Series: In Heroin's Wake

CRITICISM OF PLANO MISSES THE BIGGER CULTURAL PROBLEM

Good grief, you might be thinking: Once again, teenagers in Plano are
fooling with heroin. Once again, some of them are overdosing and dying.

What is it about Plano, you might be wondering, that let this happen?

It's a fair question, but I'm not sure it's the right one. It's
certainly not the only one. You might also ask: What is it about
alienated, undersupervised kids?

Or what is it about simpleminded "just say no" drug education that
obviously doesn't make a lasting impression? Or what is it about
overly permissive baby-boomer parents so pathetically eager to be
"cool" that they won't subject their own adolescent children to
serious scrutiny?

Please, let's don't pile it all on Plano. This is a cultural problem,
not a geographical one.

They're not paying me to say this. I don't have especially strong
feelings about Plano at all, except for its absurdly prosaic name
(chosen by an early settler who thought it was the Spanish word for
"plains," which it isn't).

But for more than 20 years, Plano has been stereotyped as a rich,
smug suburb where Mom and Dad are so busy earning bloated salaries
and voting Republican and shopping at the big-box chain-retail malls
and driving their SUVs to the mega-church that they don't notice
their own children's souls are withering.

This broad stereotype was hatched in the early 1980s with a shocking
series of teenage suicides. Juxtaposed against the city's phenomenal
growth - those were the years when Plano was one of the biggest,
richest, fastest-growing suburbs in the country - it made a grim and
compelling story into an irresistible one.

There was more to come with a rash of teenage heroin deaths in the
1990s. One magazine article labeled the city a "teenage wasteland."
Another ran the scintillating headline: "The Jocks and Preps of
Plano, Texas, Couldn't Get Enough of a New Drug."

These stereotypes are not without factual foundation - stereotypes
rarely are - but to swallow them whole does a disservice not only to
the community itself but to the individual victims and their families.

The young heroin victim who was profiled in a riveting series by my
colleague Scott Parks over the last two days wasn't a spoiled
rich-kid jock. His family suffered dreadful tragedies. His father
lost his job. His mother was confined to a nursing home after she was
stricken with terminal Huntington's disease. The young man faced the
terrible possibility that he had inherited this cruel illness.

Every victim is different. Every family has its own private grief. To
suggest that the mere fact of living in Plano (or living any place
else) makes kids kill themselves or abuse dangerous drugs is not only
stupid, it's counterproductive.

"We're no better, no worse than any other affluent community," said
Gayle Jensen-Savoie, who heads the Seay Behavioral Health Center at
Presbyterian Hospital of Plano.

Ms. Savoie said you can't compare communities like Plano with poor,
urban neighborhoods, which have problems of their own.

But, she said, Plano parents are no different from parents everywhere
trying to navigate their children over the rocky shoals of adolescence.

She believes the thunderous publicity that started with the suicides
in the 1980s helped inoculate the city from a paralyzing fear of
negative publicity.

"Do I think there are problems? Yes," she said. "Do I think there's a
bigger problem in Plano than anywhere else? No," she said. "But at
least we're not afraid to be the poster child" for communities coping
with teen alienation.

They must feel it, though. When community groups launched a new
effort a few years back to combat the rise of methamphetamine abuse,
they purposely omitted "Plano" from its name, instead choosing
"Collin County Substance Abuse Coalition." Perhaps there was a
feeling that Plano had already been singled out enough for its
substance abuse problems.

The factors that feed teenage despair and alienation are varied and
complicated. They exist in Plano - and everywhere else.