Word: drew
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last school year Drew not only stayed clean, he even talked to younger kids about the perils of drug use. But doubts were gnawing at him. "I didn't think my use justified a whole life in a 12-step program," he remembers. He started to think, as he still does, that recovery was "a blue-collar thing." He says, "It's fine for people who are going to take their dads' places on road crews, but as a creative person, it holds you back. Just look at groups like Aerosmith or the Red Hot Chili Peppers--they got sober...
When school was out, Drew gave his demons free rein: he rented a cheap cottage in Wisconsin with some friends and laid into a quarter-pound of pot and lots of booze. "We got sick all over everything--it was definitely my failure self. I was like a dog that had been tied up in front of a steak and then finally let loose." Late last summer, a grandparent interceded to put him in a residential treatment center out of state. A week after his return, he says, he was using again...
...Drew knows he has an addictive personality. "Even as a kid, I was the one who had to have every baseball card, every comic book," he says. And while he thinks about quitting every day, he doesn't believe he can just stop. So he converts his vice into a twisted virtue. Bolstered by a smattering of existentialism, Beat poetry and rock 'n' roll, Drew and plenty of teenagers like him justify what they do as a glorification of immediate pleasure over conventional restraint, a familiar theme from the '60s. For Drew, smoking copious quantities of pot confers membership...
While some New Trier parents are disengaged, as Drew claims his were, others are more hands-on--and angry. But the results of greater parental discipline are not necessarily much better. Michael, a preternaturally bright 16-year-old sophomore, is a case in point. Last year he was smoking up to five times a day, and his grades were suffering. But it wasn't until his scoutmaster caught him getting high on a Boy Scout outing that his parents found out. Their reaction was to ground him for the summer. The punishment gave him a chance to read Dante...
More important, his characters are not the usual musical-comedy creatures. They are your basic Woody Allen folks, a family of upper-middle-class Manhattan strivers--liberaloid, neurotic, mildly dysfunctional. Mom (Goldie Hawn) numbers among her causes prison reform. So, naturally, her eldest daughter (a wonderfully surprising Drew Barrymore as a coolly appraising material girl) falls for one of the recidivists (Tim Roth, in another of his beautifully calculated bounces off the wall) her mother brings home to dinner. This leaves nice Holden (Edward Norton) in the lurch and Father (Alan Alda) fuming impotently...