FROM HEROIN TO HEARTBREAK

Epidemic Of Death Is Hitting Addicts And Novice Users Alike

They came from different worlds.

Oscar Scaggs was the 21-year-old son of a famous rock musician -- a
product of San Francisco's high society who could light up a room with
his animated storytelling and his funky, polyester wardrobe.

Daniel Sanders, 19, came from a tree-lined, upper-middle-class
neighborhood in the Oakland hills. He played haunting melodies on his
jazz guitar and planned to someday be a great chef.

Twenty-two-year-old Jennifer Holder was a dark-eyed beauty from a
military family who once hoped to help people less fortunate, but
ended up getting lost in the street life of San Francisco.

In just over a month they all came to the same tragic end -- found in
skid-row hotel rooms, dead of suspected heroin overdoses.

And they were hardly the only ones.

Since Nov. 30, at least 16 people have died of suspected intravenous
drug overdoses in San Francisco. Coroner's officials say it's almost
always heroin, and that it's an epidemic that is hitting rich and
poor, young and old.

The Dec. 31 death of Oscar Scaggs, son of blues rocker Boz Scaggs, put
the issue on the front pages. Before that, few paid much attention.

"People have to wake up. This is not just happening to kids who are
homeless or are runaways," said Sarah Sanders, who lost her son,
Daniel, to a heroin overdose Nov. 30, despite the fact that he was in
a recovery program and seemed on his way to breaking his addiction.

"People have this stigma that if kids get involved in drugs they must
be gang members or dropouts," said Sarah Sanders. "But that isn't
what's happen ing. It's much bigger than that. This stuff is
everywhere."

With crack cocaine losing popularity, police say cheap, super-potent
heroin is moving in to take its place as the drug of choice in U.S.
cities. It's been accompanied by a huge increase in the heroin-related
death rate.

Since the early '80s, the annual number of heroin deaths in San
Francisco has increased fivefold, from fewer than 20 in 1983 to an
average of more than 100, according to coroner's records.

The majority of those dying of overdoses are not young neophytes to
the drug world, but long-term heroin addicts who are older and more
hardened to the drug, said San Francisco Coroner Boyd Stephens. Yet
his office notes grim indications that the drug is making its way into
youth culture.

"We don't see a whole lot of kids," said Stephens. "Most of the deaths
are middle-aged. But the frightening thing is that the ages of those
who die are dropping."

Some overlooked victims

Every heroin user killed by the addictive and deadly drug leaves a
heart-breaking story.

Ask the friends of Guy Biggins, 43, a former electrician and father
who had slipped into homelessness after a divorce, but became a
beloved regular at a 10th Avenue market. Biggins had just gotten a job
as a laborer and worked hard for two weeks.

He died of an overdose soon after his first paycheck Dec.
28.

Or ask the family of James Peter Hanson, 40, a car fanatic from
boyhood who fulfilled a dream of starting his own successful
car-repair business but still suffered depression. The Terra Linda
resident's brothers and sisters are struggling to understand why he
died of an overdose Dec. 6.

That same day, paramedics discovered the body of Kenneth Tate, 37, who
had been released from jail a day before and had stopped at a
residential hotel for a rest before starting life over again. Tate
didn't live through his first night of freedom. Heroin overdose is
suspected, according to the coroner.

Perhaps most haunting are the tragedies of young people, some of whom
never get beyond the initial stages of experimentation with heroin.

Drug-treatment counselor Millicent Buxton, who worked with Oscar
Scaggs as he struggled with a heroin addiction that was in its early
stages, said many young people try the drug as a casual thrill but
quickly become trapped in an addiction that is almost impossible to
escape.

"The drug world is a very alluring thing," said Buxton, who said she
is a former heroin addict. "It's exercising your dark side. It seems
very cool.

"But the heroin out there is about 60 percent pure. It's like Russian
roulette. You may have someone who is barely using, and they score a
particularly potent dose and end up overdosing."

'The neatest kid'

The similarities between the deaths of Oscar Scaggs and 19-year-old
Daniel Sanders of Oakland illustrate how swiftly heroin can destroy
lives.

Both young men realized they were in over their heads within months of
beginning to experiment with the drug. Both had families that would do
almost anything to support their struggles. And both got themselves
into treatment programs, determined to get clean.

Yet, heroin claimed them both.

On Nov. 30, Sanders, whose parents described him as a talented artist
and sensitive, spiritual young man, decided to make a visit to San
Francisco from the Sonoma drug-treatment program, in which he
seemingly had been recovering successfully from his heroin abuse for
months.

