Pubdate: Thu, 19 May 2005
Source: Pitch, The (Kansas City, MO)
Copyright: 2005 New Times, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.pitch.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1120
Author: Glenna Whitley
Note: Originally published by the Dallas Observer 10 May 2005
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mmj.htm (Cannabis - Medicinal)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Test)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/mdma.htm (Ecstasy)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hallucinogens.htm (Hallucinogens)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/oxycontin.htm (Oxycontin/Oxycodone)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/youth.htm (Youth)

GENERATION RX

Adrift In A Sea Of Psychotropic Pharmacology, It's Easy For A Kid To Drown

You couldn't miss him: a teenager dressed always in black, with Elvis 
sideburns and a hard-charging way of bounding up the stairs, as if life 
were moving too slowly for him. In the same class as my oldest son at the 
Science and Engineering Magnet at Townview, occasionally at our house for 
all-night LAN parties, Luke Stone was likable, smart and had an appetite 
for adventure, the guy willing to try anything once. He was a natural 
leader, a person who drew people from all walks of life into his orbit with 
his energy and enthusiasm.

He also had a sweet side. He'd grown up going to church and carried a 
picture of Jesus in his wallet. He was drawn to beautiful, troubled 
girlfriends who needed rescuing. Luke Stone was your basic good kid.

But on May 14 a year ago, when Luke was a 20-year-old student at the 
University of Texas at Dallas, his daring nature killed him. The coroner's 
verdict: accidental drug overdose.

This isn't another "drugs are bad for you" story. It is a trip into another 
world, one far different from that of Luke's parents--even though they'd 
grown up in the '60s and '70s and had their own encounters with illegal 
drugs. David and Sondra Stone viewed their experimentation, particularly 
with marijuana, as a normal part of growing up. They didn't want their kids 
to become addicts, of course, but as long as they stayed away from "hard 
drugs" like cocaine and heroin, they figured the kids would come out all 
right, just like they had.

Luke Stone's parents know that isn't true anymore. They didn't realize the 
landscape of substance abuse has radically changed.

Today, kids Luke's age swim in a sea of psychotropic pharmacology--pills, 
potions and powders legally prescribed for everything from depression to 
attention deficit disorder. When they want to get high, they're more likely 
to turn to benzodiazepines, a class of drugs like Valium that treat anxiety 
and panic attacks. Instead of shooting heroin, they score synthetic opiates 
such as Vicodin, Percocet, Dilaudid or Tylenol with codeine. To get a buzz 
or pull an all-nighter for an exam, they pop pills like Ritalin and 
Adderall, amphetamines that treat ADD.

It makes sense. You don't have to find a drug dealer to get Xanax. You just 
have to rummage in Mom's medicine chest. You don't need to sneak around to 
score Adderall. A pediatrician prescribed it because you were driving your 
teachers crazy. Why not trade a few Adderall to your roommate, under the 
care of a psychiatrist for panic disorder, for some of his Xanax?

If you get caught--well, parents who discover a kid snitching a Lortab 
react differently from those who find a crack pipe or syringe.

The explosion in pharmaceuticals has been magnified by the Internet. Not 
only are there more psychotropic drugs to choose from, it's easier than 
ever to learn what to take, how much to take and what effects to 
anticipate. Luke scoured sites like erowid.org--"documenting the complex 
relationship between humans and psychoactives"--for information and "trip 
reports" on everything from peyote to Percocet. From there, teens are one 
click away from an illegal online pharmacy, a cyber medicine cabinet 
offering quick, discreet delivery.

A 2004 study at Columbia University found that only 6 percent of 157 Web 
sites selling medications actually required a prescription. And last month 
the DEA arrested 20 people, from Tyler, Texas, to Bombay, India, as part of 
"Operation Cyber Chase," targeting an illegal international ring that used 
more than 200 Web sites to distribute prescription narcotics, amphetamines 
and steroids.

Web sites to replace them will pop up overnight like psilocybin mushrooms 
sprouting in a cow patty.

Fascinated by illicit pharmaceuticals, Luke created a "drug log" of those 
he'd tried and their effects. He wasn't alone. Most of his friends at UTD 
used pills--in addition to the college mainstays of pot and alcohol--and 
turned to Luke for information. He knew what medications could be taken 
together and what to stay away from. "Luke was so smart," one friend says.

Intelligence, experimentation and a young man's belief in his own 
immortality seduced Luke into believing he knew what he was doing and could 
control the outcome.

