One family's story about life at the bottom

Sandy began to experiment with drugs at the age of 12. Soon she was initiated into the Conejo Valley drug culture, trying everything from marijuana and crystal methamphetamines to alcohol and prescription drugs.

Sandy, 19, is now a recovering heroin addict.

Due to the sensitive nature of this article, Sandy and her mother, Carol, agreed to speak with The Acorn about drug abuse as long as their real names were not revealed.

The mother, daughter and younger brother lived in Oak Park and Agoura Hills before moving to Calabasas. According to this family and other teens who were interviewed, drug use is rampant among youth in every corner of the Conejo Valley.

Sandy said her entry into drug abuse was encouraged by the company she kept. Rather than hang out with kids her own age in Oak Park-dubbed "Coke Park" by some teens-the friends she chose were far older.

"I was hanging out with 17and 18-year-olds around the neighborhood," Sandy said. Her friends introduced her to a smorgasbord of drugs.

Drugs were "just there, at a party or a friend's house," Sandy said. She admits stealing prescription drugs from the medicine cabinets of her friends' parents.

A realist, Carol doesn't blame her daughter's friends for her own child's drug abuse.

She said her daughter was diagnosed with bulimia at 8, depression and bipolar disorder at 12, and was prescribed various medications. At the same time, she started to experiment with drugs. Add the trauma of divorce-- which resulted in Sandy's father leaving their home--her possible genetic predisposition to substance abuse, and easy access to drugs from friends, dealers and the Internet, and the cards appeared stacked against the girl.

Randi Klein, alternative education counselor for the Las Virgenes Unified School District, said the period of time between a child's first experiments with drugs and the point when they cross over into addiction is crucial.

"The sooner the treatment, the more success you have," Klein said. But once a child has become addicted to drugs, their chance of recovery drops precipitously, she added. She said that according to national statistics, only 20 percent of drug addicted teens recover.

Carol heeded the advice of experts-address her daughter's emotional problems and escalating drug use head on.

Instead of entering high school as a freshman, Sandy was sent to a residential rehabilitation program for nine months with the hope that early intervention would be her saving grace.

The rehab program was an expensive failure, although the experience helped Sandy to stop other negative behavior, including self-mutilation or cutting.

Easy to come by

By this time, Carol had moved her family to Agoura Hills, but said she found "Divorce Row," her nickname for the neighborhood surrounding Agoura High School, worse than Oak Park.

"Drug dealers found their perfect demographic," Sandy said of affluent Agoura Hills, Calabasas and Oak Park.

Drug use "is right around us, everywhere," Carol said. "My kid (was) not the only one partying out here."

While at Agoura High, Sandy said, she never met a student who had not tried drugs or alcohol.

"Whether they were on the honor roll, in college, or rich actors that I met in Malibu-everybody used drugs," she said.

Prescription medications, Sandy said, are also easily accessible. "If you pay a doctor enough money, (they will) write a prescription," she said.

At 16, Sandy was using crystal meth and other drugs, but not heroin. Not yet.

In treatment, again

The mother remembers vividly the program directors arriving in the middle of the night to cart Sandy away for a six-month stay at an out-of-state girls' residential treatment center.

For more than a year, Sandy appeared to be recovering. Then several friends died and the chain of events triggered a new pattern of drug abuse. This time, she began using heroin.

By the time Sandy was 18, she had attended several rehab programs, including a methadone detoxification center. Methadone reduces the painful symptoms of heroin withdrawal. Sandy's recovery, already tenuous, was again blindsided when she had her wisdom teeth removed and was given a pain prescription containing codeine. Although her mother warned the doctor Sandy was an addict and should not take prescription medication for pain, Sandy was over 18, an adult, and the doctor ignored Carol's advice.

"As a medical professional he could have made the decision to not give her Vicodin," Carol said.

While she believes that the medication triggered her daughter's relapse, she said Sandy would probably have relapsed again anyway.

Don't look the other way

Carol hopes that her daughter's story will help parents wake up to the drug abuse problem she sees as rampant in the Conejo Valley. She believes parents bury their heads in the sand when it comes to teenage drug use. Many mothers and fathers, she said, chalk up their children's drug use to typical teenage behavior, considering it just a phase.

Klein agreed with Carol. "There are some families that are in denial or without any knowledge of their teens' drug abuse (or) addiction," Klein said.

Some parents go a step further, and believe that they are helping their child by allowing drinking or drug use in their own home, rationalizing that they can at least monitor drug usage or alcohol consumption if the teens are on the premises.

Sandy attends Alcoholic Anonymous meetings at least four times a week and has been clean and sober for more than a month. She is living with her sponsors.

Twelve-step programs for drug abuse, alcoholism, overeating-whatever the addiction- recognize that every person must reach their own low and hit bottom before making the decision to quit. At her lowest point, Sandy said she had pawned everything she owned, and was hanging out on Skid Row shooting heroin with the homeless.

"The harder the drug, the harder the life style," Sandy said. "The difference now is that I'm an adult, and I don't want to go to prison."

Sandy hopes other teens who use drugs will find their own low sooner than she did. "Make your bottom whatever you want it to be. Basically, it's going to kill you or will destroy you."

Sandy has high hopes for the future. She expects to go back to school, move out on her own, launch a career and "maybe have a family in the...future."