-out experience.) Online journaling, too, can be enhanced by pills. "Kids who live in remote areas can develop a camaraderie online of drug-abusing kids," Carol Falkowski of the Hazelden Foundation, an addiction treatment and research center, told USA Today for a June 2007 feature. "They can share stories about drug experiences." The rather alarmist piece is headlined "Teens use Internet to share drug stories," and it no doubt introduced some adult readers to an unnerving instant-message acronym: "POS," for "parents over shoulder."

Some kids have learned the hard way exactly who 's standing behind them. In 2006, members of the Northwestern University women's soccer team were suspended-and all were required to complete a community-service project and an educational program-after pictures of hazing rituals that included lap dances, bondage, and simulated s.e.x were posted online. Officials at schools nationwide have trolled students' Facebook profiles for evidence not only of s.e.xual misconduct, but also of underage drinking and drug use, especially by athletes. At Va.s.sar in 2006, a member of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee warned her cla.s.smates by e-mail that the head of athletics "looks through our Facebook accounts every Monday morning to see how the weekend went." In May 2008, the University of Iowa announced that it would be implementing an old-school policy in response to all of this newfangled social-networking technology: the random testing of student athletes-or at least of their online personae. Instead of peering into a cup in search of illicit activity, the powers that be would be peering into a Web browser. "We believe in trusting our student-athletes," one administrator told the Daily Iowan. "But the ball is in their court."

Around the same time the Northwestern soccer team was stripping down for its digital portraits, the drug czar's office took a break from cheering the decline in marijuana use to notice that kids were still getting high in roughly the same numbers-only now many of them were abusing pharmies instead of pot. The czar warned that every day, 2,500 kids between the ages of twelve and seventeen were abusing a narcotic for the first time. "Though overall teen drug use is down nationwide," an ONDCP statement noted, "more teens abuse prescription drugs than any other illicit drug, except marijuana; more than cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine combined."

The never-ending game of Whac-A-Mole continued, as the White House announced a new nationwide campaign against teen abuse of prescription drugs. The effort, though, was more of the same, relying almost exclusively on old media and virtually ignoring the new one through which the phenomenon was spreading. The $30 million effort launched with a Super Bowl ad and also included two print ads in fourteen national magazines, open letters to health and school officials in trade publications, open letters to parents in forty-three national and regional newspapers, and a "tool kit to help community groups implement local prescription drug abuse prevention efforts."

The campaign isn't entirely offline, however. A Web site set up by the White House, TheAntiDrug.com, includes a "virtual tour" of a typical home so that parents can identify "danger zones." Of course, if those parents' more Web-savvy children take the tour instead, they' ll come across numerous suggestions from the drug czar as to where they might be able to find pills, including "Mom's purse," "Bedside table," and "Trashcan."

CHAPTER 9.

You Trip.

The first time I went to visit Leonard Pickard, I left Los Angeles early in the morning, driving ninety miles to a federal prison complex built into the moonscape desert near the broken-down town of Victorville, California. Without the facility, the area wouldn't be even remotely viable economically. The San Bernardino Valley as a whole is an impoverished place, but this section of it made some of the towns along the way look downright pleasant.

The maximum-security compound appeared on the horizon as a surreal mirage. I had been inside prisons before, most often a squalid joint in Jessup, Maryland, that housed a friend who was doing time for selling cocaine. Even with its crumbling brick, lack of air conditioning, and broken windows, it was nothing compared to this site in terms of sheer intimidation. The guard at the front desk told me that visitation had been canceled for the "indefinite future" following a riot that morning. Pickard told me in a subsequent letter that one gang member had kicked off the scrum by knifing another and that "blood droplets" were splashed about the place.

Pickard had told me more than once that when I came to visit him, I had to be sure that n.o.body had smoked pot near me for several days. In addition to a metal detector-which roundly fails to keep out metal-the Federal Bureau of Prisons uses ma.s.s spectrometers that can detect microscopic amounts of drug residue. Drug use is still rampant inside the prison walls, Pickard said, but he would lose all visitation rights for thirty days if I was swabbed and found to have recently been close to someone getting stoned-something that nearly half of all Californians do on a regular basis, in many cases legally.