But dead people don't post trip reports on the Internet.

At age 13, Luke Stone spent 17 days in Australia and New Zealand, one of 
the kids chosen for a "student ambassador" program. "He came home a 
different kid, a world traveler, you know," says his mother, Sondra Stone 
Fishman, who works out of her Oak Cliff home doing computer billing for 
doctors. Talking about Luke, Sondra flashes between pride and sudden grief, 
in a place she calls "beyond tears."

The older of her two sons, Luke had never been ordinary: whip-smart, 
reading before he went to kindergarten, playing chess at 7. They finally 
put Luke in a Montessori school to challenge him more. An athlete built 
like a brick outhouse, stocky and strong, Luke was the kid who had to be 
the pitcher in baseball or the goalie in roller hockey. He thrived on being 
in the pressure point, the one who made the difference in the game.

"Luke had tremendous drive," says his father, David Stone. "Wherever he was 
going, he was going there like a steam engine. I was proud of him."

But David says his oldest son was always a challenge to raise.

Luke would debate anyone about anything. "His mind was so quick," David 
says. "Luke believed he could outthink you. That's what got him into 
trouble. He wasn't as smart as he thought he was."

David and Sondra married in 1983. After Luke was born a year later, Sondra 
became a stay-at-home mom and loved it. Sondra--not Luke--cried the first 
day she dropped him off at preschool.

The couple divorced in the mid-'90s after years of discord. One conflict, 
David says, was disciplining their strong-willed son. David, a military 
veteran, thought Luke needed tough love. A self-described former hippie, 
Sondra believed in a softer approach.

Luke's computer and math skills got him accepted at the Science and 
Engineering Magnet at Townview, recently named by Newsweek the sixth-best 
school in the nation for its percentage of students passing Advanced 
Placement or International Baccalaureate tests. Luke wanted to study 
computer science and get an internship with Texas Instruments. If Luke was 
a bit of a nerd, though, he was also recognized as an outspoken leader.

Girls loved him. He was self-assured, cool, the guy who would instigate 
trouble at the back of the room then sit back and enjoy the fallout. By 
ninth grade, Luke had adopted a man-in-black persona. He got a couple of 
piercings and spent evenings flailing away on his drum set as rap or 
alt-metal music by Static-X and Rob Zombie blasted from his room.

He also went to a Disciples of Christ church with his mother and younger 
brother every week, and it was at church camp the summer after his freshman 
year that he first got caught with pot. Luke claimed the marijuana found in 
his backpack belonged to another kid. Though their minister and the camp 
director vouched for his story, Luke and the other boy were charged with 
possession. Luke and his mother had to attend counseling sessions once a 
week for a while.

Sondra and David had grown up in the '60s and were no strangers to drug 
use. They sometimes marveled that they were lucky to have made it through 
their teenage years more or less unscathed. Though she was upset, Sondra's 
attitude toward Luke's transgression was more laissez-faire than David's, 
"because I did it and enjoyed it thoroughly." Luke seemed to be maintaining 
his grades, so if he was getting high, he was handling it well. She was 
more worried about him smoking cigarettes.

David, who says he abused alcohol as a young adult, took a zero tolerance 
attitude. "Luke knew I had smoked pot," David says. "We'd sit down to talk 
about it. To me, pot can lead you on to other drugs. I never got through to 
him." Luke's argument: Marijuana is natural, no big deal, 
you-did-it-so-what's-the-problem. David looked for opportunities to 
challenge his son about his drug use, but only once or twice did he suspect 
Luke was high.

"I needed hard evidence before I confronted Luke," David says. "He only 
responded to hard evidence." Luke always had a one-word retort: hypocrite.

Even so, David saw Luke as a casual user. Like most parents, he didn't have 
a clue. Besides, Luke seemed to be on track to get into a good college, 
especially after passing a handful of AP tests and scoring a 1380 on his SAT.

His friends tell another story. By the end of high school, Luke was smoking 
pot regularly and occasionally doing mushrooms or sipping over-the-counter 
cough syrup containing dextromethorphan (DXM), like Robitussin. Luke loved 
altering his reality, not because he felt unhappy--though he was angry at 
his father about the divorce--but because life was amazing. He admired the 
edgy, dangerous life of his idols: rappers and rock stars, alive and dead. 
"Luke glamorized that whole lifestyle," says "Dennis," one high school 
friend. (All the names of students have been changed.)

