Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 16, 1992 TAG: 9202170214
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: E3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TIM THORNTON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
THE WAR ON DRUGS ARE KIDS BEING SENT A MIXED MESSAGE?
BACK WHEN I was still young and the Soviet Union was still a country, people would talk about indoctrination and propaganda in the U.S.S.R. The Soviet state, grown-ups told me, virtually took over the parenting of young comrades.Budding Communists were taught about the greatness of Lenin and Marx, and the benevolence and wisdom of the party. This began very early and continued throughout the young Communists' academic careers, after which they were expected to become good, solid, dependable - if somewhat automated - citizens of the workers' paradise.
The most insidious aspect of this process was the replacement of the family with the state. "If you went to school in Moscow," my father solemnly told me, "they would teach you to inform on me if I did or said anything they didn't like. Your own parents. They'd teach you to turn in your own parents."
I remembered that little vignette from my childhood after reading about a 9-year-old Chesterfield County girl who turned in her mother for smoking marijuana.
According to The Associated Press, the fourth-grader told a guidance counselor that her mother smoked dope. The counselor called the local police. The police talked to the girl and, on the strength of her report, obtained a search warrant. During the subsequent search of the girl's home, police "seized several small bags of marijuana and drug paraphernalia."
"You go into the schools and teach a kid about drugs, and when they want to express themselves, you have to look into it," Lt. Dennis S. Proffitt, the commander of the Chesterfield County vice and narcotics unit, was quoted as saying.
Well, yes, I suppose so. But this story bothered me.
The very reason the story made the wires, the kid-turns-in-mother angle, struck me first. It's a pretty powerful indoctrination program that makes a child turn against a parent, no matter how noble or compelling the reason.
The nature of the evidence struck me, too. There were stick-figure drawings showing how the girl's mother and stepfather drank and argued, and how her mother smoked pot. There was also a two-page paper titled "I Hate Divorce." The AP quoted from it: "I hate divorce because my parents always fight and my mother takes drugs. She's always mean, and my stepfather smokes cigars, cigarettes and pipes, and my mother and stepfather drink wine and beer."
Clearly, this is not a happy, healthy family. What was the official response? Seize the marijuana, charge the mother, problem solved.
"After we got there, we didn't think it was necessary for anybody to intervene," Proffitt told the AP. "We didn't have social services come in or try to remove her from the home."
Everything was going to be all right? Taking a few baggies of marijuana out of the equation fixed everything?
Police put enough stock in the little girl's story to ask for a search warrant so they could seize drugs. But they apparently missed or ignored the part about the parents' fighting and drinking and the mother being "always mean." They left a 9-year-old who caused her mother's arrest in the care of that mother.
Perhaps the police and the rest of officialdom really believe that seizing a small amount of drugs solved the other problems that unhappy little girl obviously faces.
I recently visited an elementary school. Near the main entrance, big red letters and a circle-and-slash symbol declared it to be a drug-free school zone. A smaller sign on the door told me I was entering a tobacco-free building. Inside was a bulletin board and a substantial collection of posters telling anyone who walked by that they should "Just say no."
Is this the same kind of propaganda war that made little Communists turn in their parents? Is it really the best way to deal with problems in a democracy?
What kind of message we are sending our children? Are we teaching them about personal responsibility and decision making? Or intolerance and blind obedience?
Why we do so much to treat symptoms and so little to cure the ills that cause them?