He caught a bus to The City and checked into a Mission District hotel,
his parents said. Late in the evening, he called his drug-treatment
program and said he'd made a mistake. He'd used heroin again, he
confessed, and he wanted to come back to the program and straighten
himself out. His counselor told him to come straight back in the morning.

But Daniel Sanders didn't make it through that night.

"Daniel shouldn't be dead. That's all I can say," said his father,
Terry Sanders, an executive with Adtrans, the transportation company.
"He was the neatest kid. I think about going down to the Mission
District and just shooting those drug dealers."

Satan in your blood

Daniel had had some trouble with marijuana and alcohol in high school,
Terry Sanders said, and, during a rebellious stage, had dropped out of
school at 16.

Yet, almost as soon he tried heroin, he knew he had gone too far, his
dad said. Daniel went to his family and sought help just months after
being introduced to the drug by a youth he knew from night school in
Piedmont.

His father said Daniel only dabbled with heroin and never got hooked
enough to have the kind of whole-body withdrawal that hard-core users
suffer. According to Oscar Scaggs' treatment counselors, he didn't
suffer heavy-duty withdrawal, either.

Instead, it was the nagging cravings that hounded them both, according
to their doctors and parents.

Terry Turiello, a recovering addict who went through a drug-treatment
program at Sequoia Hospital with Oscar Scaggs last summer and allowed
him to stay at her home this fall, said she understands how heroin can
quickly take a young person's life hostage and make it nearly
impossible to win it back.

She talked of cravings that come back even years after the heroin
leaves the system and feel like "Satan coursing through your blood."

"You'll be driving down the street and you'll get an obsession," she
said. "All of a sudden you'll think, "I just need to fix this once. It
won't hurt me to do it this once.' Then another part of you will be
trying to argue. But I've found when you get those obsessions, you
almost never win."

His father's support

Oscar Scaggs could send a room full of people into peals of laughter
with his stories and impressions, Turiello said, but he lacked any
kind of streetwise toughness.

She recalled him talking of how he would one day make a movie
featuring all the bizarre characters he had met in treatment, then
scrunching up his face and playing their roles.

Oscar Scaggs, who also had experimented with marijuana before trying
heroin, went through several drug-treatment programs and did well for
months on end, she said. His family was there to support him and his
father even came to some of the rehabilitation meetings, she said.

But sometimes, Turiello said, Oscar had a hard time believing that he
was actually addicted.

"One of the things I really tried to do with Oscar was to take away
some of the glamour that is portrayed to these kids around heroin,"
she said.

Two weeks before Oscar's death, Turiello got a call from his mother,
Carmella Scaggs, who raved about how well her son was doing at staying
clean and about his new job at the trendy Diesel clothes store off
Union Square.

Yet, on Dec. 31, all that hope fell apart.

Oscar Scaggs' body was found at a rundown hotel on Valencia Street,
just blocks from where Daniel Sanders had died a month before.

Both families had battled for months to help pull their children out
of heroin's grip. Both were heart-broken.

"We lost the war," said Sarah Sanders, Daniel's mother. "I would have
sold my house to help Daniel with this. But I don't know what the
answer is. It's a huge epidemic and society's not paying attention to
it." Jennifer Holden's story

For Jennifer Dawn Holden, who died three days after her 22nd birthday,
addiction had progressed much further.

As a youth, she was spunky, with a dynamite smile, and always very
close to her family, according to Bob and Victoria Holden.

But as she grew older she developed a fiercely independent
streak.

After growing up in South Carolina, Texas and Japan, among other
places, the Holdens and their three children settled in Tacoma, Wash.,
where her father was an Air Force mechanic.

The next year, she "went in a different direction," says her mother,
Victoria, who last saw her daughter in good health in July. "She just
wanted to do her own thing all the time. She didn't like limits set
too much. She started not going to school and one thing led to another."

The Holdens tried to guide their daughter, sending her to live with
some in-laws in Seattle, placing her with a children's center for
youths with a variety of problems. Although Jennifer was a child who
"always wanted to make mom happy," she ended up on the streets of
Seattle's university district and eventually moved to San Francisco,
where she most recently stayed at a Tenderloin hotel.

From far away, she could cover up her 2.5-year-old heroin addiction,
constantly reassuring her family that she and her boyfriend were doing
fine, Victoria Holden said.

In September, Jennifer told her mother she would be coming home soon
to be with her family.

Then, three days after the death of Oscar Scaggs, a friend bringing
some food to Jennifer Holden's hotel room found her dying of an
overdose. "She loved her family very much," said Victoria Holden. "But
she couldn't beat this. And that's why she stayed away."