UH STUDENT'S DEATH A LESSON IN SUBSTANCE ABUSE

Jake Elmore came back to Hawai'i this fall to go to school. But mostly he
came here to save himself.

Instead, the 23-year-old, 6-foot-tall business student left his UH dorm room
six weeks ago in a body bag, the victim of accidental poisoning by a toxic
mixture of alcohol and methadone, according to autopsy findings.

Like so many other young people, Jake was trying to find his way through a
complex and competitive world where expectations are high, the risks seem
tame, and alcohol and drugs are as seemingly plentiful as cappuccino.

But his death, the 14th so far this year related to methadone, is raising
alarm about its lethal combination with alcohol and other drugs. And it has
UH officials re-evaluating and questioning their policies and counseling
options regarding alcohol and drug use.

"These kids are thinking they're just taking one or two tablets, but in
combination with other drugs or alcohol methadone can be toxic," said Dr.
Kanthi von Guenthner, the city's medical examiner. "The combination
depresses the respiratory system and can induce coma and death.

"The bottom line is all these depressant drugs -- alcohol, opiates, Valium,
methadone -- should never be taken in combination."

It is not clear how Elmore came to take methadone on the night of Aug. 29.
His friends say he was partying hard after surfing that day, drinking maybe
eight beers. He told one of them he also took some painkillers.

A few months earlier he had combined Ritalin and alcohol before going to a
dance club, thinking it would make him mellow, said his best friend, Ricky
Castello. When Castello got upset and told him it was a dumb thing to do,
Elmore sheepishly agreed.

Deaths are rare on the UH campus. Elmore's was the first and only student
death in seven years related to drug and alcohol use. Even before the final
autopsy report was released, UH officials were concerned.

"When something like this happens it makes everyone look back and ask 'Are
we being vigilant?'" said UH Vice President for External Affairs Paul
Costello. "You cannot let it pass without stopping and thinking about how we
can do this better."

Counseling sessions for drugs and alcohol are regularly scheduled through
student health services, with sessions offered specifically in the dorms by
Mike Taleff, coordinator of the Alcohol Drug Education Program.

Last weekend UH launched a new program to offer an alternative to drinking
-- late-night events with free food in the athletic complex.

"We want to have head-to-head competition with drinking," Taleff said. "It's
an alternative invitation -- late-night basketball, volleyball, a free
movie, or get drunk and puke off the lanai."

Taleff is now also talking about dangerous combinations in his counseling
sessions.

"We're bringing up the subject of not mixing drugs and certainly not taking
anything that someone offers you," he said.

But it's possible Jake Elmore didn't know what he took that night, said his
mother, Pam Elmore, from Tacoma, Wash. His trunk shipped by his parents was
still unpacked in his room, and with it the Motrin he took for recurring
back pain suffered as a result of skiing injuries.

Trying to gain meaning from her son's death, Jake's mother pleads with other
young people to be vigilant and not trust what someone else may offer.

"I just don't want any other kids to do this," she said tearfully. "I don't
want anyone else to have this heartache."

"As parents you just think you know your kids, but you don't," she said in
the first days after her son's death. "You don't know everything they're
doing. And you never will ... You listen to these things on the radio and
you see these things on TV that if you're just there for your kids they're
going to be fine. And it's not always true. Everything we could do, we were
there, and it still happened."

Though the Honolulu Police Department's narcotics and vice division officers
have seen no recent spikes in methadone street use in Hawai'i, it has
definitely been part of the illicit drug scene since the 1960s when it was
first used therapeutically to fight heroin addiction but soon found its way
to the street as a pain killer and "downer."

However, far more common today is the upsurge in other illicit drugs in pill
form and aimed specifically at young people.

"The people putting these together are preying on kids and their innocence,"
said Capt. Kevin Lima of the narcotics/vice division. "It's a pill and
appears to be less harmful, which couldn't be further from the truth.

"People think they're pretty invincible when they're that age."

Elmore fits that description. A fearless athlete, skier, ball player,
surfer, he was the life of every party, and everyone's buddy.

"He just made everything fun," said Nick Crump, his roommate last semester.

"Everyone just liked to be with him, you couldn't not be his friend," said
Pat Wardle, who roomed with him part of the summer.

For many of them his loss was their first brush with mortality.

In a windy twilight a few nights after his death, more than 100 of his
fellow students came together in the courtyard between the Hale Noelani dorm
buildings, to plant a baby palm tree and remember someone who had made their
lives bigger than themselves.

