HEROIN DEATHS AMONG YOUNG PUZZLE AFFLUENT PLANO

Apex Of Suburbia Has Seen 11 Fatal Overdoses Since '96

PLANO, Texas This is a great place to raise children. Except when they
die. The golden buckle of the Sun Belt, its subdivisions and business parks
swelling with whitecollar migrants, Plano is by almost every measure the
apex of educated suburbia clean streets, big houses, 113 lighted ball
fields.

With just two or three murders annually, this Dallasarea boom town of
nearly 200,000 is Texas' safest city and one of America's Top 10. The
Children's Environmental Index calls it the nation's fourth most
childfriendly community, based on socioeconomic data such as dropout rates
and household incomes. Its high school boasts an Academic Decathlon
championship, a prize that earned the team a White House visit with
President Clinton.

Then there is this measure: 11 young people dead of heroin overdoses since
last year.

Almost all of them were students, mostly popular, athletic and affluent
"nice, preppie, middleclass children," in the words of one drug abuse
expert. They ranged in age from 15 to 22, a football player, a philosophy
major, a former altar boy, a Marine home for the holidays. Four died last
year, seven so far this year. And still the emergency room at Columbia
Medical Center reports an average of three to five overdoses a week
unconscious, vomitstained teenagers, often dumped at the hospital doors
by friends in brandnew Wranglers and Range Rovers and Expeditions.

One now lies in a coma, his family searching for some sign of life to keep
him from becoming No. 12.

"How's this for a cleancut, allAmericanlooking young man?" said Lowell
Hill, pulling out a walletsize photo of his blondhaired, squarejawed
son, Robert, a 1997 graduate of Plano East Senior High.

On Aug. 20, he found Rob slumped over in bed. When doctors pronounced him
dead of an overdose at the same hospital that welcomed him into the
world 18 years earlier his father was incredulous.

"How do you know?" the former life insurance executive asked.

"He was a happy boy," said his mother, Andrea, a specialeducation teacher.
"The last thing on my mind was to talk to my son about heroin."

The culprit, which has enjoyed a startling resurgence from the depths of
the 1960s to the heights of trendiness in the 1990s, is widely available in
Plano and conveniently packaged usually in antihistamine capsules that
can be broken open and snorted, avoiding the stigma of needles and
syringes. Sold for $10 to $20 a hit, the powder is marketed here under
heroin's Spanish nickname "chiva," which to Plano's predominantly white
youths sounds a lot more like a designer drug than oldfashioned smack.

"I didn't even know what it was the first time I tried it, but I liked it
and I wasn't really interested in finding out," said Donald Jason Smith,
19, a recovering addict who has spent the past five months in county jail
for heroin possession.

He described himself as someone with "good morals" who was "brought up not
to do drugs." But once you cross that line, no matter how naively, "the
drug grabs ahold of you and doesn't let go," Smith said.

"I've taken friends to the hospital after they've overdosed and then gone
right back to where we were and kept on using."

What makes the tally in Plano so troubling is not just that this is a
bastion of privilege, although that undoubtedly has helped propel it into
the news. What so rattles Plano is that it already has been through an
epidemic like this, making headlines in the early 1980s when eight
teenagers committed suicide, and a dozen others attempted it, in one
ninemonth spurt.

In two decades, Plano has gone from a quiet hamlet of 3,000 nestled in the
cotton and soya fields 20 miles north of Dallas to a highachieving bedroom
community of 100,000, its growth fueled by Eastern professionals chasing
the Southwest's newfound prosperity.

"If you drive through Plano, there are miles upon miles of huge, brandnew
houses enormous houses, 12 feet apart and there's nobody there all
day long," said Sabina Stern, coordinator for the Collin County Substance
Abuse Program, a local referral agency.

"Dad works. Mom works. Long hours," she said. "Frequently one of them
travels. Nobody eats dinner together any more. When do they talk? In the
car? While they're chauffeuring their kids from one activity to another,
from school to ballet to soccer? It's insane."

Many of Plano's young addicts were given their own $20,000 cars as soon as
they turned 16. Some have credit cards and $100aweek allowances. "A lot
of the parents have said that they saw no sign of drugs," added Stern, who
starts every day by scanning the obituaries. "You don't want to be cruel.
But sometimes you wonder how hard they looked."