DIFFERENT PATHS, SAME DEVASTATION

CHESTERTON, DRUGS: Heroin Addict, 'Good' Father Look To Warn Of Drug
Destruction

CHESTERTON -- You can't see the connection by looking at them.

Bill is 56, an avuncular figure with neat gray hair and an easy smile
beneath wire rim glasses. He's at home in a cardigan.

Max, at 26, has a more windblown look to his short dark hair and ruddy
face. He's an informal, T-shirt sort of dude.

A generation apart, Bill Sexton and Max Donnella share a connection neither
would have wished for: Their lives have been scourged by drugs. Now both
are intent on saving others from the same fate.

For Donnella, it was a heroin addiction that led him to rock bottom: A
robber's gun to the side of his head shortly after a drug purchase in the
housing projects on Chicago's South Side.

For Sexton, his 16-year-old daughter's marijuana and alcohol use took him
down: The middle-of-the-night call saying she'd been in a crash with three
friends and wasn't expected to live through the night.

Pot, painkillers and worse

The story of Donnella's descent into drug use has a certain stomach-turning
ease and awfulness to it.

Pot came first, in high school, because it was a big deal to hang out with
"that crowd." He jumped to the painkiller Loratab when he found some at
home after his mother's surgery.

"I was 15. I saw them sitting there in the medicine cabinet. 'Take one for
pain.' OK. ... That really messed me up.

"As soon as I took that first painkiller -- this just feels fantastic."

Donnella didn't care. "If I die, I die," he thought.

He did Fentanyl, a gel within an arm patch, designed to release the drug
over a 72-hour period. Eventually, Donnella started cutting open the
patches and eating the gel. It was intense, he said. It made his friends
sicker than a dog. He'd try it every two or three months and end up
"totally zoned out."

He did another painkiller, Vicodin, for years.

Then he moved on to OxyContin, another narcotic painkiller known as
"hillbilly heroin." He was able to get the drug fairly cheap from a friend
with multiple sclerosis.

It got to the point when he'd have to take way too many to feel anything.

Finally another buddy introduced him to heroin, which he found he could get
for far cheaper: $10 for a baggie of heroin versus $40 for some OxyContin.

He began shooting up and that was it. He had to have it.

"It's the greatest feeling in the whole world, like floating on freakin'
cloud nine," he said. But that's before the after-effects would leave him
curled up in pain.

"I never knew it could be that bad. It was 10 times worse than I thought."

The crash

Bill Sexton and his wife, Zathoe, were admittedly naive about drug use
until she found some marijuana in their daughter's jeans in the fall of
1984. Debbie denied it was hers, and said she was carrying it for a friend.
The episode came as a wake-up call for the parents, who flushed the pot,
had the drug talk with their daughter and started watching her friends
"much, much closer." When she went out, she got more pointed questioning of
her plans than before.

Still, they couldn't avert that snowy January night. The four teens did a
bait-and-switch, each telling their parents they were going to another's
home, when in fact they were headed to an unsupervised party where alcohol
and marijuana were available.

On the way home, no doubt trying to make their 11 p.m. curfew, the kids
crashed. Two lived, two died. Debbie was found crushed inside a fold-down
seat of the station wagon, with massive head injuries that would leave her
with a radically different personality and future.

Rehab and pure pain

Unfortunately for Donnella, he'd had a $100,000 fund set up for him by his
grandfather at a local bank and he figured out how to access it on his own.
He started making regular heroin runs for his friends and himself to the
Chicago projects.

For years he'd been able to hide the daily pill use, but his family figured
out the sunken eyes, the long sleeve shirts in the summer, the weight loss,
the dope sickness. His fiancee left him. One brother threatened he'd never
see his niece again.

"It's just the worst drug in the world," Donnella said.

The heroin finally broke him, and he told his mother through tears that he
was an addict.

His family got him into a three-month treatment program in Michigan last
September, where weeks of "pure pain" from the body cramps during detox
alternated with boredom, feeling like a million bucks and re-learning to
deal with life's problems. Rehab can work only if the addict wants it,
Donnella says, and he wanted it.

It was too late for his cousin, Josh, a fellow heroin addict who died in
February of an overdose.

Like an infant

After the accident, Debbie was comatose for four months. She came home in
June, with no control of her body, no language. She had to be fed through
tubes and was in a wheelchair another three months. Gradually, she
re-learned simple words -- "what you'd expect an infant to do," Sexton says.

Because of aggression brought on by her traumatic brain injury, Debbie had
to be cared for in a group home for a while. She has made more progress
than anyone expected and now lives independently, but mentally she's only
half her real age.

"Is this what I had in mind for my daughter?" Sexton asks.

Fighting back

Sexton and his wife threw themselves into the twin causes of drug education
and disability advocacy. She started the Positive Life anti-drug program at
Chesterton High School, went back to school and got a master's in social
work. He spoke to school groups about drugs. They both joined a support
group that deals with head injuries. For their younger daughter's sake,
they went to drug and alcohol training to learn the indicators of drug use
and courses of action for intervention.

Now Sexton sits on the Porter Town Council. The recent renewed interest in
Duneland in addressing drugs brings him a bad sense of deja vu because the
problem, if anything, has gotten worse.

He has proposed that town officials go door to door, as they did to get
elected, and survey residents about drug issues. This would collect
baseline information and residents' concerns, allowing progress to be
measured on future surveys, he says. He also wants to get onto the town's
Web site names of neighbors or organizations parents can contact for
information or help.

The hardest thing to deal with

Donnella, too, wants to help, wants to let kids know drugs suck. But he's
not totally sure how.

"I have no clue what to tell these kids to get them not to try it but tell
them horror stories. Yeah, it feels great. Wait till you come off it. It is
not pretty. ... It's horrible. I just wish those people would know before
they even try it."

He has offered his services as a speaker in schools to the Porter County
Drug Task Force coordinator. In March, he electrified the audience at a
Chesterton Town Council workshop with his story.

He thinks drug testing can be part of the solution because he knows from
experience how much and how well users lie. Cough suppressants, he says,
should be kept behind the counter at pharmacies. Pharmacists should call
and double-check with the doctor on every narcotic prescription they get.

The most pressing need, he believes, is a treatment center for addicts,
like the one that cleaned him up.

Donnella doesn't think for an instant that community effort will end the
problem of drug abuse. Even slowing it down won't be easy. Despite his
experience, he has friends who are still using.

"This is probably the hardest thing this town has ever had to deal with,"
Donnella says.

Fighting with this the rest of my life

Good kids, bad kids, rich kids, poor kids -- drug abuse and addiction can
happen to anyone, Sexton says. A friend of Donnella's grandparents, he
remembers a much younger Max -- a typical, nice kid you couldn't conceive
of on drugs.

Sexton has this warning for parents: If you find marijuana, you have a
serious problem. By itself, the drug can have serious health impacts on the
body. And, yes, he believes, it can be a gateway drug to others.

Now that he's freed himself of heroin, Donnella feels sure he can keep
things that way.

"I love being sober. I freaking love it." And he now has two nieces, with a
nephew on the way. "No way I'm messing that up again," he says.

But it's not a given.

"I will be fighting with this the rest of my life," he says.

"It's been a horrendous trip," Sexton says of his family's experience.
"We're reminded of it virtually every day of our lives."