Police Target Student Drug Use

Montgomery Officer To Head Up Effort

They were just four words typically text-messaged to his cellphone -- "What are the numbers?" -- but to a teenage pot dealer at one of Montgomery County's elite high schools they were part of a code used by students interested in making a buy.

The former dealer, speaking on the condition that neither he nor his school be identified, said he answered such texts in cryptic fashion: "24 x 16," for instance, meant $240 an ounce.

"There is definitely a very large market," he said. "The bud follows the money."

The teenager's account comes as school begins and several months after police accused two students, one from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda and the other from Winston Churchill High in Potomac, of buying $10,000 worth of high-grade marijuana for up to 15 of their peers. The case, and the flood of tips that followed, has prompted county police to target student drug use and drug dealing this fall.

Leading that effort will be a veteran officer, Detective Rick Grapes, who expects to use some of the methods he used to build cases against hardened drug traffickers, interviewing low-level suspects to get to their suppliers and executing search warrants.

"The quantity being moved around by these kids is amazing to me," Grapes said.

There is little indication that teens in Montgomery use pot in significantly greater numbers than anywhere else. And daily marijuana use among high school seniors nationally has declined since its height in 1978; about 5 percent of seniors today report daily use, according to surveys conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan.

Even so, law enforcement authorities and experts are concerned that marijuana is generally more potent than it was in the 1990s, and potentially more addictive. Authorities also say that buying significant amounts of marijuana has become more dangerous as suppliers have shifted from cocaine to marijuana, in part to avoid the stiff penalties for cocaine offenses.

Grapes said students often don't realize how dangerous their suppliers might be. "If the roughest place you've been to is the food court at a shopping mall, you're in for a surprise," he said.

In 2005, two Montgomery teenagers were killed in separate marijuana-related incidents. A college-bound Gonzaga College High School graduate was shot in the head in Bethesda during what prosecutors described as a drug swindle, and a recent Damascus High School graduate was stabbed while discussing a marijuana purchase outside a birthday party in Germantown.

Grapes, who for years has investigated interstate drug traffickers and other major suppliers, now finds himself in a realm where potential targets include high-achieving students bound for Ivy League schools and where adults struggle to reconcile the parental obligation to be a role model with their past drug use.

Nationally, parents are about twice as likely as their 12th-grade children to have smoked pot, according to the University of Michigan studies. Many parents are afraid of sounding like hypocrites, said Beth Kane Davidson, director of the Addiction Treatment Center at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda.