The marijuana she had rolled into long, fat joints was supposed to be Mexican sensemilla, the seedless, potent stuff guaranteed to bring on a good buzz after just a few tokes. At $1.50 per joint, it was going fast this spring morning a few weeks ago. A small crowd of students on bicycles and skateboards gathered around her on the sidewalk next to Pacific Beach Junior High. Only a couple of minutes before the first bells rang at 7:35. “How many do you have left?” asked a girl who held a camouflage-colored knapsack to her chest.

“Got only two left,” answered the fifteen-year-old dealer as she opened a metal Band-Aid container in which she carried the joints.

“Aw, c’mon. Gimme a Band-Aid,” pleaded a young boy, his hands outstretched over the handlebars of his motocross-style bicycle.

The dealer just smiled sweetly and handed a joint to the girl with the knapsack, who passed back a dollar and two quarters. One of the coins fell to the ground and the boy bent down from his bike to pick it up. “Yeah,” he said, “we’ve already been drinking this morning.” The girl with the knapsack and the joint nodded and held up her pack. Inside was an empty bottle of champagne.

“We’ve already drunk half of it,” she said, “Man, school is sooo boring. How do you think we get by? You have to be drunk or stoned.” She opened her pack to reveal a nearly empty bottle of Andres Cold Duck. She had stolen it from home.

The bells sounded. Ten minutes till class, one joint left. The young pot seller had arrived at her spot on the Feldspar Street sidewalk some time earlier with seven joints in her Band-Aid box. Several of them had been given away on credit to her friends without money, and she admitted she wasn’t the world’s best businesswoman. “I’d better keep track of how much everybody owes me,” she said, “or I’m gonna forget. Most kids don’t pay up. They’ll go, I’ll pay tomorrow or Monday, but most of ‘em don’t.”

“Hey, better not put that champagne bottle in your locker,” warned another boy in the crowd. “They checked ‘em all yesterday and might do it today too.”

As the impromptu gathering began to break up and move toward the nearby school gate, another boy silently motioned to his friend, who’d just bought one of the last joints. He wanted to toke up before class. The partitions between the handball courts on the playground would provide cover. The pot, it turns out, had seeds in it—not sensemilla, but still pretty strong.

About a quarter of Pacific Beach Junior High’s student population of more than 1100 comes from Latino sections of the city. They’re bused here as part of something called the voluntary Ethnic Enrollment Program. The busing experiment got off to a shaky start last fall; there were fights and other signs of tension. But after the school’s administration began a series of intimate meetings, rap sessions, really, with official and unofficial student leaders, much of the anxiety dissipated. One of those visiting students is a fourteen-year-old girl whose name is not Mary. She practically slid into her first period class this morning, plopping down in her seat, a bit dazed from the weed she’d toked before the bell rang. “We normally don’t get high with the white kids,” Mary said later. “We get off the bus and go to an alley across from school and get stoned.

“I don’t smoke pot every day,” she continued, “I usually do it on the weekends or when friends offer it to me in school. I normally don’t buy it. Some kids, they have it every day; they seem to smoke it every day—probably sometimes alone. I don’t like to do it every day; it’d give me a headache.”

Mary is from Sherman Heights, near Twenty-fourth and Imperial. On a recent afternoon she and her friends discussed the teen-age drug scene. Some of the kids were sure it was easier to get their drugs here in Pacific Beach than it was in their own neighborhood—pot, anyway, sometimes Angel Dust. One boy disagreed. Much easier to score off the streets in Southeast, he said. Though drugs are not restricted to P.B. Junior High—Memorial, Marston, Dana, all the junior highs see drugs—Mary said she thought the white kids were more inclined to use pills and cocaine; they can afford them. What about Sherm Sticks? Ohhhhh, Sherm Sticks. There wasn’t any talk about where to get Sherms, but there was some excited talk about just what exactly went into them. They are joints either dipped in something or laced with Angel Dust (PCP). Mary said one of these things will screw you up good; you feel verrrrry slowed down, goofy. One kid thought the pesticide Raid was sprayed on the joint; another said he was offered one that he thought was dipped in rocket fuel. He didn’t toke on it though.