Sheltering candles, brushing away tears and carrying white carnations to lay
beside his photograph, they called him the best friend they'd ever had. Jake
was their inspiration and delight, the flame that drew them closer. Jake was
the one who headed off for class one day in a backpack and boxers, who never
sweated the small stuff, who made them grateful they were young.

He told the worst jokes and was always ready to offer a ride somewhere in
Squirrel, his old maroon car with the lousy brakes.

"We were going to start a club together someday, be in each other's
weddings, be friends forever," said Castello, who helped him to his room
around 4 a.m. the day he died because he was so woozy he couldn't make it up
the stairs.

Castello remembers Jake leaning on the railing for a while in the night air,
not wanting to go right to bed. He left him there and headed to his own
room, worried because their first class was just a few hours away. At 5:45
p.m., Jake was found dead in his second-floor dorm room.

For all his humor, Jake Elmore lived with demons. He was on probation for a
drunk driving arrest in Washington state, and was seeing a counselor trying
to deal with his problem.

He wasn't alone. Drinking is a way of life on college campuses across the
country, and UH is no exception. A recent Harvard School of Public Health
study of 14,000 students at 119 four-year colleges, showed 31 percent fit
the criteria for alcohol abuse, with 6 percent alcohol-dependent. Five years
ago the College Alcohol Study found that one fifth of college students binge
drink two or three times a week.

"We've got pockets of problems in the dorms," UH counselor Taleff said. "And
we also have a culture in the dorms that celebrates excessive drinking. It's
been around this campus for decades.

"But you also have another crowd down there that carries baggage from high
school -- drinking and drug baggage. They've heard so many people put the
accusing finger to them that they just turn off."

Jake was one of those with baggage. Struggling to break away from a
relationship with an old girlfriend, he had come to Hawai'i for solace,
distance, and a new beginning. But his problems with her, and with himself
began in his senior high school year when he seemed to grow tired of
striving to get ahead, his mother remembered.

"His whole life he had known exactly what he was going to do," she said of
his brilliant baseball career through his early high school years, and his
high academic achievements. "He did everything he was supposed to do."

Senior year changed all that. After devoting so much of his life to school
and baseball, he told his mother he was tired of trying to succeed so hard
in those areas.

A powerful hitter with a batting average of .500, Jake had a flock of
college scouts sniffing around. But when he slacked off, the opportunities
dried up.

"Parents cannot feel guilty, they can only do so much," his mother said.
"It's up to the child. All you can do is love them and try to figure things
out. When they're 17 or 18 you cannot make them do things. If they have it
in their mind they're not doing anything wrong, it's very, very hard."

Soon Jake was partying and drinking and spending more time with friends than
his studies. The big college offers disappeared and he went to a community
college near his home. On his 21st birthday Jake got so drunk with a friend
that he drove home at 5 mph and still hit a fence. He was arrested for drunk
driving and put on probation.

"We thought it was a blessing when it happened because nobody was hurt,"
said his mother, "and it opened his eyes he couldn't be so reckless."

When he signed up for counseling and transferred to UH last January, it felt
right. Pam Elmore made the phone calls to find him a counselor and flew over
to join him for the first appointment. She felt he was in good hands.

"The last six months he acknowledged he had a problem," she said. "Part of
his deferred prosecution was getting counseling once a month and going to AA
meetings twice a week."

In Hawai'i, Jake learned to surf and was returning to baseball and thinking
of trying out for the UH team this season. And he was concentrating on
business courses -- a future that had begun taking shape in his mind.

"He was trying to turn his life around," Castello said. "He gave up hard
alcohol, and he told his old girlfriend to leave him alone."

Just before he came back to Hawai'i, he shared a golden summer trip with his
parents, boating through the Canadian Gulf Islands up the coast from their
Tacoma home. Every morning they'd drop the crab pot over the side and then,
shirtless, Jake and his dad would lower the skiff and head out on the
shining Pacific to troll for salmon.

"He was very at peace," his father said. "Just being with each other was
special."

They lazed by the hour in the 85-degree warmth, the tail end of a nationwide
heat wave, and Jake told them he had come to realize he had to change his
drinking habits. He said he realized he could no longer handle hard liquor,
that it "really made him crazy," said his father. If he was going to party,
he said, he would stick to beer.

When he boarded a plane to return to Hawai'i a week before he died, he did
so with new determination that he would live with a new set of guidelines
amid all the pressures he would undoubtedly face, his father remembered. "He
thought he could handle that."