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They clear bloodshot eyes with Visine. They hide liquor in Nalgenes. They take Ritalin to boost test results. They numb out on stolen Vicodin and Percocet. They post party alerts on Facebook. They text-message dealers during class. They’re some of Wayzata High’s finest students. How the world of chemical abuse has changed since you were in school.

Photo by Jonathan Chapman

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Deb K. had suspicions about her son’s behavior, but she couldn’t be sure. When he came home, he raced straight up to his room. She had heard him open the sliding door in the middle of the night. To smoke pot outside? Her husband thought she was overreacting, but her intuition told her differently. In desperation, she called the drug counselor at Wayzata High School, where her son was a sophomore. The counselor suggested Deb search his room. “You have to know,” she told Deb. “He’s in trouble, but we don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

Deb took a deep breath, climbed the stairs and opened the door to her 15-year-old son’s bedroom. Oh God, what am I going to find? A small flashlight on the carpet caught her eye. She knelt down, switched on the flashlight, and peered under his bed. There was a fluorescent light attached to a 40-foot extension cord along with a manual for growing marijuana printed off the Internet. She pulled out an accent pillow she had purchased for him. It jingled. She found miniature bottles of alcohol inside. She spied a fishing tackle box—why was that under the bed? She discovered pot, seeds, and a one-hitter tucked into the folding trays. In the garage, where her son had been spending more time recently, she found more grow lights, five marijuana plants, and a stash of pipes.
An hour later, Deb called back the counselor, Judy Hanson. “I’m so sick I could throw up,” she said.

“What are you doing at one o’clock?” Hanson asked.

“I guess I’ll be in your office,” Deb said.

When an aide from the front office summoned Derek from class, he thought that meant he had a free pass for the rest of the day—he could spend the afternoon smoking weed. “See ya,” he said to classmates.

His grin faded when he walked into Judy Hanson’s office and saw Hanson, the school police officer, and his parents, along with his bong, several pipes, and more than an ounce of weed lined up on the floor. His eyes flashed panic. “Mom, what did you do?”
 

WALK INTO A HIGH-SCHOOL CLASSROOM these days with, say, 20 seniors. If statistics are right, seven of those seniors have smoked marijuana in the last year, but not the mellow weed that baby boomers puffed in the 1960s and ’70s. Pot today is five times more potent, thanks to higher THC content cultivated by improved growing methods. Of the group, 14 of those kids have drunk alcohol in the past year, and six have binged—consuming more than five drinks at one sitting—in the past two weeks.

Like their parents’ generation, these kids party, but they’re going about it in a whole different way. Not only are they drinking with greater intent to get drunk and smoking stronger weed, they’re popping prescription pills—maybe another kid’s ADD medication; maybe the painkillers they raid from their parents’ medicine cabinets—with little thought to prescribed doses. The drugs are a quick text message away, toted in omnipresent yet innocuous backpacks and often consumed under the noses of unsuspecting parents, teachers, and coaches. Fueled by misperceptions picked up online, today’s teens are using drugs in an alarmingly reckless and dangerous fashion. Yet most of their parents have little or no idea.

“There are so many parents who don’t want to know,” Deb says. “For some reason, people don’t think this is happening in Wayzata. Well, they have the same problem in Eden Prairie and Elk River. It doesn’t matter if it’s an inner-city high school or a big mega-million-dollar high school—there are drugs there, and the parents aren’t paying attention.”
 

LIKE MOST HIGH-SCHOOL SOPHOMORES, Derek K. was still trying to find his place in the school’s social strata. A 5-foot-5 lightweight, he wasn’t cut out to be a varsity athlete. He was smarter than the Hard Hats, the popular group of hardcore fans in overalls cheering madly at football games and later pounding beers at parties. In his polo shirt and designer jeans, Derek didn’t fit with the pierced-and-tattooed crowd either. The day his parents confronted him in Judy Hanson’s office secured his identity. “I told that story, and I was a legend,” he says. “Kids looked up to me. They were just starting to get into weed, and I’d already done that.”