Mary said, “I saw somebody selling it [pot] today, right in front of the bathroom, outside the door. I think a teacher saw but they didn’t say anything. I guess either they didn’t want to get involved or they don’t want to cause a hassle, considering the (racial) fights in the beginning of the year. You know a lot of parents don’t want to believe their kids do it. It happens everywhere. . . . I don’t think they want to solve the problem; the school itself should solve the problem. They’ll just suspend the person or expel them, but they don’t try to figure out why the kids are using the drugs. Like, they should ask them if there was a problem at home. It’s like they’re trying to run away from it. The kids could be addicted to it. They need a counselor for this because they’re not going to go to their parents. They need somebody they can trust.”

Better not suggest that to a thirteen-year-old girl whose name is not Jane. She had been ditching classes frequently until the school caught up with her, and she became indignant when the counselors tried to ask her what was bothering her, if anything was wrong at home, “Can you believe they asked me that? How fucked,” she said recently. “I hate this school and I think the teachers are fucked.” Jane had to comfort a friend of hers between the break in classes today. Her friend had taken some psychedelic mushrooms and had put down some liquor before coming to school. The drugs started to kick in and were affecting her in a strange way. She became extremely paranoid and was upset about the wrinkles in the bottom of her pants. Very concerned. “I was getting all weird,” the girl said later. Jane brought her to her next class and sat her down. The bell rang and the halls were empty again.

According to several students who openly admitted they used drugs, more dealing goes on outside of school than right on campus. But that’s just a sensible precautionary measure. There’s definitely a market here for anyone who’s got something to sell. A few kids even claimed there was something of a standard price list:

Marijuana — the price varies depending on quality and availability, but generally five dollars will buy five to seven joints. . Ten dollars will buy between ten and thirteen.

LSD and mescaline — prices range from three to four dollars a hit.

Valium — Two dollars a tablet.

Psychedelic mushrooms — Usually between seven and ten dollars a gram, depending on availability.

Amphetamines — The type and quality vary, but most cost one dollar a tablet.

Quaaludes — The Lemmon 714 brand are said to sell for four dollars each, while a less potent variety runs about two dollars a tab.

And the school day moves on. Classes change a couple more times before the first lunch period at 10:45 a.m. The seventh and part of the eighth grade classes get a half hour to eat at this time. When they are done, they can stroll around the eight- acre campus at Ingraham and Diamond until the bell rings again for class at 11:15. Another half hour passes before the second wave of more than 500 students is let out for lunch.

Principal Wendell McFadden, along with a few counselors, teachers, and supervisors, watches over the kids as they move around during lunch. McFadden can be seen all over campus, talking with students, patting them on the back, and making peace when necessary. The task of keeping an eye on the whereabouts of more than 500 people is difficult, however, what with all the acreage, the handball courts (with their partitions), tennis courts, fourteen restrooms, the adjacent Pacific beach Recreation Center, and numerous other buildings.

“As far as I can tell,” McFadden said, ‘there is not a serious problem on this campus. But that is as far as I can tell. I go by how many people have been suspended [for drug-related suspension]. That’s been about six or seven since school began this year.” But McFadden acknowledges that he and his staff can only be sure of drug abuse when they actually catch a student. He’d also like to know just how much he can be expected to do. They have nurses, staff psychologists, counselors, and school security, he said. And when a student is caught with drugs or whatever, they do try their best to determine if there are any serious personal problems. That, however, is extremely difficult. With a touch of exasperation, he added, “We’re the only agency in society that is saddled with the responsibility of working out social problems such as integration and drug abuse. The P.B. Town council doesn’t do it, the city doesn’t do it, Mike Gotch [the area’s city council representative] doesn’t do it. And we can’t solve the problem without the help of the parents,”

A school counselor complained that supervision at Pacific Beach Junior High is lacking, that everyone is aware of it but no one is doing anything about it. A former gym instructor who now teaches another subject said the school had been lucky so far—nobody has overdosed or gotten badly hurt while on drugs. The school’s chief counselor, Ernest Hubbs, said, “In between classes we have 1143 kids in the hallways. It’s a mess. How are you going to watch all but two kids at any one given time? If the public wishes to shoulder extra cost of supervision that it would take to keep track of all the kids, I’m sure the principal would gladly accept the extra money.”