"He wanted to try everything," says "Corey," another high school friend who 
smoked pot in high school to deal with academic pressure. "He did it 
first--and more."

Sometime after graduation in May 2002, Luke first snorted heroin, courtesy 
of "Tina," a girl he met through a friend at church.

Described as a "very hot chick" by Luke's buddies, Tina lived in North 
Richland Hills and was a year older than Luke. During high school, when 
neither could drive, they talked for hours online. After Tina got her 
license, she'd pick Luke up on Friday and he'd spend the weekends with her 
family. Sondra didn't know that Tina was a heroin addict who dropped out of 
high school.

"I thought she was real sweet," says Sondra, who remarried in 2002, about 
the time her son started dating Tina. "I thought she was a stable influence 
for Luke. I never suspected she had a drug problem. What I didn't like was 
that she wasn't doing anything. She didn't work or go to school. She lived 
with her parents."

Every now and then Tina dropped out of sight; Sondra would later learn her 
son's girlfriend had been in rehab during those times. She now believes 
that Luke learned a lot about drugs from Tina.

Luke didn't tell most of his buddies about trying heroin. They looked down 
on people who used heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines. Stuff that junkies 
use, that can get you addicted. Though one close friend believed Luke 
turned to drugs because of depression, most of the others thought he just 
enjoyed getting high.

"I don't think he was addicted," says "Rosemary," who dated a friend of 
Luke's. "I think he was bored and cocky."

Among his circle of friends at UTD, Luke became known as the expert on 
illegal and legal drugs, which was saying something. All of them had 
bookmarked erowid.org, the Web site known for its broad and deep "vaults" 
of information on recreational drug use. Operated out of California by two 
people known only as "Earth" and "Fire," Erowid taps into the collective 
knowledge, experience and enthusiasm of users all over the world.

Plano police Detective Courtney Perot, who investigates overdoses--both 
fatal and nonfatal--consults Erowid regularly. "You have people using the 
drug talking about the effects right there," Perot says. "Some of the 
information obtained on these Web sites is beneficial--talking about the 
dangers of using various drugs. But there are so many different sites out 
there that advocate and encourage usage."

You can search Erowid for information on plants, herbs, psychoactives, 
pharmaceuticals, chemicals and new "smart drugs" that supposedly sharpen 
your brain. Consider this enthusiastic report from an OxyContin user: "The 
drug...gives me the most euphoric high I've ever felt. I have had a lot of 
experience with other substances and none compare to OC. I never take more 
than one 40 mg pill crushed and taken orally. The effects usually hit 
around 45 minutes...The euphoric high will last until I pass out. Smoking 
weed while on OC intensifies the opiate 'buzz' for me. I won't take OC 
without weed."

Many of the experience reports, however, are warnings. And the range of 
substances seems endless. Take this from a guy who crushed up morning glory 
seeds (yes, flower seeds), mixed them with water and drank the potion: 
"From my experience I CANNOT recommend their use, it was probably the 
single most unpleasant experience of my life. Ten hours of intense panic, 
(imagined) suffocation, seemingly endless, painful hurling accompanied by 
crazy delusions that you are going to die and that your organs went through 
a blender are not my idea of a good time."

Other popular sites for illicit use include dancesafe.org, which caters to 
the rave/Ecstasy crowd, bluelight.nu, junkylife.com, pillreports.com, 
shroomery.org, ecstasy.org, thedea.org, Lycaeum.org, crazymeds.com and 
maps.org (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). These Web 
sites weren't meant to be a source of trivia. Teen users and abusers do 
their research here, in the privacy of their bedrooms.

In a study released in April, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America 
reported that, for the first time in 17 years, teenagers were more likely 
to have abused prescription and over-the-counter medications than illicit 
drugs like cocaine, Ecstasy, methamphetamines, heroin and LSD. About one in 
five teens has abused a prescription painkiller to get stoned. Eighteen 
percent reported nonmedical use of Vicodin, 10 percent admitted they'd used 
OxyContin and 10 percent Ritalin or Adderall.

"The current favorite is Xanax," says Gayle Jensen-Savoie, director of Seay 
Behavioral Health Center, an adolescent psychiatric and chemical dependency 
unit in Plano. "It has a numbing effect. If you are overstimulated in so 
many areas, with Xanax you can handle it all. In the last three months, for 
the first time we had to detox several kids of Xanax, which we never had to 
do before. They were probably taking 16 a day. That's a huge amount. That's 
deadly, and then they drink."