The consequences hardly mattered. Nor did letting down his parents. His social stock had risen dramatically. Little surprise that a month later Derek got caught downing vodka shots with another kid on a phy-ed class outing. Ticketed for consumption by a minor, he had to attend an alcohol-diversion class—where he says he learned how to avoid getting caught. He asked the cop teaching the class how he could tell if a kid was high. “That made it easier to get away with,” Derek says.

Derek has short brown hair—almost a buzzcut—and brown eyes and a pointed chin. His wide and winning smile is his signature characteristic. He’s charming and easy to like, with the personality of a natural salesman. Now 19, he graduated from Wayzata last spring. By the end of his sophomore year, Derek figures he had gotten stoned with at least 200 kids in his school. They smoked before school, after school—even during school, in bathrooms. “It had blown up pretty quickly,” he says. “Weed was the biggest thing I saw at Wayzata High. There were maybe 100 kids who were stoned all day.”

Weed wasn’t hard to come by. “You could walk up to any circle of kids at Wayzata and ask them where to find weed, they’d know,” Derek says.

Sometimes the deals took place in the school. He placed his money in the paper-towel dispenser of the boys’ bathroom. The dealer slipped out the money and replaced it with a bag of pot. “Everybody knew how to open those [dispensers] with a paper clip,” Derek says.

If he wanted something else, a text message to one of 25 dealers he knew generally did the trick. He’d tap that out during class and be set for after school. When he had dope to sell, he sent a mass text to his list of 150 contacts: “B there by 3:30. Gone @ 4.”

School rules ban the use of cell phones in classrooms, but students frequently text on the sly. Derek’s teachers had no idea he was arranging drug deals in their classrooms. “It can happen right under your eyes, and you don’t even know it,” says Hanson, Wayzata’s chemical-health coordinator for the past 13 years. “Cell phones have opened up a whole new world for kids seeking and dealing drugs.”

Once believed not to be addictive, marijuana is now listed under cannabis dependence in the DSM-IV, the American Psychiatric Association’s catalog of mental disorders. Yet today’s teenagers still believe that the drug is harmless, a misperception often perpetuated by what they read online—a whole new source of information about drug use. One of the bigger pro-drug sites, Erowid.org, has instructions for turning a pop can into a pot pipe, advice for beating a drug test, and this tip: “Caught by parents? Don’t admit it! There’s no way they can prove you’re stoned, just say you feel sick!”

Such sites drive Carol Falkowski crazy. Currently the director of the Minnesota Department of Human Services alcohol-and-drug-abuse division, Falkowski has monitored the state’s drug scene in various roles over the past three decades. “What kids used to learn on street corners from other kids they now learn online,” Falkowski says. “Even withdrawn kids or kids in remote geographic areas can get a whole lot of misinformation and have an online group of buddies with drug-using behavior. There’s a big online culture about drug use, and it’s available for anyone.”
 

WAYZATA HIGH SCHOOL, actually located in Plymouth, is a megaschool with nearly 3,300 students in grades 9-12 from seven different municipalities, which are mostly white, middle to upper-middle class. Yet, when it comes to drugs, there’s not much difference between the kids in the $100 sneakers and the ones wearing work boots. “The habits and behaviors of teenagers are pretty similar across communities,” Falkowski says. “There’s not much difference between metro areas and outstate with use, especially when it comes to alcohol. Parents need to realize that this can happen to their kids regardless of their income or social standing.”

When Deb K. attended Hibbing High School in the 1970s, students weren’t popping other kids’ ADD meds. She had no reason to think her son was doing that. But he was—along with lots of other kids attracted to the prescription speed. Derek regularly scored in the 90th percentile on standardized aptitude tests, until he discovered that Adderall made him studious. “No matter the subject, I couldn’t get enough of it,” he says.

When he dropped Adderall before class, his mind raced, and he took furious notes. But sometimes his mind sped too fast. “I had 20 thoughts a second, but I was not able to verbalize any of them,” he says. “The teachers couldn’t see it—they just thought I was an attentive student.”

Adderall, Ritalin, and other neuro-enhancers frequently prescribed to children with attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder can increase focus and concentration but can also cause shakes, appetite loss, and rapid heart rates. The drugs have lately become popular study aids on college campuses, a trend that’s working its way down into high schools.