Educators see rise in student drug use

It was 8:15 a.m. and the student smelled of marijuana. The aide suspected that the student was high.

The girl told Kloppel she drove her boyfriend to school and that he was smoking his medical marijuana in the car. He is a Montana “green-card” holder, meaning he can legally possess and smoke marijuana to alleviate pain.

Kloppel then inspected the student’s car.

“You could smell the marijuana from outside the car. It was almost blue in the car,” he said.

Through the smoke, Kloppel spotted a baby seat in the back. The principal believed that the couple’s 4-month-old baby likely had been riding in the car.

“Looking at her (the student), there was no way she wasn’t high. But she said she wasn’t using it, and there was nothing in her possession,” Kloppel said.

With no admission of guilt, there was nothing the administration could do but send her back to class.

This instance is not isolated. More Great Falls teenagers are smoking marijuana than counselors and administrators have ever seen before. Kloppel and Fred Anderson, principal at Great Falls High School, say that is because of the growing use of medical marijuana in the community.

“I strongly believe it is directly attributable to the increased availability of the drug through caregivers and cardholders,” Kloppel said.

Counselors say students have taken a more casual approach to marijuana in the past year. They keep hearing students tell them it is medicinal and helps calm them down and relieve stress.

With no way for officials to test students for marijuana besides taking them to the hospital for a blood test, students — with or without a green card — go unpunished for using the drug.

“Right now, we don’t have a policy,” Kloppel said in a recent interview.

“This has become an epidemic,” CMR counselor Earlene Ostberg said. “Some of these kids were going to go to college and now are just going to get a job.”

In a February 2009 survey among the city’s high-schoolers, 48 percent reported that they have used marijuana, and 5 percent reported using it 10 to 19 times in the last 30 days. The number of students who said they experimented with marijuana was up nearly 10 percent from the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. The latest national statistics conducted by the CDC show 38.1 percent of teens had used marijuana at least once in their lifetime, according to the 2007 survey.

“But our data doesn’t reflect how much it’s increased since they started opening up the marijuana stores,” said Mikie Messman, Chemical Awareness/Responsive Education program coordinator for the school district.

Kloppel and Anderson say there is no question that the use is higher than last year.

“It’s worse than the early ’70s,” Kloppel said.

What is different is that marijuana use this year seems to be across all groups and cliques at the high schools.

“It really does not have boundaries — even athletes,” Anderson said. “There used to be a group you could ID, but now it doesn’t have boundaries.”

Authorities used to be able to pinpoint the distribution points, but “now if you can get it anywhere, where do you go?”

There are no avenues of control, he added.

“There are a lot of kids that don’t (use marijuana), but there are a lot more kids that do that didn’t use to,” Kloppel said.

Tom Daubert, founder and director of Patients and Families United, a Montana cannabis care-giving cooperative, said that in other states with medical marijuana laws, recreational use among teens has actually gone down.

“It’s no fun anymore. Kids see it as grandma’s cancer medicine,” Daubert said.

In Montana, Daubert said the traveling medical marijuana clinics organized by the Montana Caregivers Network have created a different perception in the last seven months.

In October, the Obama administration told federal prosecutors not to waste time arresting marijuana patients and suppliers who are operating legally under state law. The traveling clinics followed. They give people access to doctors who see marijuana as a safe alternative to some traditional prescription medications. The Montana Caregivers Network has signed up a large portion of the nearly 15,000 medical marijuana cardholders in Montana.

Efforts to either craft legislation solutions or a ballot initiative to undo the 2004 decision legalizing medical marijuana were discussed last week in Helena by people on both sides of the issue.

Jason Christ, executive director of the Montana Caregivers Network, said the problem of illegal marijuana use among teenagers has been there all along.

“Principals, they don’t know,” Christ said. “It’s not that these clinics are causing the problem.”

He said that kids always have experimented with drugs, and school officials should be more concerned with methamphetamine, abuse of prescription medications and alcohol.

“No one has ever died from this plant — ever,” he said.

Christ wanted to be very clear, however, that medical marijuana should be used only as a medicine.

“Jason Christ does not want to legalize marijuana,” he said.

