Prescription
drug abuse may have led to Allen man's death
Visits to
multiple emergency rooms gave 20-year-old his high
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/allen/stories/072007dnmetprescripdeath.2f3807d.html
12:10 AM CDT on Friday, July 20, 2007
By KAREN AYRES / The Dallas Morning News
ALLEN - When Jordan Hall didn't feel high enough, he found a way to get another
pill. Xanax. Valium. Or OxyContin. He craved them all.
In the past few months, Jordan prowled emergency rooms in Allen, Plano and then
McKinney, begging for prescriptions. He stole money out of his doting mother's
bank account. And then on July 3, he met a dealer down the street from his house
and paid $80 for OxyContin pills, a strong narcotic pain reliever.
The next day, his mother, Susie, shook her son to wake him up so they could
watch July Fourth fireworks together. His body lay stiff on the living room
sofa, his head propped up like he was watching television.
At age 20, he was dead.
Allen police are investigating the cause of Jordan's death, and the results of
Jordan's autopsy won't be available for a few weeks. But his family believes
that the craving controlling his life ultimately killed him. And his addiction
was far from unusual.
Teenagers now abuse prescription medications more than any other drug except
marijuana, according to recent research. Overall drug use is down nationwide,
but prescription drug abuse is booming.
"It's the biggest change in the landscape of substance abuse that we've seen in
20 years," said Tom Hedrick, one of the founders of the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America. "This is as big as what we saw with cocaine in the 1980s. It
is just as scary as that."
Nearly one in five teenagers across the country reported abusing prescription
medications to get high at some point in their lifetimes, according to a
Partnership survey of 7,000 randomly selected teenagers released last year.
In Texas, an estimated 9 percent of teenagers and 14 percent of 18- to
25-year-olds abused prescription drugs within the past year, according to data
from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. That amounts to about
528,000 young people.
Experts can only guess why it's happening: Some teenagers say prescription drugs
are easy to get. Many believe medications manufactured by drug companies are
less dangerous than the marijuana, heroin and cocaine they've been warned
against for years.
Regardless, abusers have started sharing recipes for getting high on MySpace and
other Internet sites, quickly spreading the problem to every town in America.
"People are a little naive that we have this apple pie community and a lot of
people with higher incomes," Ms. Hall said. "They think they're exempt from all
of this. If one person learns the danger from seeing what happened to him ..."
'Almost a learned thing'
Jordan was unsure of himself from the start.
His parents divorced when he was 4. The next year, doctors diagnosed attention
deficit disorder and put him on Ritalin, a stimulant and the first of many drugs
he would be prescribed throughout his life.
"He has had pills thrown at him ever since I can remember," said Rick Hall,
Jordan's father. "It's almost a learned thing."
School was always hard. Jordan read paragraphs but couldn't remember them a
minute later. He would later be classified with a generalized learning
disability.
At home, he constantly reminded his mother to lock the doors of their house. At
age 7, he once asked his mom 41 times during a movie if his hamster was OK. He
also asked his mother not to date.
"You're going to live for a long time, right, mom?" Jordan frequently asked.
Jordan loved to hang out with Mr. Hall's two older sons. Basketball and video
games were his passions. Ms. Hall wasn't rich, but her only child got the
Nintendo and later the Xbox that he wanted.
"All he had to do was smile and say 'I love you,' and we did everything we could
for him," Ms. Hall said.
Signs of trouble
Ms. Hall first smelled marijuana in her garage when Jordan was a freshman at the
Lowery Center in Allen. Then, her Xanax pills started to disappear when his
friends slept over.
Xanax, a mild tranquilizer, is one of the most commonly abused prescription
drugs in Collin County, according to Sabina Stern of the county's substance
abuse coalition. Abuse often starts in the early teenage years.
"Someone is saying to them, 'You'll like how this makes you feel,' " Ms. Stern
said.
Ms. Hall, who works long hours as a legal secretary in downtown Dallas, banned
Jordan's friends from their small one-story house and eavesdropped on his phone
calls, but she knew her son was still using drugs when she wasn't around.
Jordan and his friends largely stuck with marijuana, but they also started
taking the street version of Xanax, called "four bars."
"I would scream. I would talk nice. One day everything would be fine, and then
he would do it again," Ms. Hall said.
Just before Jordan turned 16 on Oct. 25, 2002, Ms. Hall bought her son the black
Mustang GT convertible he had always wanted. Two years later, high on Xanax,
Jordan crashed the car into a tree. He wasn't injured, but the car was totaled.
He was charged with drug possession, driving while intoxicated and evading
arrest, court records show. Depressed about losing his car, Jordan dropped out
of school.
He spent most of the day watching television, particularly Nancy Grace and other
crime shows. But he also got stoned with friends. "I had tried to run these kids
off, and they wouldn't run off," Mr. Hall said. When his mom wouldn't give him
money for drugs, he hit her. "I need this, Mom," he told her.
Still, Jordan called his mom at work constantly and came home every night. Ms.
Hall couldn't afford to take off from work to watch him all the time. His
parents had tried getting him counseling. At that point, they didn't know what
to do.
"You want to help them and you want to get them to rehabilitation, but your
heart just breaks thinking you're doing something that is rough on them," Mr.
Hall said.
The loophole
In the fall of 2006, Jordan was sentenced to community service and probation for
the car wreck. If he couldn't pass drug tests, he knew he was going to jail.
That meant no more marijuana.
Jordan was already seeing counselors and doctors who had prescribed him pills to
treat anxiety and depression. So, he knew they wouldn't count against him on
drug tests. Ms. Hall assumed the doctors made the right prescriptions. But
Jordan had started popping extra pills to settle his nerves.
Xanax and Valium, popular brand-name tranquilizers, put him to sleep.
Opiate-based painkillers such as OxyContin also sedated him. Combining the two
can prove deadly.
Mr. Hedrick, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America founder, said young people
often know more about prescription drugs than anyone else.
"It's totally understood by all the kids that it's going on and it's OK, but
there is a complete lack of awareness from the adult population," Mr. Hedrick
said. "It's really astonishing."
In May, Jordan finally graduated from Allen High School after completing a
self-paced program. He hoped to work in forensic science.
At the time, he continued to pop pills. Without a car, he called taxis to take
him to local hospitals so he could persuade doctors to prescribe the drugs he
wanted.
The Halls would later bury their son in his cap and gown.
'Eating out of his hands'
Doctors are used to seeing addicts in search of prescriptions. An estimated 6
percent of Texans abused prescription drugs in the past year. About half of them
were younger than 26. Those numbers are about the same nationwide, according to
federal data.
Some doctors recognized Jordan's drug dependence and refused to write
prescriptions for him. But others gave him what he wanted.
"I am amazed at how easy it was for him to get things that finally ended up
killing him," Mr. Hall said. "He had medical personnel fooled and eating out of
his hands."
Ms. Hall threatened to call his probation officer. "Would you let your own son
go to jail?" Jordan asked.
After Jordan bought the OxyContin from a dealer on July 3, he finally agreed
that he had a problem and needed to go to the Green Oaks rehabilitation program
in McKinney. Ms. Hall said she had planned to take him there on July 5 - the day
after he died.
In the meantime, Mr. Hall had had enough. He told Jordan not to come over to
celebrate July Fourth.
"I had gotten to the point where I just wanted to do everything I could to help
him straighten up," Mr. Hall said. "I honestly believe if I had gone to get him,
he would still be alive. But what do you do? There's a good chance that maybe I
would have been prolonging the inevitable. He was just out of control."
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