Teen Drug Use

Ken Raymond, Staff Writer

Published: July 27, 2008

Katie Marino tried marijuana the first time because she was curious.

“I wonder if it really is like ‘Alice in Wonderland,’” she thought. “I wonder if it’s going to make Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd sound so much better.”

Nope. It just made things worse.

“It actually scared me to death the first time I got high,” she said. “Like, I literally thought I was dead and in hell. It scared the crap out of me.”

But it didn’t scare her enough. She tried it again and again, and at 14, she found herself relying on drugs to help her get through each day.

Isolated by loneliness, teen angst and grief at the deaths of three of her grandparents, Katie started using just about anything she could get her hands on: alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, even combinations of over-the-counter medicines.

None of it was difficult to obtain.

“Most of the stuff I got was free,” said Katie, who is now 20. “It was what other people had, and they were just sharing because I was there, and I was their friend, and it probably didn’t hurt that I was a chick. I mean, I rarely paid for my own stuff.”

Some of her friends scored drugs from their parents who were drug abusers, she said.

Other times, she went with her friends to buy from drug dealers, paranoid people in bad neighborhoods who were “just freaking out constantly” and seemed to be always on the verge of violence.

By the time her parents realized there was a problem, Katie had been using for about nine months.

“The first time we figured out she was in trouble, she had taken an entire bottle of 200 Tylenol. ... We took her to the emergency room because she had become incoherent,” said her mother, Shelly Marino, in an e-mail.

For the next 18 months, the family tried to keep Katie away from illegal drugs. She underwent counseling and was prescribed a variety of medicines to treat depression, anxiety, insomnia and psychosis, her mother said.

Katie enrolled in a residential treatment program twice, but it didn’t help.

“When you’re thrown into a place like that, you don’t want to get better,” Katie said. “You just want to get out.”

Drug addiction wasn’t just taking a toll on Katie. She couldn’t be left alone, so her mother had to quit working. That, along with the bills associated with Katie’s treatment, left the family cash-strapped.

Finally, Katie’s father drew money out of his 401(k) retirement plan to pay for a last-ditch effort at treatment. Katie was placed in the faith-based Teen Challenge program in Disney, where she remained for 13 months.

“There was no TV, no music, not your clothes,” Katie said. “All they had, they had a uniform. You were in a little house stuck in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere, so, I mean, you can’t run away. There’s nowhere to go. You’ll be eaten by wolves.

“All you had was yourself, and you had to deal with yourself.”

The program wasn’t a miracle cure, but it helped. She returned at age 17, emotionally immature but somehow stronger.

She has relapsed since then, last using a drug about a year ago, but she’s also found the will to say no.

Before, she said, “I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be like other people and just be normal and happy and, like, the ideal ‘Brady Bunch’ kid.”

Now, she said, she understands that everyone has problems and drugs aren’t the answer.

“My plans are to get enough money to be able to go to ... college and specialize in something that I really like and get a job and be a successful person,” she said. “To try to have a good life.”

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