Teenage Wasteland
It doesn’t matter what time it is. Do you know where your children are? If you live in Plano, one of Texas’ toniest suburbs, they may be strung out on heroin somewhere. Or on trial for distributing it. Or dead.
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THE HEROIN CAME FROM THE FOOTHILLS of the Sierra Madres—scarlet blossoms that when cooked down to a gummy paste over makeshift grills in the poppy fields of Southern Mexico promised to deliver everything that Plano was not. “When it hits you, you feel no pain, no worries,” says seventeen-year-old Jonathan Kollman, a minister’s son who is serving a one-year sentence at the Collin County jail for dealing heroin. “You feel really relaxed and good inside.”
First synthesized for wounded soldiers, heroin’s express purpose is to inhibit the brain’s ability to perceive pain; it also mimics the body’s natural production of endorphins, but at an accelerated rate. The initial rush is a rapturous, slack-jawed jolt that lasts for a minute or two, after which the drug’s euphoric effects fade into a warm, drowsy state that lasts for several hours. Unlike cocaine or speed, heroin slows things down to a pleasurable state of apathy, giving the illusion that all needs—hunger, thirst, human interaction—have been fulfilled. “It takes the edge off things,” Clay Roper, a soft-spoken twenty-year-old, told me as he sat at his mother’s kitchen table, his hands folded neatly in front of him.
Mexican black tar heroin, known by the nickname chiva, came to Plano by way of Laredo, where it was hidden in the hollowed-out soles of shoes and walked across the border, then driven up Interstate 35 to Dallas and destinations beyond. Competition between the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels for control of the emerging heroin market drove up the purity of the drug—from 5 or 6 percent a decade ago to upward of 50 percent in the past two years—making it a popular drug with a new crowd: Its potency meant that it could be snorted rather than injected, delivering the same high without the needles. “No one would have touched the stuff if it meant sticking a needle in your arm,” explains nineteen-year-old Sean Isaac, an affable blond who attended the same rehab program as his father, a recovering cocaine addict. Neatly packaged in gel caps, it was the blissful high of heroin without the mess, and many teenagers figured that if they weren’t shooting it, they weren’t in danger of developing a habit. It was cut with Dormin, an over-the-counter sleeping pill that slowed down the high, prolonging its effects and eliminating heroin’s runny noses and watery eyes with an added antihistamine, and it was given away for free at first, handed out along with the pot and cocaine that teenagers were already buying on the east side. Dealers started charging for it once they had repeat customers, offering free caps to those who brought friends back with them.
Heroin easily slid into Plano’s weekend scene, in which teenagers often drove out to field parties on the fringes of the neighboring towns of Allen or McKinney, where they could set up a keg or pass around a joint without looking over their shoulders for cops. There was no great mystery as to why they started experimenting with chiva: It was regularly described as the best high anyone had ever felt, and it was perfect escapism. “It was always, ‘Let’s get messed up this weekend,’” says twenty-year-old Chris Cooper, a clean-cut Plano Senior High dropout, describing the boredom, drinking, and casual drug use that is by no means unique to Plano. “You want to party with your friends and feel good, to get that buzz. You don’t think about the future.” The son of a Dallas television producer and a resident of a well-heeled West Plano neighborhood, Cooper had already experimented with a number of drugs, beginning with pot in the eighth grade. In his senior year he was curious enough about chiva that he tried it for the first time one night after dinner while his mother was washing the dishes. He reached for a cap that friends had given him—he had tucked it under some shirts in his bureau for safekeeping—and snorted it, as he had done before with cocaine, lying down on his bed to wait for its effects. “It was this tranquil feeling, this amazing numbness,” he remembers. The next day he asked around about getting some more, and it wasn’t hard to find; one dealer sold chiva in the parking lot of the Disciples Christian Church across the street from Plano Senior High, while others would meet customers at the nearest gas station whenever they were paged. For the under-21 crowd, it was easier to get than beer: No one asked to see your I.D.
Heroin was seemingly without boundaries, a drug that people in all cliques—“The cheerleaders and the football players and the computer geeks and the guys with 3.5 GPAs,” says one recovering user—were experimenting with. Some had used pot, acid, or cocaine before, but heroin had its own particular appeal, and for people who got hooked, weekends quickly degenerated into finding a place “that we wouldn’t have to move from,” Cooper says, “where we could sit around and nod off.” For some teenagers, doing chiva every other weekend became doing chiva every weekend and then every day; initial withdrawal symptoms—achy joints, muscle spasms, hot-and-cold flashes—kicked in on days when they didn’t use it. “I started waking up in a cold sweat, and pretty soon I needed caps just to function,” Cooper recalls. “I would do a couple in the morning to feel normal, the way other people have a cup of coffee.”
Caps generally cost $10 apiece; addicts would eventually need roughly $100 a day just to prevent themselves from going into withdrawal. The crimes they committed to finance their habits were almost comical for their innocence: Scavenging suburbia, they stole golf clubs out of neighbors’ garages, pawned their parents’ power tools, shoplifted CDs from Wal-Mart and video games from Blockbuster, lifted $20 bills out of their mothers’ purses. One boy told me sheepishly that he had pawned his father’s Mickey Mantle baseball card.
Some teenagers began selling it to their friends to pay for their own habits, buying black tar heroin from dealers before it was cut, mixing it in hand-held coffee grinders with Dormin, and eyeballing the color and texture to gauge its potency. It was an inexact science, often producing chiva that was alarmingly strong. Recovering addicts spoke of vomiting repeatedly after using it and even being thrown into cold showers and slapped awake by friends as they slipped into unconsciousness. Sometimes they were too late, as Dr. Larry Alexander remembers from his tenure at the Medical Center of Plano emergency room in 1997 and early 1998, when weekends often brought in panicked teenagers whose friends would not wake up. He recounts the not uncommon story of one boy who later died: “His friends started beating on the doors, yelling and screaming, ‘He’s not breathing. He’s not breathing!’ He was blue, and he was lying in the back of a Suburban. We put him on a gurney and started running him back into the ER. The next thing I heard was tires peeling out. His friends had taken off, and we had no idea who he was.” Other times, Alexander says, teens would call 911 when a friend had overdosed but bolt from the scene for fear of being arrested, leaving a door open for medics so that they could reach the victim.
The naiveté of some teenagers about the power of the drug they were using would cost a few of them their life. Friends of one boy, who had vomited on himself after shooting up, tried to wash him off by putting him in a Jacuzzi, where they left him, in a daze, to drown. Others waited too long to call an ambulance—a mistake that would end in the fatal overdose of one of Cooper’s friends, Milan Malina, whom he had first met in ninth-grade gym class. On Malina’s twentieth birthday, nearly a year and a half ago, friends gathered at a house in Willow Bend and passed around champagne, pot, and chiva; Cooper had provided the heroin. Malina had been clean for nearly two months, so he had a far lower tolerance for heroin than usual that night. He snorted two caps of chiva, and by the end of the evening, his speech was slurred and he was having difficulty walking. His friends told him to sleep it off, and so he lay semiconscious in a bedroom for several hours, feverish and vomiting. Cooper had already returned home by the time someone discovered that Malina wasn’t breathing anymore. He met them at the emergency room, where a doctor directed him and seven friends into the room where Malina’s lifeless body lay, his face blue and caked with blood. “The doctor wanted us to see what had happened, to really look at him,” Cooper says, his eyes fixed on the ground. “It was awful.”
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