For my second attempt, I drove down the coast just after leaving Burning Man, an annual subcultural gathering of artists and techies and the sort in the Nevada desert. Hardly anybody exiting that event had a st.i.tch of clothing that wasn't covered in some sort of illegal residue. So on my way, I stopped at a Wal-Mart and bought a new shirt, pants, socks, and shoes. At the prison, a guard quickly stopped me. "No white shirts," he said. White had been adopted as a gang color inside the prison, he said, and was now banned. Miles from the Wal-Mart, I headed into town to look for a new shirt, but each store I pulled up to turned out to be out of business. After an hour of looking, I finally found a place that sold T-shirts. No one, as far as I knew, had gotten high near the one that I chose.

I had come to this retail-deprived wasteland to try to get a better understanding of the 2000 bust that I had described in print as the main reason for the disappearance of LSD. I'd already obtained copies of court transcripts and tracked down Carl Nichols, the Drug Enforcement Administration agent who led the investigation into Pickard and took part in his arrest. Both confirmed something that Pickard had told me in a letter from prison: that the feds never seized 90.86 pounds of LSD from him. Instead, Pickard had dumped out buckets of some liquid that might have weighed approximately that. Nichols was watching him from a distance at the time, but he said that Pickard wouldn't have known that he was under surveillance.

No one except Pickard can say for sure what was in those buckets, but there's virtually no way that it could have been pure acid. Pickard wasn't wearing a protective suit or even gloves, and no chemist with decades of experience would fail to shield himself against the possibility of spilling a couple of thousand doses on his arm-do that, and you might as well block off the next week or so, because nothing's getting done. And because Pickard didn't know that he was being watched, there's no reason that he would have dumped millions of dollars' worth of anything into the Kansas soil.

Pickard also told me in letters-and claimed in court-that he was a simple academic who had gotten out of the LSD game by the time of his arrest. He was framed by another member of the acid-distribution ring, he maintained, although it's very hard to find anyone seriously interested in psychedelics who doesn't chuckle at this suggestion.

Jon Hanna, the organizer of the annual psychonaut gathering Mind States, is as well connected as anyone in the acid universe. At the 2007 conference in Costa Rica, he told me that there is no doubt in his mind that Pickard had been producing the vast majority of the nation's LSD-not that there was anything wrong with that. Pickard had to deny it, Hanna said, because his case is still on appeal. Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary a.s.sociation for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit organization dedicated to sponsoring " scientific research designed to develop psychedelics and marijuana into FDA-approved prescription medicines," told me, "Leonard really was the major producer."

At Burning Man, I had asked Hanna if he had any questions for Pickard. "Ask him when he' ll stop appealing his case," he replied.

As long as Pickard is working on his appeal, he' ll continue to deny any involvement in LSD production or distribution. During our interview, he invariably preceded answers to my questions with "Well, I understand from my academic research that . . ." At one point, he apologized, saying that he hoped someday to be able to speak freely.

The biggest question behind Pickard's arrest, of course, isn't exactly how much of exactly what he dumped out, or even whether he was in fact LSD's top U.S. producer. It's how his bust-no matter how neatly it overlapped with the demises of Jerry Garcia, Phish, and the outdoor rave scene-could have presaged such a complete collapse of the acid market.

One day, it seemed, LSD was there for the taking; the next, it wasn't. Why, after the drug vanished, did no one step up to meet the demand of the nation's legions of suddenly deprived acidheads?

The answer lies in the tight-knit nature of the LSD-producing community. The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, organized in the late sixties in Laguna Beach, California, to control the acid trade, is celebrated by some as a powerful and pervasive operation. Two books about the Brotherhood, Stewart Tendler and David May's The Brotherhood of Eternal Love: From Flower Power to Hippie Mafia-the Story of the LSD Counterculture and d.i.c.k Lee and Colin Pratt's Operation Julie: How the Undercover Police Team Smashed the World's Greatest Drugs Ring, characterize the group as a bunch of surfers struggling, often in vain, to find the necessary precursor chemicals.

In fact, members of the Brotherhood didn't even produce LSD for the first several years of its existence, but rather served as middlemen. The syndicate became famous thanks to the arrival in its...o...b..t of media darling Timothy Leary-whom the group later paid the Weather Underground to break out of prison. Eventually, the Brotherhood did make copious amounts of LSD, but several other producers were at work before the group, and those producers remained at work after the feds busted the Brotherhood, in 1972.

