Hillary Hammond was a 15-year-old freshman at Vashon High School when she started “using,” as she put it, introduced to alcohol and marijuana by a senior cheerleader who was fun, pretty and popular.

Three years later, she said, she was getting high on prescription pills or “anything I could get my hands on” every day. Her once-high grades fell. She lied on a routine basis. She was rude to her mother.

“My life was completely unmanageable,” she said.

Today, Hammond — who played the ditzy step-sister Portia in the high school’s recent production of “Cinderella” — is in recovery, a clean and sober senior who has become a leading voice in Vashon’s growing effort to reduce the Island’s troubling statistics on teen drug and alcohol use.

Last Wednesday, as part of that effort, she stood before an audience of 150 parents, teachers and other youth advocates at VHS and told her story — a story that included coming to high school so drunk last June that she couldn’t walk straight, getting turned in to the principal’s office as a result and finding herself sitting in the back of a sheriff’s cruiser, arrested on felony charges for illegal possession of alcohol and prescription drugs.

Her mother, Arline Abrams, also spoke, telling the audience that the day her daughter got arrested “was one of the best days of my life … because I am now launching one incredible kid.”

“I was one of the lucky ones,” she added. “I found out what was going on in the back of a police car, not by a phone call asking me to come to the morgue.”

The forum on drug and alcohol use among teens was sponsored by the PTSA and spearheaded by Laura Hansen, a mother active in school issues who felt moved to pull together the effort after results from the school district’s Healthy Youth Survey last month showed that the percentage of Vashon teens using alcohol and marijuana is higher than the statewide average.

The 2006 survey found, for instance, that during a 30-day period nearly 60 percent of Vashon’s 12th-graders reported using alcohol compared with 41 percent statewide; and 38 percent reported smoking marijuana compared with 21 percent statewide. The survey also found that 61 percent of the Island’s eighth-graders think alcohol is easy to get, compared to 33 percent statewide.

Hansen, after the gathering, said she was pleased by both the turn-out and the power of the many presentations at the nearly three-hour-long gathering.

“It exceeded all my expectations,” she said.

In an effort to counter the perception that drinking and marijuana use are tolerated by adults on the Island, Hansen handed out a “parents’ pledge.” Parents who signed it vowed to “teach our children to view alcohol and drug use as a serious concern,” to “hold only alcohol/drug-free activities or parties” for young people and to “not permit our home to be used for unsupervised parties.” (See page A4 to read the entire pledge.)

Susan Hanson, the high school’s principal, said she was deeply moved by the gathering and the fact that it stemmed from survey results, not the death of a teen.

“It was wonderful that the community was demonstrating their caring and concern without having lost a child,” she said.

The panel discussion was rich in information.

David Chapman, a lawyer who heads a public defenders’ agency, for instance, spoke at length about the laws governing teen drug and alcohol use and the kind of serious trouble a kid can get into if he or she is arrested for substance abuse.

But noting that he’s the father of two teens, Chapman added that the courts “do not do a good job raising children” and that it’s really up to the parents to do all they can to see that their kids remain clean and sober until adulthood.

Teens will often say “all my friends do it,” he went on. “Man, when you hear that, ask them who their friends are and get on the phone with those parents.”

Stephen Bogan, who manages the youth treatment system for the state Division of Alcohol and Substance Abuse, facilitated the panel, opening the evening by saying that “this is not a night about blaming or making you feel bad about your parenting skills.”

Rather, he said, a growing body of research shows that neurological development hugely influences adolescent behavior; the prefrontal cortex or “CEO of the brain,” for instance, is underdeveloped during the teen years, he said, leading many young people to make poor choices. But the fact that the brain is not fully developed is also the reason parents should not think a little bit of drinking or pot-smoking is OK.

“The accelerator is on full blast, but the brakes are on back order,” he said. “When something is under construction, being influenced by chemicals is not a good thing.”

Bogan, who leads a support group for teens who are struggling with drug or alcohol use, said adolescence is a time when some young people “feel like an alien” and are desperate to feel more comfortable in their own skin. That’s why drugs and alcohol can be so enticing — and why one use can lead to more and more use, he said.

The evening also included gut-wrenching stories from three mothers whose families unraveled because of the impact of drugs and alcohol on their teens’ lives and two seniors — Hillary Hammond and Ezra Blake — both of whom are in recovery.

Like Hammond, Blake stood before the group and described his slow descent from a freshman who experimented occasionally to a senior seeking near-daily drug use.

“I knew I had a problem when I woke up each morning and realized I was on a mission to get high and to get high every day,” he said.

His life began to turn around when his mother confronted him and he was able to confide in his brother, who urged him to join Bogan’s group. From there, he said, he ended up in inpatient treatment — “the best thing that ever happened to me.”

But the evening was raw and honest, and some in the audience teared up when Blake acknowledged that “the drinking’s real hard” and that his recovery is still quite new.

“I’ve been clean from drugs for four months,” he said, “and I’ve been sober for 10 days.”

The audience stood up and applauded.

Two mothers — Arline Abrams and Barbara O’Black — described their efforts to intervene on behalf of their drug-using children and the shame and isolation they felt as they struggled to hold their families together.

“My daughter almost died, and no one brought me food,” Abrams noted.

And Robin Blair, a parent educator new to the Island, told the story of her daughter, Makayla, who was killed in a fiery car crash one week after her 16th birthday because of her decision to get into a car with another teen who’d been drinking heavily.

She moved to Vashon, she said, in part because she wants to live in a place where she believes her middle school-aged son will be safe. But her heart sank, she added, when she read the results of the Healthy Youth Survey.

“I chose to come here … and I have a son who I want to see go to high school here, and I want him and all of our kids to be safe,” she said. “I challenge you to be a part of that with me. … I want our kids to know there are safe places and safe people.”

Yvonne Zick, a parent educator and the McMurray liaison for Vashon Youth & Family Services, said it was deeply meaningful to see so many people “bear witness” to these painful stories and the tragedy of teen drug and alcohol use.

“The community showed up to support this important conversation like they never have before,” she said.

“It’s already made a difference,” she added. “I ran into a woman the next day who said, ‘I’m still emotional about it.’”

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