Source:   Los Angeles Times
Contact:    30 Nov 1997
Author:  Jesse Katz, Times Staff Writer
 
OLD ENEMY STALKS KIDS OF PRIVILEGE 

Overdoses of heroin have killed 11 young people in prosperous Plano, Texas,
since 1996, with 3 to 5 cases turning up each week. Reasons for the drug's
popularity are elusive. 

PLANO, TexasThis is a great place to raise kids. Except when they die. 

The golden buckle of the Sun Belt, its brickwalled subdivisions and
smokedglass business parks swelling with whitecollar migrants, Plano is
by almost every measure the apex of educated suburbiaclean streets, big
houses, 113 lighted ball fields. 

With just two or three murders annually, this Dallasarea boomtown of
nearly 200,000 is Texas' safest cityand one of America's top 10. The
Children's Environmental Index calls it the nation's fourth most
kidfriendly community, based on such socioeconomic data as dropout rates
and household incomes. One of its high schools boasts an Academic Decathlon
championship, a prize that earned the team a White House visit with
President Clinton. 

Then there is this measure: 11 young people dead of heroin overdoses since
1996. 

Almost all of them were students, mostly popular, athletic and
affluent"nice, preppy, middleclass children," in the words of one drug
abuse expert. They ranged in age from 15 to 22, a football player, a
philosophy major, a former altar boy, a Marine home for the holidays. Four
died last year, seven so far this year. And still the emergency room at
Columbia Medical Center reports an average of three to five overdoses a
weekunconscious, vomitstained teenagers, often dumped at the hospital
doors by friends in brandnew Jeep Wranglers and Range Rovers and Ford
Expeditions. 

One now lies in a coma, his family searching for some sign of life to keep
him from becoming No. 12. 

"How's this for a cleancut, allAmericanlooking young man?" said Lowell
Hill, pulling out a walletsize photo of his blond, squarejawed son,
Robert, a 1997 graduate of Plano East Senior High. On Aug. 20, he found Rob
slumped over in bed, his face buried in a pillow. He put his mouth to the
boy's blue lips, breathing for him, vainly. When doctors pronounced him
dead of an overdoseat the same hospital that welcomed him into the world
18 years earlierhis father was incredulous. 

"How do you know?" the former life insurance executive demanded. "He was a
happy boy," said his mother, Andrea, a special education teacher. "The last
thing on my mind was to talk to my son about heroin." 

The culprit, which has enjoyed a startling resurgence from the depths of
junkiedom in the '60s to the heights of trendiness in the '90s, is widely
available in Plano and conveniently packagedusually in antihistamine
capsules that can be broken open and snorted, avoiding the stigma of
needles and syringes. 

Sold for $10 to $20 a hit, the powder is marketed here under heroin's
Spanish nickname, chiva, which to Plano's predominantly Anglo kids sounds a
lot more like a designer drug than oldfashioned smack. 

"I didn't even know what it was the first time I tried it, but I liked it
and I wasn't really interested in finding out," said Donald Jason Smith,
19, a recovering addict who has spent the past five months in county jail
for heroin possession. He described himself as someone with "good morals"
who was "brought up not to do drugs." His mother teaches government and
economics to 11th and 12thgraders, his stepfather runs a jewelry shop. 

But once you cross that line, no matter how naively, "the drug grabs ahold
of you and doesn't let go," Smith said. "I've taken friends to the hospital
after they've overdosed and then gone right back to where we were and kept
on using." 

NEW AURA OF GLAMOUR 

Heroin is not Plano's cross to bear alone. Gen X rockers and waifish
supermodels have lent it a new aura of glamour, a dreamy narcotic languor
compared to the manic rush of cocaine. From 1993 to 1996, the number of
Americans who had sampled heroin more than tripled, from 68,000 to 216,000,
according to the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Since the
beginning of the decade, the average age of firsttime users has dropped
steadily, from nearly 25 down to about 19. 

New distribution networks forged by the Latin American cartels have helped
expand the U.S. market, a phenomenon that the Drug Enforcement
Administration calls "doublebreasting." Dealers who once sold only cocaine
now frequently also offer heroin, its purity and potency far greater than
what the Asian pipeline has traditionally delivered. The lethal results are
everywhere: four fatal overdoses in just one week this year in Boulder,
Colo.; 30 last year in Orlando; 28 in Ventura County. 

"The rules have changed and the risks have changed," said Ted Dickey, a
Plano funeral home director whose mortuaries have buried about half of the
town's overdose victims. "The risk is no longer about losing a scholarship
or a place on the drill team or embarrassing the family; the risk is dying." 

A PRIOR EPIDEMIC 

What makes the tally here so troubling is not just that this is a bastion
of privilege, although that undoubtedly has helped propel it into the news. 

