Delinquents in Suburbia.

Thanks to family decay, criminality is creeping into America's middle class

If you think "juvenile delinquent" only means a 17-year-old minority male from the inner city whose impoverished mother is on welfare, you haven t been paying attention lately. There are now legions of seriously messed up kids who look just like the ones in the suburb next door. Today's problem child can be white, he can live in a middle- to upper-middle-class home, he can be under (far under) age 16, and he can just as easily be a she.

To document this, TAE's gaze has for some months now been focused on the pleasant, palm-fringed suburb of Cape Coral, Florida, a thoroughly white, middle-class enclave on the outskirts of Fort Myers. The range of crimes that teens have been arrested for in the last half-year in this sunny locale is worrisome. Recently, for instance, five students at Riverdale High were charged with selling their Ritalin or possessing the drug unlawfully. The day after, two other students admitted to selling Xanax and other prescription drugs to their fellow teens. Jim Holstine of Florida Addiction Services in Cape Coral tells reporters that prescription medication abuse "has soared in the past five years" He estimates that half of this suburb's school kids have experimented with prescription drugs.

Not long before these arrests, five students at Cypress Lake High School were rushed to the hospital after they overdosed on amitriptyline, a high-powered antidepressant that can be lethal. The recreational users were three 14-year-old girls, one girl aged 15, and a 15-year-old boy. Another 15-year-old girl bought several of the pills from the ninth-grader who was distributing them because "I was told by my friend at lunch that they were painkillers and would give me a great high." She decided not to take them but was blase about the whole affair, telling reporters, "It was bound to happen because drugs are available to nearly everyone."

By early December of last year, ambulances had rushed to Cape High School three times for drug-related problems. The month before, ten teens were arrested for possession of drugs, five charged with intent to distribute. Mariner High School assistant principal Bob Fain said students caught with pills were not only the "stereotypical `drug type'" but also "the clean-cut, well-dressed student who has never been in trouble." Gone are the days when "drugs" really just meant "marijuana" For $1 to $6 per dose, today s suburban students have access to chic "designer drugs" like gamma hydroxybutyric acid ("liquid G"), Xanax, Ecstasy, lithium, and much more. One 16-year-old girl at Mariner High was reported to police by her mother; they caught her with 17 pills that included five different varieties of antipsychotics and antidepressants.

For a sense of how such youth view authority, consider two teenagers who were arrested after they flagrantly dumped litter out of their car in front of a marked patrol car. The arresting officer searched their vehicle and found marijuana, LSD, cocaine, five Ecstasy pills, five Rohypnol pills (the "date rape" drug), a .22-caliber handgun, and a .380 handgun. Sixteen-year-old passenger Preston Patton (an 18-year-old girl was driving) was fearless enough to tell the police he sold such drugs for "extra money."

Wayne Nagy, principal of Cape High, is blunt: "Every high school in Lee County has a drug problem." Senior Joshua Yearout told the school's newspaper, "It's obvious that the school system doesn't make a big deal about it.... There's still people dying, still people taking drugs, still people buying and selling in the school that claims zero tolerance." In dozens of interviews with parents, students, police, and juvenile justice workers, nearly everyone estimated that at least half of the Cape's high schoolers had used drugs within the previous 30 days.