"WHEN I WAS ten," Angel, a young woman from Phoenix, Arizona, recalls,

I started smoking my Grandpa's cigarettes. When I was about eleven, I would go around after my mom's parties and drink up half-full beer cans and smoke roaches [marijuana butts] left behind. Then I found out my older brother was selling marijuana. The kids at school called me "Stoney" because I always had weed.13

When Angel was fifteen, she started using cocaine with her boyfriend. During the next two years she struggled with addiction to methamphetamine. She was beyond her mother's control by then and lived with her boyfriend. Her drug abuse escalated: "I told myself I would never use needles or do heroin, but in the end I did both."14

Angel's story may seem extreme, but most young addicts' personal stories are remarkably similar. Without effective intervention...