Dr. John Stowers, an emergency room doctor in Great Falls, does not suggest medical marijuana patients ever smoke marijuana. There are other, more effective ways of ingesting the medicine, he said.

“There are risks. Marijuana is not a benign drug. Smoking anything isn’t healthy. It’s kind of the best of a bad situation is the way I see it,” he said.

Stowers sees patients wanting medical marijuana about five times a month in a separate office downtown. Patients are screened by phone and by a nurse before he sees them, and even then, he said he turns away 30 to 40 percent of the people he sees.

But there are many risks that have to be weighed when it comes to young people having access to marijuana, he said.

“Clearly, the studies have shown that some people do have delay in mental development,” Stowers said. “Would I want my own child to smoke marijuana? Absolutely not.”

Stowers said he has seen three people in their teens or 20s.

“I wouldn’t hesitate seeing a 12-year-old with his parents and talk to his doctor, if they had a severe debilitating lifetime illness,” he said.

Stowers also said he is bothered by what the Great Falls principals have seen in recent months.

“It was never intended to be in the hands of young, healthy kids,” he said.

The students tell Messman that smoking marijuana relieves their stress. They are not learning to cope with their stress — they are covering it up, she said.

“The kids are using it as medication so they don’t have to deal with adolescence,” Messman said.

“For me, this is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen,” Ostberg added. “Most of the ones that are failing are doing pot.

“When I ask, ‘why,’ a lot of kids are real defensive. They say, ‘Mrs. Ostberg, it’s medicinal. I could get a green card,’” she said.

CMR senior Cameron Castaneda knows firsthand about using the drug. He used to turn to marijuana any time a struggle came his way. If he didn’t get a good enough grade on a test, he’d get high. If he got in an argument with his girlfriend, he’d get high.

“I couldn’t cope with things,” Castaneda said. “If you do it too much, you pretty much — you lose your life.”

Castaneda said he lost his high school years because of marijuana.

“It’s like someone trying to swim with a 10-pound brick tied to your leg,” he said.

Castaneda dropped out of school last spring with a month and a half left in the school year. Then he spent the summer in the juvenile detention center after he stole a television out of an acquaintance’s house to get money to buy drugs.

Out on probation and back in school last fall, Castaneda lasted only three weeks before he broke his probation and began to run from the law.

His parents had sent him to live with his aunt and uncle in Great Falls to get him away from the crowd he was hanging with in Las Vegas. CMR school counselors and teachers saw Castaneda’s potential in those first nine months he lived here and stayed clean. But after visiting his parents at Christmastime his junior year, he went right back to that lifestyle. When he returned to Great Falls for school, he quickly hooked into the party crowd here.

Castaneda’s aunt and uncle fought hard for him, but eventually kicked him out of the house. After breaking probation last fall, he had no place to stay, hardly ate and had to borrow clothes from his friends.

In November, law enforcement caught up with him.

“At 17 years old, I spent two months on the hill in jail. I missed Thanksgiving, Christmas and my 18th birthday,” he said.

But one day in January, Castaneda was given a second chance. He entered the drug treatment court program, in which he has to check in every day before 10 a.m. Three times a week he has a drug test, and every Tuesday he speaks to District Judge Thomas McKittrick about how his week went. He also has to attend at least three support group meetings a week.

“I’ve been sober 6 1/2 months — and that’s completely sober,” Castaneda said. “Everything is so much better now that I have engaged myself as a member of society.”

Castaneda will graduate today from CMR, even though he lost two full semesters of credit. He was a full semester ahead before he dropped out the first time; this semester he took eight classes to meet graduation requirements.

However, not everything can be undone.

Since Castaneda was a small boy, he has dreamed of becoming a special agent for the FBI.

“Now that I have a felony, there is no way I can do that,” he said.

Castaneda will start at Montana State University-Great Falls College of Technology this fall where he intends to major in English. He’d like to become a novelist.

His fight to stay clean is a daily decision, he said. He has learned other ways to cope when he argues with his girlfriend or something doesn’t go his way.

“Now when something like this happens, I’m a lot more willing to work on it,” he said. “Since I know I honestly do love the girl, I know I want to work on it.”

