Legal and deadly

Teens warned of prescription medication dangersJeff Deschner's killer was legal.

Legal as this: A scribbled piece of paper handed to him by a doctor more times than his mother can count.

The prescriptions were supposed to assuage a football injury. But they quickly consumed the Vancouver teen's mind and, eventually, his life. When he finally sought help, it was too late. The drug's grip was too firm.

Deschner died of an overdose Dec. 9, 2003 at age 24. When Vicodin pills weren't available, he turned to heroin. When he died, his system contained a mix of prescription drugs and methadone.

"As hard as he was battling it, I didn't think we would lose him," said his mother, Kathy Deschner. "Just because it's legal doesn't make it safe."

Prescription drug abuse is skyrocketing among Clark County teens for just that reason: Medication is easy to attain from a doctor and just as easy to swipe from a parent's medicine cabinet or accept from a friend at school.



At the height of Deschner's addiction, which started in the 1990s, prescription drug abuse was occasional. Today, police and chemical dependency counselors say painkillers are some of the fastest growing substances abused by teenagers.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported last year that while cigarette and alcohol use among teens declined, prescription drug abuse continued to rise.

Some officials liken the trend to the methamphetamine craze of the 1990s and early 2000s.

"It's the highest rate I've ever seen in my 15 years as a counselor," said Sheryl Smith, a crisis intervention counselor at Hudson's Bay High School.

Following the boom of the pharmaceutical industry, painkillers became more widely available, and teens, believing they're more benign than street drugs, smoke, snort or inject them.

Yet many prescription drugs, such as Vicodin or Oxycontin, can be fatal when mixed with other substances or taken at a strong enough dosage.

Surged among youth

Though evident in past decades, prescription drug abuse took off in 2005, particularly among those in their late teens to early 20s, said Jeff Beatty, a Kaiser Permanente chemical dependency counselor.

Nationwide, seven of the top 10 drugs abused by 12th-graders were prescribed or purchased over the counter, the 2008 NIDA survey found. The prescription drug trend transcends all social classes.

In Clark County, prescription drug abuse has risen at an "alarming rate" in schools, said sheriff's Sgt. Mike McCabe, who supervises the sheriff's school resource officers.

Teachers or officers find students handing out drugs in hallways, during classes or at lunch. On some occasions, students don't know what drug they're taking. They don't question the unidentified pills handed to them.

"In the past, we've focused on alcohol and (illicit) drugs, like marijuana," McCabe said. "That problem definitely still exists. This is a new trend. It's harder to detect than alcohol but equally as dangerous."

Law enforcement's greatest roadblock is the fact that most prescription drugs are odorless and symptoms nearly undetectable — unlike alcohol, which causes obvious physical signs.

Also, students can bring drugs to school and share with friends under the guise that "it's a prescription."

Officers catch some dealers on school grounds, but they believe the problem is widely unreported. "We're not catching that many, although in the past year we've seen an increase in arrests of students," McCabe said.

One person detained by officers was an 18-year-old Heritage High School student. Last November, the student was taken into custody by sheriff's deputies after he was spotted handing out Darvocet, the trade name for the opioid painkiller dextropropoxyphene. The student had worked as a pharmacy technician and was filling a prescription when he stole extra pills, according to police reports.

A teacher saw him hand a pill to a student complaining about pain in his ribs, police reports said.

Overdoses, on the other hand, are rare but still do happen, police say. Some don't result in death; others do. Just last month, an 18-year-old Portland-area high school senior overdosed on an oxycodone pill and died. Last week, three men pleaded guilty in connection with her death. The pill that she had smoked was prescribed to one of the defendants by a Vancouver doctor, according to court documents.

Last year, detectives investigated the death of a 12-year-old Clark County boy as a possible drug overdose because of a foamy substance found in the boy's nostrils, said Clark County sheriff's Detective Sgt. Dave Trimble. Lab results were inconclusive.

Out of control

Though Jeff Deschner had a history of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, he was a handsome, clean-cut and meticulously dressed kid from a good family. In his early teen years, he wasn't a known drug user.

That all changed after a Fort Vancouver High School football game his sophomore year. During the game, Deschner tore his anterior cruciate ligament in his knee and was prescribed Vicodin to relieve post-surgery pain.

Over the next few months, Deschner's doctor offered numerous refills, as the teen continued to complain about pain.

Deschner's mother spoke up: "I felt uncomfortable with it. I felt it was excessive," she said. "Every time I turned around, (the doctor) was writing a prescription."

It soon became apparent to his mother that the prescriptions were more than just for pain.

At one doctor's appointment, Deschner forged a prescription and later took it to a pharmacy. The clerk thought it looked suspicious, refused to fill it and notified the doctor and Deschner's parents.

He once underwent unnecessary dental work to obtain drugs.

His parents admitted him to an outpatient treatment center briefly at Southwest Washington Medical Center. His addiction persisted largely because, at that point, Deschner didn't want help.

Eventually local physicians and dentists started noticing the same drug-seeking trend with Deschner. He stopped receiving prescriptions for Vicodin. So he switched to heroin, an opioid with the same calming, euphoric effect.

After a series of arrests, Deschner decided he needed help. He tried several different treatment programs, mostly short-term. His parents, promising they would help him stay clean, invited him to come home.

That would last two or three days, and then Deschner would leave again.

In December 2003, Deschner told his parents he was going to the Seattle area to try a new treatment program. Instead, he visited a friend and the two went to a stranger's house.

The news came the next day to his parents, when they arrived home from a skiing trip to find a deputy medical examiner on their doorstep.

A lethal combination of methadone tablets and benzodiazepine, which is found in the anti-anxiety drugs Valium and Xanax, had stopped his heart.

The rest of the details are a mystery to his mother.

"I never thought he would die, because he had fought so hard," she said.

Since then, Kathy Deschner has made it a mission to warn teens of the dangers of all drugs, legal and illegal. She serves as co-chairwoman of the nonprofit Prevent! The Substance Abuse Coalition of Clark County, which was formed in 2007. The organization, made up of community members, hosts speakers and puts on events to raise awareness of drug and alcohol abuse.

In schools, resource officers are doing what they can. In January, officers underwent a specialized training course by a Washington State Patrol drug recognition expert to detect signs of prescription drug overuse.

In addition, both Vancouver Police Department and Clark County sheriff's resource officers have integrated prescription drug abuse into alcohol and drug abuse curriculum in schools.

Officials are on the right track, McCabe said, and he hopes these efforts will send a message of zero tolerance.

"There needs to be a tremendous amount of education that starts in the home and then school. Courts need to follow up with convictions," he said. "Education is going to be the big key" in prevention.

Still, there's a lot more that needs to be done to change teens' complacent mindset, Kathy Deschner said.

"Kids are using prescription drugs and they don't know how dangerous they are," she said. "It can be deadly quickly."


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Medical Director: Board-Certified by American Board of Anesthesiology 1994, former chief of cardiac anesthesia, University of Nevada School of Medicine.

Board-Certified by American Board of Pain Medicine 1997, Clinical Assistant Professor University Nevada School of Medicine