New York Daily News -
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Orthodox upbringing no
bar to drug use: study
BY JOYCE SHELBY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, January 26th, 2005
Rigorous religious schooling and protection from secular culture do not guarantee that kids won't experiment with drugs, a study of Orthodox teens in Brooklyn indicates.
"Generally speaking, most Orthodox Jews and most Orthodox adolescents do not use drugs. But within the past five years, we've seen young adults from the finest of homes start trying illegal drugs," said Joshua Fogel, a Brooklyn College professor who conducted the study.
An assistant professor in Brooklyn College's Department of Economics and an Orthodox Jew, Fogel studied 11 males, ages 15 to 18, who all attended yeshivas. All but one teen came from homes where the Sabbath was observed.
All study participants went to a Brooklyn center set up for Orthodox teens at risk. The center, which Fogel said he could not name, provides counseling and activities to keep teens out of trouble.
Ten of the 11 teens interviewed had experimented with drugs. Two admitted they were still using them, Fogel said.
"In the more Orthodox and Hasidic circles, you find that many families do not have television sets. They don't read secular newspapers. They don't interact on a regular basis with different ethnicities or cultures. Some families do not have computers with Internet connections in their homes for religious reasons," he said. "These are barriers that prevent exposure to secular influences."
Even so, the teens began experimenting, mainly due to peer pressure, Fogel found. The drug of choice was marijuana.
Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Borough Park) said he was well aware that drug problems existed on a very small scale.
"There are still people who want to put their faces in the sand," Hikind said, "but this problem is hard to deny because it is happening in the heart of the Orthodox community."
On Jan. 20, Hikind said, a 20-year-old from Los Angeles died of a heroin overdose in Jerusalem. Four other American yeshiva students were arrested there on suspicion of selling drugs.
"No community can say it is immune to this problem," said Hikind, adding that attitudes were changing.
Lew Abrams of Yatzkan Center, a rehabilitation facility in Mount Vernon, agreed. He said, "Denial in our community is high because of shame and guilt, but we are not sweeping the problem under the carpet, as we have in the past."
Fogel said he believed his was the first scientific study conducted among Orthodox Jewish adolescents. The findings will be published Feb. 7 in the Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse.