The reality is that LSD producers have historically had a much looser syndication, one known as the Family-or, more accurately, the Families. Pickard has always been a controversial figure in the acid underground, but widely respected by his peers and adversaries alike as a talented chemist. "He's one of the few we know of who has ever synthesized mescaline," Nichols told me, referring to a process that's far too difficult and expensive to be profitable. One of the few others known to have accomplished the feat is Alexander Shulgin.

"Pickard is a charlatan," blotter artist, blotter-art collector, and unofficial Family spokesperson Mark McCloud told me. He and many others warned me not to take anything that Pickard said at face value. Within the several Families, Pickard is known as someone who can't be trusted, and for good reason: facing decades in prison following a 1988 conviction for running an LSD lab, he cooperated and had his sentence drastically reduced, according to news reports from the time. (He denies any collaboration.) Many in the syndicate suspect that his cooperation with the feds dates back even farther, to the sixties or the seventies.

At Shroomery.org, where the psychedelic community meets online, it's generally a.s.sumed that Pickard is a longtime informant who intensified his snitching after his most recent arrest. The psychedelic underground is infested with paranoia-indeed, not entirely unfounded. Pickard may never once have cooperated with federal authorities, but the suspicion that he had was enough to send psychedelia tripping. One post to the site, allegedly from a respected member of the Family, describes the aftermath of his takedown:After his bust there was a mad scramble in N. Cal. The feds were everywhere they shouldn't have been. The precurser market (the link that ties every one together) was exposed and i' m told quite a bit of [ergotamine tartrate] ended up in the Pacific ocean by family that was totally freaking out. A lot of heat came down on people who didn't work with Pickard but knew him. It's possible that someone Pickard had working for him talked, or maybe Pickard himself. n.o.body knows, but it's evident that someone was giving out a lot of information that is highly guarded. This is why Every family stopped any activity.

That activity included LSD distribution as well as production, so even if a non-Family-affiliated manufacturer had continued to crank out doses, it would have had no easy means of selling them on a large scale. Foreign producers probably stayed away because acid isn't exactly a moneymaker. LSD's traditionally rock-bottom retail price might be a good thing to those eager to spread the psychonautical gospel, but it's a con for anyone weighing the rather inconsequential economic benefit of selling the drug against the significant risk of transporting it across international borders. And because acid isn't habit-forming, the potential for market growth is severely limited.

With the Families hunkered down, the marketplace was left with an unmet demand for a particular kind of mind alteration. The conventional wisdom is that Ecstasy took LSD's place. However, Ecstasy use began to decline in 2000, not increase. That drug was in its ascendancy a few years earlier. The largest federal survey estimates that about 500,000 people tried Ecstasy for the first time in 1996, about double the rate of two years earlier. The survey shows another doubling of first-time users by 1998 and a further doubling by 2000, when two million new people tried the drug. By 2000, Ecstasy was dominating the market, even before Pickard was arrested. But it didn't replace LSD: the number of first-time acid users slowly increased over the same period, hovering at around one million new heads per year.

A 2002 change in Monitoring the Future's methodology makes it impossible to judge whether there was a significant increase in the rate of psychedelic-mushroom use following acid's disappearance, but the survey makes it clear that use did not decline: use of "hallucinogens other than LSD" remained steady. Further evidence that significant demand for psychedelics persisted into the early years of this century is the post-Pickard rise of fake LSD. Consider the final Phish show, a two-night affair held in the summer of 2004 in Coventry, Vermont. Whenever I heard someone muttering, "Doses, doses," I'd buy one. After three transactions, my wallet was lighter but my mind as firmly tethered to the ground as ever. Others I spoke to had the same experience.

I had tried the same experiment a few months earlier at the ma.s.sive, jam-band-friendly Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tennessee, and I'd also gone looking for LSD at the national Rainbow Gathering in northern California's Modoc National Forest. Both events yielded similar results. Before the bust, a con artist selling fake doses at a Phish concert was a rarity. Real acid came with a promise that there's something beyond ordinary life-a plane of existence governed by love, trust, and peace. The bogus stuff suggested something much more prosaic: good old-fashioned greed.