In 2004 there were 10 fatalities from mixed-drug overdoses recorded in 
Collin County, surpassing those from cocaine or heroin.

One fascinating source of information is posted by the Drug Enforcement 
Agency: the Microgram Bulletin, which for 36 years was secretly published 
for forensic chemists and narcotics officers 
(www.usdoj.gov/dea/programs/forensicsci/microgram). The monthly newsletter 
issues intelligence briefs and alerts describing seizures of street drugs, 
as well as methods of manufacture and smuggling.

The DEA decided in 2003 to make the Microgram Bulletin public after 
recognizing the explosion of information and misinformation about illegal 
drugs on the Internet. The DEA now advertises on Google. Plug in Percocet 
or Valium, and a sponsored link to the DEA pops up: "Read Our Consumer 
Alert Before You Buy Drugs Online. Learn The Law!"

Luke scoured the Internet to study medications and their effects and 
interactions. "If you wanted to know something, you asked Luke," says 
"Roman," a business major. "He was always known as the experimenter among us."

Luke's first introduction to pills apparently occurred between high school 
graduation and the start of his freshman year in college, when he got a job 
at UPS. It was hard physical labor with attendant muscle aches; Luke hated 
the work but liked being around the blue-collar guys who he thought were 
tough, real, ghetto. UPS cohorts introduced Luke to Percocet, a combination 
of acetaminophen and oxycodone, an opiate-based painkiller.

Oxycodone has been around since the '20s, but its use exploded after 1996, 
when Purdue Pharma began producing the controlled-release pill OxyContin, 
which is highly addictive. (In 2003 talk-show host Rush Limbaugh went 
public with his addiction to OxyContin after his name surfaced in a 
narcotics investigation.)

Percocet quickly became Luke's drug of choice. Though Luke was still dating 
Tina, he quit using heroin--cold turkey. He was proud of his willpower. And 
the pills allowed him to rationalize, minimize and justify his use of 
narcotics. Percocet isn't as bad as heroin. I'm not addicted like Tina. I 
need something to handle the pressure.

Like Luke, who was majoring in electrical engineering, his friends at UTD 
were very smart, pursuing degrees in physics, math, engineering and 
computer science. All of them popped Adderall, an amphetamine, to stay 
awake through marathon study sessions. Despite its image as a study drug, 
no more potent than No-Doz, Adderall is a psycho-stimulant, says 
Jenson-Savoie of the Seay Center. "It increases heart rate, increases blood 
pressure. If you are snorting it, it goes right into your blood. You could 
blow your heart out."

"Jason" says "you don't do Adderall for fun. It just helps you concentrate 
and stay up two days, drinking energy drinks." But after the tests were 
over, Luke had to take something to bring him down enough to sleep. For 
many of the students, that was the major appeal of the drugs that offered 
sleep such as Soma and Ambien.

Corey, a physics major, was prescribed Adderall in high school for ADD but 
rarely took it then. "I hated the way it made me feel," Corey says. "It 
deadens the creative side of you but sharpens the analytical side. I need 
it to do things like physics, but I hate having to do it. For AP [test] 
week, I took it and stayed up for three or four days straight. Then I 
wouldn't take it at all."

During his freshman year at a college out of state, Corey quit taking 
Adderall, but he filled his prescriptions and sold or traded them to other 
students. A three-month supply netted 100 pills that he could sell for $3 
each. Adderall was more highly prized than Ritalin. "Adderall lasts six or 
seven hours," Corey says. "It gives you a little high, which can be 
dangerous if you like it. Ritalin lasts two or three hours and doesn't give 
you a high."

When Corey moved back to Dallas and enrolled at UTD, the pills went for 
only $2 each. "The market's so saturated," Corey says. He sold it to his 
buddies for $1 apiece.

Luke was getting a variety of pills from several UTD students and a Dallas 
drug dealer whom everybody called "Porn": Percocet, Valium, OxyContin, 
Xanax, Lortab, Soma. He preferred opiates and benzodiazepines (sedatives, 
muscle relaxants and anti-anxiety medications), but Luke would try almost 
anything once.

"If you wanted it," Corey says, "Luke could get it." Luke wasn't trying to 
make a lot of money, just support his own use. "He wouldn't give us 
anything he hadn't tried himself."

Pills had several advantages over cocaine, heroin, meth and other drugs: 
easy to take, easy to hide and relatively cheap. Xanax and Valium could be 
purchased for $2 to $3, with the higher-dosage pills going for a few 
dollars more. You could buy an evening of Percocet euphoria for $5, though 
some pills could cost more, depending on supply and demand.