Montana’s medical marijuana law states that it is not appropriate for the workplace, but there is no mention of school.

Kloppel worries about the implications: What if the student with a green card smokes marijuana at lunch and shop class is next? What if the student will be using a saw?

What about driver’s education, he wonders.

For those growing numbers of students smoking illegally, the same concerns hold true, since it is hard to prove a student is under the influence of the drug.

Even when the administration can add consequences for those students smoking marijuana, it is of little concern to the students involved.

“All the detention that worked with people that are pretty rational tends not to work with marijuana,” Anderson said.

It’s a vicious cycle. The kids start smoking and lose interest in being in school. If they are not in school, counselors and teachers cannot establish relationships with them.

“We know that we have to keep them in school to keep them engaged,” Messman said.

“The heavy users and the regular users do not perform in school,” Kloppel said. “School becomes less and less important to them.”

One student who used to get B’s and C’s in school now is getting low D’s and F’s. The student told Kloppel he is having trouble remembering what he read after he reads it.

“He’s still planning to go to college, but he has to get through high school first,” Kloppel said.

Compounding the problem is that parents are in denial, according to school officials.

“If you have a violation that doesn’t involve alcohol, there is a much higher rate of denial,” Anderson said. “Parents do not want to believe it.”

He said one situation stands out in his mind. A family of a student with a serious marijuana problem denied those problems and refused to get their child’s blood tested. At a later date, the student was found on the third floor of the school passed out during an athletic event. He was rushed to the emergency room, where he was in serious condition.

“That is what it took,” Anderson said. “That was an eye-opener.”

Ostberg said that many parents are not aware of what to look for if their child is smoking marijuana. Many parents also will not allow a blood test because they don’t want to cause problems with their relationship with the teen.

A CMR school newspaper reporter with the Stampede did a story this spring on medical marijuana. She found an underclassman who was willing to talk about how medical marijuana was helping her ailments and how she got her green card.

The story turned out to be a total fabrication. The student didn’t have a green card or the medical condition she said she did.

Kloppel said the girl lied “to be cool.”

It’s the cool thing to do in high school now — the story might get her more friends, Kloppel said.

Alan Stelling, student body president at Great Falls High, said he hasn’t noticed marijuana use being more of a problem.

“Just around the school, I can’t really tell, but I can see how the attitudes are changing,” he said.

His freshman year, students who were using marijuana were outcasts, but now it’s much more accepted, he said.

Ostberg is hearing that, too.

“I asked a group of students how difficult it was to get pot and how many cardholders they knew of. They then added that when the cardholders get their pot, they would invite people over and party for several days,” she said.

“The use of marijuana in Great Falls is crazy,” CMR senior Jessica Kohlhepp said.

She smells it before school, at lunch and even in the classrooms.

“I see it all the time. I smell it all the time,” she said.

Kohlhepp stopped smoking marijuana her sophomore year after she ended up in the emergency room. She had smoked a joint that was laced with either meth or angel dust. While it didn’t cost Kohlhepp her life, the incident did cost her the trust and respect of her family and friends.

“I’m a well-put-together person, so my parents didn’t even suspect,” she said.

Now she has her life back on track. She graduates today and will move to Billings to start cosmetology school next month.

“If I could talk to a kid before they tried it, I would say don’t try it. It will mess up your life. You can’t trust your dealers — even if they are your friends,” she said.

Messman, who has served as a school representative for the Juvenile Drug Court program since its inception in January 2006, said the statistics show kids are choosing marijuana over alcohol and other drugs.

“From that (starting) date until May 1, 2010, we’ve had 53 kids participate in Juvenile Drug Court. Of those 53, 51 named marijuana as their drug of choice,” Messman said. “These are kids who have committed crimes and drugs or alcohol have been a major contributor to their criminal behavior.”

Kloppel and Anderson said kids believe that using marijuana while driving will not result in a DUI, like it would if they were drinking alcohol.

One of the scariest things Messman is noticing is that kids are trying marijuana even before they are in high school.

“These kids are starting very, very young — “12, 13 years old,” Messman said.

Make that 4 months old, Kloppel pointed out, if you consider the baby in the back of the student’s car he searched.