Just as colleges are different, each community has its unique characteristics. National publications may alert you to the dangers of designer drugs or homemade PCP (angel dust), and those substances may or may not be of major concern in your area. Usually a drug fad will start on one coast or the other, and then filter to the middle of the country. But there may be local favorites, based on availability, price, and how vigorously they are being pushed.

Here’s how you can tell what’s really going on:

1. Listen to your kids when they talk to you and when they talk to their friends. You don’t have to be a spy—just stay alert. If after every weekend you hear jokes about who was “smashed,” you know there’s a lot of drinking going on. One boy just happened to pick up the extension when his fifteen-year-old older brother was on the phone planning an afternoon at a friend’s house. “Bring some booze—we’re all out” is what he heard. The older boy said he couldn’t get anything from the liquor cabinet because too many people were around. The younger boy told his mother. (Whether he should have or not is a decision each family has to make.) She picked her older son up earlier than planned, and talked with him calmly about what his friends were doing. She’d had no idea before this that they spent Saturday afternoon drinking.
2. Read your local, school, and college papers if they’re available. From news stories, letters to the editor, even cartoons, you will find out what’s happening. Be sensitive to what is not completely spelled out. After the son of the 1984 vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro was arrested for possession of and intent to sell cocaine, reporters learned that his fellow college students had been suspicious for a long time. The April Fool edition of the college newspaper had carried a mock advertisement with a picture of the young man and the line “My mom may drink Pepsi [Ferraro had done a Pepsi commercial] but I like Coke.” Below this was “Changing in line with the times.” College officials seemed neither to notice not to understand the reference. It was easier and more comfortable to avoid facing the existence of drug use on campus, despite public pronouncements about official disapproval.
3. Talk to other parents. Like college officials, parents may want both to know and not to know, and trying to get information may be difficult. But it’s worth the effort. An example of how ostrich-like parents can be was revealed when the Partnership for a Drug-Free America polled children, teenagers, and their parents across the country. Only 21 percent of the parents thought their teenagers had experimented with marijuana, yet 44 percent of the teenagers said they had done so. Even though many of these parents had lived through the drug-filled sixties, they were as na?ve as parents of the past. They were unaware that marijuana use had increased, that among young people awareness of the risks of the drug decreased. (That decrease has now leveled off and, at least among eighth-graders, is even declining slightly, a hopeful sign for the future.)
4. Go to school and community meetings on the subject of alcohol and drugs, even if your kid says, “Please don’t go. You’ll embarrass me.”
5. Notice what your local stores are selling. Head shops stocked with drug paraphernalia and cigarette-rolling papers in the stationery store are a sure sign of local use. So are magazines about drugs.
6. Check the Internet for what information—and propaganda—there is about drinking and drug-making and taking. One website to look into is that for High Times, the monthly magazine about drugs. In addition, more than thirty-five alcohol brands have their own websites. As for tobacco, more than fifty websites praise the wonders of smoking for women. Chances are your kids have found one or more of these sites.
7. Keep your eyes open at parties in the neighborhood or at your house. If you see volunteers overeager to clean up afterward (to remove signs of smoking or drinking from the back lawn or the family room), be suspicious. Awareness is the first step toward doing something about your child’s exposure to alcohol and other drugs.