LESSONS OF MY SON'S DRUG DEATH

The stereotypical drug addict doesn't exist. Instead, think Little
League, Boy Scouts, cheerleaders, soccer practice, piano lessons. The
truth is, nice kids next door do drugs and die of them.

I should know - I lost my 25-year-old son to drugs.

Yet we parents are often the worst-equipped to help because we don't
want to believe our kids are on drugs. We don't want to believe that
with our nice homes, hard work and anti-drug education in schools,
and giving them the best we can think of, they can still head down
the path to self-destruction.

Finding out your kid is on drugs is one of the most demoralizing
experiences of being a parent. Complicating an already hellish
situation is that the addict will hide behind manipulative behaviors
worthy of a CIA agent. He will assume an entirely clean persona, like
the son congratulated by his father for being sober for an entire
year - who wound up dead in his bed a few hours later.

The current HBO "Addiction" series (also available online) examines
the disease of drug addiction and explains why it is truly a disease
- - something society doesn't yet know and but too many of us parents
have been forced to understand. And something the system of rehabs
and detox houses can't really deal with.

Researchers report that about 60 percent of drug-addicted people have
some initial underlying mental illness, like depression and anxiety,
which, paradoxically, are the very conditions that also develop from
prolonged drug use. They begin the endless cycle of self-medication.
Some have reasons and excuses; some just like to get high.

There is a proliferation of information out there, from the
scientific community, medical research and community movements, some
faith-based, trying to get the word out there in a deeper way than
the well-intentioned Just Say No programs of the '80s did. They don't work.

Parents who have struggled, loved and lost their children speak in
schools, lobby Washington, and join a host of other unique projects.
One brave mother brings her son with her to schools in New Jersey.
She does the speaking. He survived a heroin-induced coma, is a
paraplegic, arrives with her in his wheelchair, and drools.

For parents and their children, there are no guarantees because
addiction disease involves the mind, too, and we in our culture
always believe that you can control your mind with willpower. It
doesn't always work.

I am encouraged by the surgeon general who believes that blood tests
for drugs should be a mandatory part of physicals and the new
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration director who is
committed to making the research and treatment of mentally ill
chemical abusers top priority. I am in touch with researchers all
over the country, applauding their efforts and encouraging them.

I tell them about my 25-year-old son. I feel comforted in
corresponding with them because they give my son's life and his death
dignity. He isn't just another statistic with them.

The public needs to continue to encourage these researchers in their
hard, long and tedious work, to find inroads into understanding and
better treatments of the addicted brain, especially in navigating the
tricky and intricate waters of mental illness and substance abuse
when they co-occur.

But I won't brave the waters yet of ordinary everyday people. I know
the reactions my fellow bereaved moms have endured, complicating
their grief. They are looked upon askance, with disparaging remarks.
My husband's point: Let people remember our son as the loving,
kindhearted, sensitive, fun-loving soul, committed to family, which
he was. Why sully his image and have people react with, "Oh, just
another drug death."

My son is not just another drug death. But I understand from where it
comes: I, too, felt that only kids from disadvantaged backgrounds and
thoroughly dysfunctional homes succumbed to drugs.

I have no answers, but I can give out some red flags. Watch out for
extended sleepovers in the teen years. Excessive and late sleeping
beyond noon on weekends and daily if they are out of school and
unemployed. Do not rely on urine tests; they are faked more often
than not. Either someone "clean" is supplying them for a price or
they are using some other means to disguise their use.

Medical research needs to harness bad drugs, and isolate their
feel-good properties and develop them into medicines that won't kill
the host, but help in gradual weaning in a controlled, supervised
environment. Children who have ADHD, anxiety, depression,
obsessive-compulsive disorder, learning disabilities and a host of
other mental conditions that interfere with their lives are
especially prone to drug use.

Psychiatrists and psychologists must be savvy and wiser than they are
now. Physicians need to ask probing questions and be suspicious of
someone asking for pain medications. They have fast become one of the
easiest drugs to abuse. So must teachers be aware. Administrators
need to monitor their buildings and not bury their heads in the sand
about what's going on on school grounds, in bathrooms and parking lots.

Schools are among the most fertile grounds for drug sales. Principals
and superintendents should not only institute drug-free schools but
stand by those policies.

Anyone convicted of driving drunk or high must be put into drug
rehab, not jail - especially first-time offenders - and be forced to
tour a nursing home where there are 35-year-old men in diapers from
decades of abuse to their organs. It is not to be taken lightly and
assumed to be a first and only time use. And any teen or young adult
arrested should consider himself lucky to get off with this sobering
warning. The worst is yet to come.

To parents, I say, if you know of someone's teen using street drugs
or abusing prescription meds, either firsthand, or through word of
mouth by your child, speak up! It takes courage, but the discomfort
is worth it. Be wary of a child who reports of others' use to you. It
may be a ruse to make you think "not my child." Users are masters of deceit.

And a final note to parents of kids who die of drugs: We aren't
psychologists, police or wardens. We are just parents who love our children. *

The Daily News is withholding the author's name at her request to
spare her family further pain.