At first, Corey was afraid of the pills Luke was using, which often had 
been cut with filler and repackaged by his dealer into generic capsules. 
"Then I tried Percocet," he says. "I really liked it. You take it and 
there's no grogginess. I could forget about the anxiety, the depression. 
That little thing in the back of your head goes away."

By the middle of their freshman year, many of Luke's friends, even high 
school holdouts, were smoking pot, eating 'shrooms, drinking alcohol and 
doing pills. Luke only rarely drank. The same bottle of Chivas Regal sat in 
his refrigerator for months. Luke knew the dangers of mixing pills and booze.

"We all researched drugs," Corey says, "but Luke was especially vigilant 
about it. There's a whole underground, really, of Internet drug users who 
give their opinions. You learn to trust each other, because they are 
usually right."

After injuring his hand at UPS, Luke was out of a job. His mother gave him 
$100 a week for spending money so he wouldn't have to work; his father was 
paying his tuition and rent. Though he bought Luke groceries, David 
resisted giving his son money, trying some tough love to get him to buckle 
down.

"He wasn't going to class," David says. After getting his grades, David 
tried to take Luke's car away from him. When Luke refused to give him the 
keys, David grabbed his son from the front seat and tried to pull him out. 
Luke backed down. David made Luke sign a contract that he would take at 
least 13 hours and pass 10, or Dad was ending the room and board.

The ugly confrontation distressed Sondra. "It got his attention," David 
says. "But Sondra thought I didn't love Luke."

Luke used his father's supposed stinginess as an excuse when he bumped up 
his sales of pills and weed, mostly schwag, low-grade pot purchased through 
a guy at UPS. Then Luke converted to selling hydro; one ounce of the 
high-grade pot could sell for $350 to $400. It meant higher profit and 
lower risk. (Possession of less than two ounces is considered for personal 
use, not distribution.) But pills were the most profitable.

Luke and all his buddies heard they could buy pills on the Internet, but 
none of them did it. "Anthony" once ordered pot on the Internet from 
Canada; it worked, but he didn't repeat it. He didn't want a drug charge on 
his record.

A business major, Anthony finally tried Percocet out of boredom. "It didn't 
seem to be hurting Luke," Anthony says. "He said it made you feel great. He 
was so knowledgeable. He'd rattle off bad combinations and chemical 
structures. He was a walking pharmacist. That was part of the appeal to 
him. The other appeal--you're not supposed to do it."

But Anthony didn't want to get in too deep. "People aren't meant to feel 
that good all the time."

Luke at first struck "Christopher," an art and film major who transferred 
to UTD in September 2003, like a character in a comic book: larger than 
life, with a goatee, spike earrings, sideburns and an 
"I'm-a-tough-drug-dealer-don't-mess-with-me" pose.

"Then I realized he was a pretty smart guy," Christopher says. Luke could 
talk about anything, tailoring his conversation to whomever he was with: 
art, music, traveling, math, film and computers.

Luke turned Christopher on to Percocet. "I took my first one and painted 
for the better part of a day," he says. "It was like being stoned but not 
lazy." A day and a half later, Christopher took another one, but his body's 
reaction turned sour. "The entire world felt like different shades of gray, 
like a dull ache in my head."

He kept using it anyway. "It was almost like a ritual," he says. "You smoke 
pot, you do Adderall to study, then do pills, then alcohol on top of it." 
Nobody worried about overdosing, Christopher says. "Anyone in command of 
their faculties can keep from overdosing."

After partying his way through freshman year, Luke had focused on his 
studies with the help of Jason, a highly motivated student who tutored him 
in calculus and several other courses. "He was very intelligent," Jason 
says. "His only delusions were chemical."

By the end of 2003, Luke started making good grades and liked the feeling. 
Before winter break, he broke up with Tina for good. She'd been in and out 
of rehab, in and out of jail. "She used to love me," he told one friend. 
"Now she loves heroin." (Again in jail for possession of narcotics, Tina 
was unavailable for comment.)

Luke and a friend from high school spent a week over winter break in 
Amsterdam, stoner Shangri-la for its shops where pot and mushrooms are 
legally sold. Luke thought it would be fabulous to travel to a place where 
he could openly indulge in his favorite pastime. His mother knew that was 
one reason he was going, but thinking it was a once-in-a-lifetime travel 
experience, she gave him money anyway. She didn't want Luke smoking pot in 
the United States because it was illegal, but in Amsterdam, that wasn't an 
issue.