Over by a portable classroom, a bungalow, sits a group of ninth graders, talking and smoking cigarettes. A supervisor happens by and –zip!—the tobacco is out of sight. A couple of more puffs and the 12:15 bell rings, sending this group and everyone else scattered around the campus back towards the classrooms. The school day moves forward.

Jack is not his name, and he may, or may not, be fifteen he claims, but he definitely no longer attends P.B. Junior High (he was switched to another school a few months back but he won’t say why). He was hanging out in the Rec Center in the northwestern corner of the campus and he was meditating on the drug scene. “Most of you junior high kids are smarter now. Everybody knows who to buy from. And the police are so dumb. You can be in some alley smoking a dube and you see them coming, and you’d get caught, ‘cept you’re not smoking a dube by the time they come by.

“And man, you can go to gym class, get right up to the plate when you’re playing softball, and have a dube hanging out your mouth. The teacher would leave for ten minutes or so to go to the bathroom or get a cup of coffee and we’d light up right there,”

It is Jack’s considered opinion that there isn’t a serious drug problem at P.B. Junior High. He said, “You don’t have every kid in the school, the whole population, doing it. Not every kid, when the bell rings, comes falling out of class. You just don’t have everybody doing it. Maybe there are sixty percent of the ninth-graders, thirty percent of the eight-graders, and ten percent, if that much, of the seventh graders.

“But pot’s like candy, except you don’t eat it, you smoke it. It doesn’t burn you out. You could still be a smart person and smoke pot. That’s not the kind of drug you can consider will burn you up. You’re stoned, what, about two hours if you smoke a joint or two, right? Your brain cells are gone for that amount of time. But when you come back and straighten up, your brain cells come back. It’s not like it destroys. You smoke twenty joints and take twenty hits of acid—you’re going to be more fucked up on the acid.”

At 2:15 school is out. Before long a few kids have joined shirtless, scraggily haired, Jack over at the Rec Center. They sit at a couple of picnic tables on a small patio. A 13-year-old seventh grader had this to say about her first experience with LSD: “The face on the television had dark black eyes and horns. There was blood all over the side of his head. When I looked away and turned back, the head would be normal. Then I looked outside and looked at the cars going down the street and the cars all looked like rats. Rat faces. And I was just laughing."

A boy who said he was twelve years old then described his recent trip via psychedelic mushrooms. He was looking at a colorful picture, he said, "and I was tripping out on it and all I was going was uuuuh and the picture started going like this [moving his hands in an undulating motion] and I thought the picture was looking at me."

Not me, man," said his young friend. "I was lying like this on the side of the bed and I was looking at the bed and it was making like three dimensional..."

Thirteen-year-old, the girl who hates school, wanted to speak. "My moher doesn't care if I smoke pot," she said. "She used to smoke with me, but she heard I'd been doing acid. Once they found out by accident that I was doing acid I really started tripping here and I wanted to call a friend. But instead I get on the phone and start talking about how fucked up I was, what I had done, and how I wanted my friend to come by. All of a sudden my father says, 'Jane, where are you? What have you been doing?” I freaked. I just hung up the phone."

At this, a friend of Jane's protested that she was making it sound like everybody at P.B. Junior High did drugs, which wasn't true. She looked somewhat younger than the thirteen years she claimed, but her own drug experiences, as she related them, belied her age. She said that she started smoking pot in the second of third grade and used it heavily until the fifth grade. In the sixth grade she cut back some and now in the seventh grade she’s practically quit. “Just when everyone else is beginning.” She’d rather drink now. Her friends around the table blurt out their approval.

“It’s cool if you drink on your own property. Can’t get arrested.”

“We hate the high on pot.”

“You get vegged out. You get stupid. You get hungry and eat more.”

"When you're sauced, you're all over the place. It's fun."

“I just like the taste of beer.”

The benches and tables around this little patio were covered with graffiti. As one girl passed on a felt-tipped pen to a friend, she advised that the mystery of a teenager’s mind could be solved simply by reading:

• Sex is great, Your mother’s a whore. We’re the class of '84.
• Rick, love you, Cindi
• Black Sabbath
• I love LSD
• Qualudes
• Hendrix
• P.B. Mortuary