Faced with a dire shortage of LSD, American heads found new ways to trip. Google searches offered easy access to research chemicals, and the number of above-ground suppliers grew from just a few to dozens. Ayahuasca, a natural hallucinogenic brew, rose in popularity. Salvia, a powerful psychedelic plant still legal on the federal level and in most states, was also easy to buy on the Internet after the Families closed ranks. A federal survey estimated that by 2006, more people had used the formerly little-known plant in the past year than had tried LSD-756,000 to 666,000. Another 104,000 did "DMT, AMT, or Foxy"-research chemicals that the feds started asking about that year.

As research-chemical use grew, the use of a natural hallucinogen picked up, too, although federal surveys don't ask about it. Ayahuasca brew, a combination of two plants that grow in South America, has long been known to the readers of Beat literature as yage. It first came to the attention of Western scientists in 1851, but Amazonian tribes have probably used it as a medicine and religious aid for centuries. One of the plants in the brew, Psychotria viridis, contains dimethyltryptamine-or DMT-which is listed as a Schedule I drug. By itself, though, it has no real effect. Indeed, many common plants contain DMT; so does the human body, though the brain is wired to neutralize it. Thus the second plant in the brew, Banisteriopsis caapi, which knocks down the brain's ability to neutralize DMT.

Without reliable survey data, it's impossible to know for sure to what extent ayahuasca use might be growing in the United States. But anecdotal evidence points to a rise. Beginning around the turn of the millennium, folks unable to find acid in their hometowns-or just looking for something new-started hopping flights to Peru, Ecuador, or Brazil, hoping to experience an ayahuasca journey, as the experience is known. "Before 2001, I never saw an American come down," a Peruvian shaman I met in New York told me.

Such psychedelic tourism grew so quickly that ayahuasca journeys are now offered in Latin American countries that have no native tradition of using the brew. Tommy Thomas is a farmer who lives in Costa Rica. A Washington, D.C., real-estate developer who moved to the country more than two decades ago, he'd hoped to earn a living growing hallucinogenic plants. The market turned out to be less lucrative than he'd imagined, so he now grows mostly traditional crops, dedicating only a small portion of his farm to mind expansion, on a four-acre plot he calls an "ethn.o.botanical garden." As we toured it, he told me that he first noticed the ayahuasca trend take a major upswing in 2005. The local version of the ceremony involves flying in a Peruvian, Ecuadorian, or Brazilian shaman, because their Costa Rican counterparts never used ayahuasca.

"It kind of p.i.s.ses them off," Thomas said of the native Costa Ricans, "but it's good money." Indeed, the retreats, mostly organized by Americans, can cost thousands of dollars per head.

Another sign that ayahuasca vacations have hit a critical ma.s.s is media exposure. National Geographic and a number of other outlets have run chronicles of their writers' mind-blowing excursions to South America, complete with harrowing bus/plane/boat rides, stays in mosquito-ridden camps, and much vomiting. But there's really no need for Americans to travel to go on an ayahuasca journey. In the nineties, the Peruvian shaman told me, he brought his brew to places such as Spain, Italy, and India, but not to the United States. "I didn't even consider coming to America," he said. "I didn't think the people would be open to it." He eventually met a few Americans who persuaded him to come to San Francisco. Today, he goes almost nowhere but the United States. There are more towns asking him to come than he has time to accommodate.

Two ayahuasca-using churches with Brazilian roots have recently grown in membership and public prominence in the United States, as well. The Santo Daime church, founded in 1930 by a rubber tapper who experienced a vision of the Virgin Mary after drinking ayahuasca (or Daime), is perhaps the oldest formal inst.i.tution to offer the brew to non-tribespeople. The Centro Espirita Beneficiente Unio do Vegetal was established in 1961 by another visionary rubber tapper. Its New Mexican branch battled the feds over the church's central tenet of ayahuasca consumption, arguing that religious liberty allows the church to use the drink. In 2006, the Supreme Court upheld the Unio do Vegetal's right to trip in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Unio do Vegetal, although it remanded the case to lower courts for further review.

I met Coco Conn, a Santo Daime member and Web innovator at the forefront of the social-networking movement, at the Mind States conference in Costa Rica, where she told me that ayahuasca had allowed her to give up drinking and other drugs. Conn explained what the Unio do Vegetal had to do to demonstrate that it offered a sincere religious ceremony: "They had to show it isn't fun. If it's fun, American courts will rule it's not a religious experience. Ayahuasca's no fun, that's for sure," she said laughingly, referring to the often harrowing four-to-six-hour trip the Unio do Vegetal's sacrament induces.