What so rattles Plano is that it already has been through an epidemic like
this, making headlines in the early '80s when eight teenagers committed
suicide, and a dozen others attempted it, in one ninemonth spurt. At the
time, much was made of Plano's status as a "popup" city, a "nesting ground
for the migratory American executive," as the city manager said in a 1983
Newsweek article. 

In two decades, it had gone from a quiet hamlet of 3,000 nestled in the
cotton and soy fields 20 miles north of Dallas to a highachieving bedroom
community of 100,000, its growth fueled by Eastern professionals chasing
the Southwest's newfound prosperity.

It is hard to imagine how the sense of rootlessness and social
disruptionthe homogeneity and competitive pressurewould have diminished
in the ensuing years. The population has doubled again, making Plano the
nation's fifthfastestgrowing city. 

Less a suburb now than a capitalist sanctuary, civic leaders have persuaded
an impressive roster of corporations to relocate their headquarters here,
including such giants as J.C. Penney Co., FritoLay Inc. and Dr
Pepper/SevenUp Cos.

"If you drive through Plano, there are miles upon miles of huge, brandnew
housesenormous houses, 12 feet apartand there's nobody there all day
long," said Sabina Stern, coordinator for the Collin County Substance Abuse
Program, a local referral agency. "Dad works. Mom works. Long hours.
Frequently one of them travels. Nobody eats dinner together anymore. When
do they talk? In the car? While they're chauffeuring their kids from one
activity to another, from school to ballet to soccer? It's insane." 

Many of Plano's young addicts were given their own $20,000 cars as soon as
they turned 16. Some carry beepers and cell phones. Others have credit
cards; $100aweek allowances for lunch; bedrooms equipped with TVs, VCRs,
minifridges and microwaves. "A lot of the parents have said that they saw
no sign of drugs," added Stern, who starts every day by scanning the
obituaries. "You don't want to be cruel. But sometimes you wonder how hard
they looked." 

CHALLENGE TO IGNORANCE 

Unlike during the suicide crisis, when public discussion was considered an
invitation to copycats, Plano's leaders now make a deliberate effort to
challenge whatever ignorance or denial may continue to linger about heroin. 

Led by Dickey, whose funeral homes also buried many teenage victims in the
'80s, a community task force is developing ways of saturating the city with
antidrug messagesfrom warnings slipped into utility bills to billboards
plastered with photos of those who have died. 

The police department has doubled the number of its narcotics investigators
from four to eight. The school district, which already had two dozen drug
and alcohol programs, has put more counselors on campuses. 

A community forum that was expected to draw a couple of hundred parents
earlier this month turned into a cathartic outpouring of 1,800. "I'd never
seen so many frightened people before," Dickey said. "Normally, this is a
subject nobody wants to talk about." 

But as much as some parents may have turned a blind eye, or even
contributed to their children's boredom and alienation, many others simply
have found themselves confronting a foe more powerful than their best
intentions. 

Addiction visited the Shaunfield home when Matt was just 17, a high school
sprinter. He tore up his knee that year. After surgery, he got his first
taste of Demerol. "Matt loved it," said his mother, Barbara, a former PTA
president, sitting on a leather couch in the living room of her elegant
brick home. "In the hospital, he had one of those machines where you can
dose yourself by pushing a button, and when they came to take it away, he
started hanging on to it. He said, 'You can't do this. This is my friend.'
I thought he was joking. So did the nurses." 

RELAPSE AT HOME 

After being discharged, Matt had access to enough pain pills to continue
feeding his hunger. His parents finally caught on and put him in rehab. He
graduated with his senior class and went on to college in East Texas, where
he studied business and psychology. 

On a vacation at home, he relapsed. This time, it was heroin. That led to
more rehab and eventually to methadone, which he also found a way to abuse,
landing himself back in rehab. 

He tried Narcotics Anonymous, psychoanalysis and family counseling.
"Sometimes he would say, 'Why me, Mom? Why do I have to be an addict?' "
his mother recalled. "I look at it kind of like cancer, not a moral issue
or a lack of willpower. I think wherever we lived, or whatever we did, Matt
would have had this problem." 

In the fall of 1995, at the age of 22, Matt tried college again, this time
at a Mormon school in Utah. When he came home for Christmas, he appeared
healthy and sober. His dad, John, an inventor of fiberoptics technology,
bought a bigscreen TV so they could watch football bowl games together.
Everyone agreed it was the family's best holiday. 

On the day he returned to Utah, Matt called to say that he had arrived
safely and to tell his parents that he loved them. 

The next morning, the Shaunfields got another call, this one from an
undertaker. "What do you want us to do with his body?" they were asked. It
was Jan. 2, 1996. Heroin has claimed 10 other Plano kids since. 

Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this story. 

Copyright Los Angeles Times