Drug Abuse

Suburban residents seem to continue to deny that their communities have an AIDS problem, a top official of the Bucks County Health Department warned last week, as he lamented scant attendance at a forum on alcohol and drug abuse. An estimated 3,000 residents of Bucks County have tested positive for HIV antibodies and 134 have been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS, said Christopher K. Whitney, who directs the AIDS education program for the Health Department. With 18, "Levittown has more cases of AIDS than any other community in Bucks County.

The U.S. won't begin to recover from the drug and alcohol addictions that plague us until we get honest. Billions of dollars have been spent for decades in the name of keeping children off drugs. The most familiar of those prevention efforts are those, such as the DARE program, which involve sending adults into classrooms to tell kids not to take drugs. Such programs are wildly popular, but are not particularly effective. Yet little cash is spent on research to find out what prevention method really works.

The shrieks bounced all over the gymnasium last week at the Charles W. Lewis Middle School in Gloucester Township. Such noise during school assemblies is usually quashed by a stalking, eagle-eyed administrator, but this time it was practically encouraged. After all, what else can you expect when you book a young rock band to entertain students during school hours with a mini-concert, complete with electric guitars, flash pots and strobe lights? But school officials did want to get a message across with the concert, part of a special four-day weekend: "Don't do drugs.

On the front lines of the real war on drugs in New Jersey, people are heartened by five words in Gov. Christie's State of the State address. "The disease of drug abuse" was the phrase the governor used in proposing mandatory addiction treatment in cases of nonviolent drug-related offenses. "The governor gets it," says Stephanie Loebs, vice president of treatment services at Seabrook House Inc., a rehabilitation center in Cumberland County that has helped addicts and alcoholics recover for nearly 40 years.

It's not just the dope peddlers who're cashing in on crack and the less potent forms of cocaine. The politicians are finding it worthwhile to get their pictures tooken playing anti-drug crusader. The other day, New York's Republican Senator Alphonse D'Amato (doesn't rhyme with tomato but should) got himself publicity all over his state by staging ye classic old-timey hokey press stunt. He, the local United States district attorney and some heavy from the Drug Enforcement Administration put on tinted glasses and dressed up in outlandish costumes they evidently thought would disguise them.

At 14, Jackie already floated high most days. "Whether I was happy, sad, mad - it didn't matter what my feelings were - when I got up in the morning, I needed to get high," she said. "It was the first thing I thought of. " From the time she was in elementary school, drugs dominated her life. For that high, she did almost anything, went almost anywhere. Her habits took her from her small-town home in Brownsville, N.J., to Northeast Philadelphia and as far away as California.

Township Council members said more than a dozen residents had approached them, alarmed that drug and alcohol abusers might be checking into a treatment center in the same public library building where children check out books. So during its budget meetings, the council interrogated library officials about the activities of their tenant, the Burlington County Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse. By the end of a politically charged give-and-take, the library lost 40 percent of the funding it was slated to receive.

They write feelings on balloons: sad, happy, mad. Then they pop the ones they don't like. It's one of the games children in the Main Roads program play to help them express their emotions and fears. Main Roads uses lectures, role-playing, games, group counseling and other techniques to help children deal with alcohol and drug abuse in their homes or neighborhoods. The program was started five years ago, offered to Bucks and Chester County high schoolers as the "main road out of your problems.

One day a couple of years ago Linda Jeffrey, a psychology professor at Glassboro State College, was discussing drug use in a child development class. She was taken aback by the comments of one of her students. "He argued that parents would have to recognize now that drug use is a normal part of growing up. It was an acceptance of drugs that I found (to be) a very dangerous point of view. " About the same time, while she was working with the Child Abuse Prevention Project at the college, a mother with two preschool-age children talked nonchalantly about drinking cocaine in tea to stay awake while studying, while another student laughed about drinking a six-pack of beer in less than two hours as if it were a commendable achievement.

Drug abuse has dropped sharply among U.S. military personnel in recent years, but drinking remains a serious problem, the Pentagon said yesterday. A new Defense Department survey, delivered to President Reagan, showed that 8.9 percent of the nation's 2.1 million military personnel used marijuana and other drugs regularly last year, compared with 27 percent in 1980. The Pentagon also said yesterday that it had discharged 51,000 servicemen for abusing drugs and disciplined 92,000 others in 1983, 1985 and 1985.