At the time, neither Sondra nor David saw any sign that Luke had a serious 
drug problem. When he told his mother about Tina's addiction, Sondra asked 
point-blank if he was using hard drugs. He denied it.

 From Amsterdam Luke brought back photos of rainy streets, bars, old 
buildings and some of their purchases--leggy 'shrooms and marijuana buds 
with names like Super Silver Haze, Poison, AK-47 and Buddha's Sister--to 
show the guys back home. He wasn't scoring any pills, though: too risky, he 
thought.

A vacation video shot by a friend shows Luke firing up fat blunts, smoking 
and laughing, smoking and laughing. He seems to be having a great time, 
except for a hacking cough and one vomiting episode. Too much booze, or 
withdrawal symptoms? In Dallas, Luke was taking two to four Percocets a 
day. When he couldn't get the drug or something similar, Luke experienced 
bouts of vomiting, stomach pains, cold sweats and migraines.

When he returned to Dallas, there were other signs that his pill habit was 
getting out of control. "He'd start gradually and take one Xanax," Rosemary 
says. "Now one doesn't feel as good, so he'd take two." Rosemary noticed 
that Luke was popping different drugs at the same time to see how they 
interacted with each other. He once passed out with a cigarette in his 
mouth and burned himself and a couch.

Still, none of his friends confronted him. Their attitude was: He's Luke. 
He knows what he's doing. "I don't think any of us felt it was our place to 
say something," Jason says. "Luke was going to do what he was going to do."

And most of his friends were doing it, too.

When Luke asked his father for funds to go to Mexico over spring break, 
David refused. "The only reason to go to Mexico," David told him, "is sex 
and drugs." Luke responded with "Well, why did you let me go to Amsterdam?" 
David had no answer.

"It hit me like 'wham,'" David says, hitting his forehead with a smack. "I 
knew we had a big problem."

Christopher remembers thinking sometime after spring break in 2004 that 
Luke, Jason and "Shelley" were taking so many pills, it was like they were 
in a "race to see who would screw up first."

Shelley had been Luke's close friend for four months before they started a 
romantic relationship in April. Drug use brought them together at first. On 
Friday nights, everybody would hang out, pop Percocet and play video games 
like City of Heroes. Shelley liked Luke because he was so straightforward 
and happy-go-lucky. But like some of the drugs they'd tried, Shelley and 
Luke were a volatile combination.

 From a small town near Austin, Shelley had struggled with depression most 
of her life. When she was 9, her mother shot herself to death, leaving 
Shelley to discover the body.

Though very anti-drug in high school, Shelley had since struggled with 
addiction. During her first semester at UTD, she and her roommate smoked 
pot one night. "That's what started it," Shelley says. "I have an addictive 
personality."

That led to a brief fling with cocaine abuse. In 2002 Shelley, her roommate 
and their boyfriends were arrested and charged with possession. The terms 
of her probation--monthly drug tests, staying away from other users--kept 
Shelley sober for almost a year.

But when she started hanging out with Luke in January 2004, Shelley was 
again using multiple drugs--some illegal, some prescribed for her by a 
psychiatrist. Diagnosed as bipolar at the beginning of her sophomore year, 
Shelley was taking Xanax for panic attacks; Lamactil, a mood stabilizer; 
Ambien and other sleep aids for insomnia and night terrors; and a high 
dosage of Seroquel, an anti-psychotic. Sometimes she took them as directed; 
other times she would crush a pill and snort it for a more immediate 
reaction. If she had a month before her next drug test, Shelley might smoke 
pot.

"I used to have hallucinations," Shelley says. "I kept darting my eyes 
around because I was seeing things. There were times when I had to throw 
away my car keys or I'd fly away."

When she got to know Luke, he was regularly using Valium, Percocet, 
Adderall, Xanax and, of course, smoking pot.

"I saw him take at least nine Adderall a day," Shelley says, "some in the 
morning, then a couple of Valium, then more Adderall." Luke used some of 
Shelley's medications, too. And when no Percocet was available, he sipped 
liquid codeine, the active ingredient in prescription cough syrup, 
sometimes called "sizzurp" and popular in hip-hop culture. One night before 
they hooked up, Shelley saw Luke crashed on his couch during a party, wiped 
out by Valium and sizzurp. The next day he didn't answer his phone. Shelley 
finally drove to his apartment and pounded on the door until he answered.

