Are you your Kid’s Drug Dealer?
Posted by Horizon Academy | Filed under Horizon Academy
Wendy Lefferts, a mother of five, gets regular calls from the school nurse with the usual reports of stomachaches and asthma attacks.
But two weeks before school let out last May, she got a call from the nurse at Boulder Creek High School in Anthem that she never would have expected. Not this. Not one of her kids.
Lefferts is a stay-at-home mother who knows where her children are at all times. With a backyard pool and Ping-Pong table, her house is a hangout for her kids and their friends.
Lefferts goes to every hockey match, baseball game and school event. Her husband of 23 years coaches their kids’ teams.
“As parents, we did everything we were supposed to do,” Lefferts says.
In the nurse’s office that day, Lefferts was stunned to find her 16-year-old son, Taylor, lying nearly unconscious on a white cot. The nurse told Lefferts to take him to the hospital, suspecting that he had taken a prescription drug.
Like every mom who has found herself in this desperate situation, Lefferts thought, “This can’t be happening.”
But it is happening. A lot. Experts say teens abuse prescription drugs more than they do any illicit drug except marijuana. Kids in Arizona have easy access to prescription drugs because not only can they rifle through their parents’ medicine cabinets or order pills online, drugs are relatively easy to buy just across the border in Mexico.
One in five teens in Arizona admits to abusing prescription drugs, according to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, prompting its prevention campaign aimed at parents with public-service announcements and billboards that say, “Don’t be your kid’s dealer.” A rehabilitation facility specifically for prescription-drug abusers (teens and adults) is planned for Gilbert because the problem is so prevalent in the East Valley and Scottsdale, says Stephanie Siete-Kreiling of Community Bridges, a Mesa non-profit drug-prevention agency.
Teens think prescription pills are safer than street drugs, a deadly misconception. Twice as many teens died from prescription-drug overdoses in 2006 as from methamphetamines, heroin and cocaine combined, according to the state health department. Drug-related deaths among children jumped 41 percent from 2006 to 2007.
Taylor paid $3 for the drugs that almost killed him that day at school.
Once Lefferts got him to the hospital, Taylor wanted only to go home and sleep. If he had, he would have died. Doctors and nurses kept him sitting up and talking. He tested positive for Xanax and OxyContin, both prescription pain relievers.
His heart rate dropped to fewer than 30 beats per minute. His mother sat at his bedside, mortified and terrified.
Lefferts couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong, where she had gone wrong. She had had the requisite parental talks with her son about drugs, but she didn’t know to warn him about prescription medicine, first offered to him by friends when he was a high-school freshman.
Taylor was sneaking out of the house at 2 a.m. to attend parties where teenagers poured pills they swiped from their parents’ medicine cabinets into a bowl. They added vodka and divvied up the mixture into Dixie cups, drinking it down in one swallow.
Taylor would return home in the morning before his parents woke up.
It’s easy for parents to miss the signs of prescription-drug abuse because they mimic typical teenage behavior – mood changes, temper outbursts and changes in sleeping habits and interests.
“You can smell alcohol and you can smell marijuana. You can’t smell pills,” Lefferts says.
Taylor, who’s now 17, is at Horizon Academy, a school for troubled kids in the Nevada desert. He says his parents saved his life by forcing him into rehabilitation in a place where he has had to earn every privilege, from going to the bathroom alone to visits home. He’s getting straight A’s and plans to study finance in college.
Jade Robinson, director of Horizon Academy, and other experts say parents need professional help to get their kids to stop using prescription drugs. This is not the casual drug use of their Boomer parents’ youth.
Lefferts has tried talking to other parents about what happened but says no one wants to listen.
“Everyone wants to pretend it’s not their kid,” afraid that it will reflect on them as parents, Lefferts says. And no one wants to believe it happens here on the quiet, manicured streets of Anthem, where families move to escape the problems of the city.
But in late January, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office received a report from Gavilan Peak Elementary School in Anthem that a student had brought a narcotic pain reliever to campus.
“It’s not that you’re a bad parent. It’s that these kids are making the wrong choices,” Lefferts says.
She doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her as a parent. Lefferts got lucky – her son is alive. She’s done crying about it. She has put new screens on all her windows so there will be no more sneaking out, and she has locked up all the family’s medications. Now she’s talking about what happened to her child in the hopes that it doesn’t happen to yours.
“If it can save someone’s life, just one life, it’s worth it,” Lefferts says.
