Police Target Student Drug Use
Montgomery Officer To Head Up Effort

By Dan Morse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 31, 2008

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.

"They'll say, 'Well, it was just a little marijuana. I don't know. I'm a successful lawyer, I smoked marijuana. It can't be that bad,' " she said.

Rita Rumbaugh, a longtime substance abuse prevention specialist with the county school system, said some parents do not consider pot a serious problem until they're told it could reduce standardized test scores.

"That gets their attention," she said.

In years past, when pot use among students was more prevalent, police cracked down in Montgomery. Officers conducted a series of raids on or near high school campuses in 1978, arresting more than 250 students and young people. At one point, students at Walt Whitman responded by throwing stones and milk cartons at police. A group of student leaders called for marijuana legalization.

For many parents, that era seems distant. Today, six of the county's public high schools are among the top 100 in a nationally recognized ranking compiled by The Washington Post; Montgomery students on average score 105 points higher than their national counterparts on the SAT; and one magnet program has produced 25 finalists in the top pre-collegiate science contest, more than any other school in the nation.

"They're better kids than we were," said Bethesda resident Pat Elder, who acknowledged that his generation was in some respects a wilder one. "My daughter is up in her room right now, practicing her French horn."

Still, from some students' perspectives, pot use in Montgomery is widely accepted. Brittany Karakostas, a senior at Churchill, said she doesn't smoke pot and, as a result, is viewed as "an outcast."

"It's not really looked at as being bad because it's so common," she said.

In surveys for 2006-07, about half of Churchill and Whitman students indicated that drugs -- the survey didn't specify which -- were a problem at their schools.

The main suppliers for teens are other teens, according to two former dealers, several student users and Grapes, the detective. The students talk about pot deals at school, Grapes said, but the transactions tend to occur off campus, out of view of school security officers and cameras.

"They run a pretty tight ship," Grapes said of the school system. "The problem is at 2:10 they're out, and they just run wild."

Montgomery police said they haven't specifically targeted high school dealers in recent years. Instead, they have used limited manpower in their narcotics unit to pursue suppliers suspected of trafficking in cocaine or in large quantities of marijuana, 10 pounds or more.

In May, while investigating an adult suspect, narcotics officers came across two 17-year-old students, a boy from Whitman and a girl from Churchill. The teens were spotted leaving a Rockville townhouse where investigators were watching a suspected marijuana dealer, police said. Detectives pulled them over and found 2 1/2 pounds of pot in a backpack, they said.

Later, searching the Whitman student's bedroom in Bethesda, detectives found $6,620 in a dresser drawer and a digital scale and psilocybin mushrooms in another drawer, police allege.

Paul Peckham, 19, who lived at the townhouse, is scheduled to be tried in October on charges of selling marijuana. The students were charged as juveniles, and the status of their cases could not be determined.

Grapes said it is unusual to arrest Montgomery teens with such quantities of pot, but not unprecedented. Several years ago, he said, he arrested a 16-year-old Bethesda girl who was selling pot and had a tally sheet of orders totaling $30,000.

Generally, however, drug arrests of teens in Montgomery are mundane matters. Suspects found with small amounts of marijuana are typically taken to a district police station. The cases usually are forwarded to juvenile authorities, and the suspects are released to their parents. "They write a report, and that's pretty much the end of it," Grapes said.

Unlike some jurisdictions, Montgomery police do not use undercover officers posing as students. Nor do they enlist students to work undercover, as they do adults.

But Grapes said he plans to use other techniques to build cases against teen dealers, including questioning those charged with possession. "They should expect me to be calling or knocking on their doors," he said.

He said he intends to interview associates and parents, examine telephone records and, when necessary, execute formal search warrants with his colleagues.

In the past, he said, searches tended to be voluntary, conducted only with the consent of the parents. This fall, he said, he expects to take a more direct approach with certain suspects and their families, telling them, "Have a seat on the couch and we'll tell you when we're done."