"I was a vomiting snake," early adopter Allen Ginsberg wrote of one ayahuasca journey. "I vomited with eyes closed and sensed myself a Serpent of Being . . . covered with Aureole of spiky snakeheads miniatured radiant & many colored around my hands & throat-my throat bulging like the Beast of Creation, like the Beast of Death."

The organized ayahuasca churches make up only a tiny fraction of American users. Most tend to imbibe no more than a few times a year, in a friend's living room guided by a traveling shaman, or in a joint like the industrial Brooklyn warehouse I traveled to in early 2007. I'd been asked not to reveal the name of the place because of "complexities of the legality." Every few weeks, on Fridays and Sat.u.r.days, a shaman flies up from South America to lead ayahuasca sessions. "The Journey Room is down and to your left," said a bearded man in his twenties as my wife, Elizan, and I filed in. Plastic pitchers-vomit buckets-were stacked on a small table to the right.

I grabbed a blanket from another stack, plopped down on a dilapidated mattress, and waited, the bucket in my lap. On a futon to my left were Zito and Eric, both from New York. They had been there before and suggested that writing while on the journey will be difficult at best. "You should probably just go with it. Just let it happen," said Eric. The woman near them was also from the city. She'd never done ayahuasca, she said, but was there for "exploration."

The owner of the warehouse found me on the mattress to talk about a mutual friend who had vouched for me. Her first ayahuasca journey, he said, was here, and shortly after it she sent him an e-mail from Peru, where she was doing a weeklong ayahuasca retreat. The owner, the veteran of several ayahuasca journeys, then gave me a brief resume that included both p.o.r.n production and investment banking. He had quit caffeine, alcohol, meat, and anything that's been cooked. He mentioned that he'd been fasting for the past three days because doing so can help bring on a "light" journey. "The dark ones are good, too, but whoa," he said, shaking his head and shuddering.

The first time that he took ayahuasca he had a magical, euphoric experience. He credited his healthy lifestyle and general goodness. "I thought it was a sign of how well I was living my life that I could handle it like nothing," he said. "Then, the second time, I went straight to h.e.l.l. Oh G.o.d, it was awful. But wonderful, of course." He reminded us to relax, to let go, and to remember to breathe. "Good luck," he concluded, finding a place against the wall. The warehouse now held twenty-five people, each of them having paid $200 cash for this gourmet psychedelic experience. There were a middle-aged couple, a group of three women in their twenties dressed in pajama pants and sleeveless camis, and a frat guy with a magazine-worthy physique who'd already removed his shirt.

Between the couple and the women was a makeshift shrine. The shaman, who comes up from Peru every few months with his metal thermos of ayahuasca, walked toward it and pulled out his guitar. He looked to be in his late twenties-and, as I'd later learn, he was born in Spain. He set down rules (no talking; no making noise that could interfere with someone else's journey) and offered advice (relax, let go, breathe). He said that there might be moments in which we feel that time is frozen, unable to move forward. We might feel as if we'll be on ayahuasca for eternity. He promised that these feelings would go away and that in several hours we would feel just the way we do now-perhaps even better.

I'd heard talk similar to this before and had even used it once myself to ease a woman through a bad trip at a Phish show: "You've taken a chemical substance and it feels like you' ll be tripping forever, but the chemicals are working their way through your body and you will eventually return to normal. But the next few hours are going to suck."

One by one, the shaman summoned us to him. He poured a muddy beverage from his thermos into a metal shot gla.s.s. I downed it as he said, "G.o.d bless you." I thanked him and walked back to my dingy mattress to wait, bucket ready. A slow wave of vomiting began to roll around the room. It wasn't looking good for the turkey sub I'd had at a rest stop on the way to the city, or for the bag of barbecue chips.

In the spring of 2008, Hebrew University professor Benny Shanon, who claims to have used ayahuasca at least 160 times in the early nineties, speculated that Moses was on a variant of the brew created from plants available in the Middle East when he encountered G.o.d with fear and trembling. "In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation," Shanon writes, "the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings." At about a half an hour in, Elizan pointed out that I was shaking. And I was-as if I were in a T-shirt in fifteen-degree weather.