"He was so white, so pale," Shelley says. "He looked terrible. I think that 
was the first time he might have accidentally OD'd."

Shelley later urged Luke to go to the university counseling center. He 
brushed her off. "I don't think it was a physical addiction that drove 
him," Shelley says. "It was psychological. Stopping would bring him down, 
so that he'd think there was something wrong with his head. He thought he 
might have a disorder like mine."

Both knew they needed to quit. Adderall suppresses the appetite, so they 
weren't eating, and their sleep schedule had turned upside down. If they 
could just get through the end of the semester, then they could make some 
changes.

In early May, Luke took Shelley to a doctor's office for a routine 
appointment. After grabbing a bunch of cards from a Rolodex-type dispenser 
that described various medications, he cut and pasted the cards into a 
flip-type notebook, creating a log of seven drugs he had taken and more he 
wanted to try, complete with each medication's purpose, dosages, dangers 
and how they affected him.

At their Mother's Day lunch on May 9, Luke gave Sondra a lovely vase filled 
with yellow roses and a sweet card. Happy and full of enthusiasm, Luke 
talked about changing his major to law. With Jason's tutoring, Luke was 
making better grades.

Sondra saw no sign of drug use. But finals started the next day, and Luke 
was popping Adderall like M&Ms.

David Stone got the phone call from a Dallas police detective at about 2 
p.m. on May 14. "You've lost your son," said the officer, calling from the 
Collin County Medical Examiner's Office. "It's a drug overdose." David had 
no idea what he was talking about.

"It's not Luke," David insisted. "How do you know it's my son?" The officer 
had found a drivers license in a Richardson apartment. The photo of Sean 
Lukas Stone, age 20, matched the body found there.

Still in disbelief, David called Sondra, who was in her car, and asked her 
to pull over. When he told her, Sondra's reaction was the same: "It can't 
be Luke."

David picked up her and their younger son, and they drove to the medical 
examiner's office in McKinney. Seeing Luke's body on a gurney through the 
morgue window, Sondra screamed. She refused to believe Luke had 
accidentally overdosed. Someone must have done it to him.

Over the next few weeks, his parents heard more details from Luke's friends 
and pieced together what had happened in their son's final days.

On May 12, Corey, Jason, Roman, Anthony and Luke had lunch together at The 
Abbey, their favorite pub. "We were talking about graduating and what we 
wanted to do," Corey says. "Luke was serious about [Shelley], as happy as 
I'd seen him in months. A real happy, not an opiate happy."

Luke pulled an all-nighter, studying with Jason for his calculus and 
history exams. In addition to Adderall, Luke was using Xanax and Valium. 
His on-campus connection hadn't been able to get Percocet for weeks.

"You could tell he'd been studying and was strung out a little," Jason 
says. "At that point, you see shadow people." Recently Luke had been acting 
paranoid, saying that three undercover cops lived in his complex.

The next day, Luke aced his calculus final. He made two trips to Wal-Mart, 
the second with Shelley. His mother had given him about $180 on Sunday. 
They bought some cleaning supplies, a small table and some DVDs. Late that 
afternoon Luke dropped Shelley at his apartment and apparently made a run 
to see Porn.

While Luke was gone, Shelley cleaned the apartment--it was the end of the 
semester, and Luke's lease was almost up--then took a Seroquel, her 
prescribed medication for bipolar disorder, and zonked out.

She was still asleep on the couch early that evening when Christopher and 
several other guys dropped in. Luke had returned with lots of weed and 
three fat gel caps of morphine, a drug he didn't much like because it gives 
a "dirty" high, making him feel rotten after it wears off. But morphine was 
the best his dealer could offer. He later told Shelley it took his last 
$30. No matter; he'd recoup it quickly by selling the pot.

Wearing a black tank top and deep into the game City of Heroes, Luke looked 
gaunt and hollow-eyed. "He had been on Xanax the entire week," Christopher 
says. "He had gone from swallowing it to dissolving it in water or snorting 
it. It hits your bloodstream all at once." Christopher bought some weed but 
declined Luke's offer to share the morphine.

At 10 p.m., Shelley woke from her nap. Luke emptied one gel cap of the 
morphine and separated it into two lines. He snorted one, and Shelley 
snorted the other. It hit Shelley hard, and she stumbled to bed.

