Adolescent health is one of the most polemical health issues that has swept the United States in recent years. This study is about documenting the process of a project on teenage sex, drug, and alcohol abuse in a small rural California town. It illustrates a dynamic set of concerns that impinge on health issues: development and underdevelopment, experts and lay people, young and old, in a context of the transformation of a rural economy to a prison-based industry. It is also about covert forms of control, pacification, burnout, and teenagers caught in the crossfire between bureaucratic institutions and contradictory messages about adolescent health as they correspond to changing conditions between institutional power holders.