Shelley roused around 9 a.m. on May 14 and found Luke half on, half off the 
bed. She pushed him back onto it and draped his arm around her. It fell 
limp. Alarmed, Shelley pressed her ear on his chest. His heart was beating, 
faint and slow but not irregular. She went back to sleep.

Later that morning--she doesn't remember the time, but it was probably 
close to noon--Shelley got out of bed and started to tidy up. They were 
going to UPS that day to look for work. A few minutes later, when she tried 
to rouse Luke, he didn't respond. Shelley pulled the covers off the bed, 
joking around. She saw with a shock that the top of his body was deathly 
pale and the bottom half looked bruised. Shelley flashed back to 
discovering her mother's body; her blood had settled on the side where 
she'd fallen, making her appear bruised. Shrieking, Shelley ran through the 
apartment and found the three gel caps on the counter, empty.

Hysterical, Shelley called Jason's cell phone. When he didn't answer, she 
dialed his roommate Christopher and screamed at him to wake Jason. "He's 
not breathing!" she sobbed to Jason. "Get over here now. Luke's dead!"

Jason raced to the apartment. One look was all it took. Weeping, 
incoherent, Shelley insisted they had to get all the pot and paraphernalia 
out of the apartment. She didn't want his parents or the police to know 
Luke was dealing drugs.

"Luke's dead," Jason told her. "He's not going to jail." He realized, 
however, that Shelley's probation could be revoked for being around illegal 
drugs. Jason gathered up the dope, bongs and scales--inadvertently leaving 
behind a tube containing mushroom spores from an unsuccessful attempt to 
grow 'shrooms--and carted the stuff out.

Shelley called 911 about 12:30 p.m. Two Dallas police detectives arrived in 
minutes with the paramedics.

The news of Luke's death flashed through cell phones, leaving his friends 
shocked and bewildered. With their limited knowledge of pharmaceuticals, 
they debated the cause. Did the Adderall, an amphetamine that can cause 
heart irregularities, interact with the morphine, which can suppress 
respiration? Finally aware how little they really knew, the tragedy snapped 
them out of their own pill habits.

For a while.

As they awaited the autopsy results, Luke's parents lived in a kind of 
suspended disbelief that lasted seven weeks. "I couldn't fathom that it was 
a drug overdose," Sondra says. "Luke was so smart." She was convinced there 
had been foul play.

Sondra agonized that Luke might have survived if Shelley had immediately 
called 911. Shelley's grief and drug use had resulted in different stories. 
There's no doubt, however, that when Shelley woke up the second time, Luke 
was beyond rescue.

The autopsy results surprised everybody.

Dr. William Rohr, the Collin County medical examiner, ruled that Luke died 
of mixed-drug intoxication--the combined effects of morphine, amphetamine 
and at least three benzodiazepines. While the morphine alone wasn't a 
lethal dose, the chemical cocktail in Luke's body shut down his respiration.

His blood showed traces of diazepam (Valium), temazepam (a sleep aid) and 
oxazepam (anti-anxiety). Had he taken the benzos that day? The night 
before? Perhaps Luke had gotten to the point where he couldn't remember 
what he took when, and even his carefully organized drug log couldn't save him.

Six of Luke's longtime friends served as pallbearers at the funeral. After 
Tina told Sondra the name of one of Luke's suppliers, she was shocked to 
find the dealer's signature in the funeral home guest book.

Luke's drug-using friends were there, too, and some of their lives have 
changed. In the last 12 months, Shelley has moved to a university out of 
state. Using journal entries from their month together, Shelley wrote a 
short one-woman play about falling in love with Luke and then finding him 
dead and performed it for her theater class. She no longer takes any 
psychotropic medications. "When I stopped abusing my prescription drugs," 
Shelley says, "I was able to stop using them [altogether]."

Most of Luke's friends say they've stopped using illicit medications. "None 
of us ever thought the pills were that dangerous," Christopher says. "I 
didn't want to be part of it anymore."

Corey says he's stopped smoking pot but still does Percocet. "I think we're 
all more cautious," he says.

Jason was scared, but also angry. "It seemed like such a waste," he says. 
"It scared me, and it still does. I have a lot of friends who are doing 
what he was doing. They moderated it at first. But Luke understood. 
Moderation isn't possible."

Anthony feels like he grew up a lot in the last year. "It was like I left 
'La La Land'--drugs are fun, they won't hurt us, we're so young--and 
realized death was real," he says. "I think about Luke every day."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth