| Article Text |
Son's overdose death spurs deputy to fight OxyContin
Capt. Jeff Taylor of the Lee County Sheriff�s Office lost his son, Matt, to an overdose of OxyContin in June. Taylor has now made it his mission to fight against the drug and the pharmaceutical company that manufactures it.
Son's overdose death spurs deputy to fight OxyContin
By ABHI RAGHUNATHAN, [email protected]
February 1, 2004
A wreath of thorns encircles a rugged wooden cross piercing a heart. The name Matt is inscribed just above and two dates are written just below: 12-15-84, the day of his birth, and 6-19-03, the day he died after overdosing on OxyContin.
The tattoo on Jeff Taylor's left arm is a tribute to the teenage son he could not save. It is also an emblem of the crusade he has since joined.
As the commander of the Lee County Sheriff's Office narcotics task force for six years, Taylor led the local war against drugs on the street � marijuana, cocaine, crack. But he never saw OxyContin until it claimed his son last summer.
A child's death banishes many parents to the darkest parts of the emotional landscape. That is where Taylor and his ex-wife Brenda, Matthew's mother, suffered in the weeks after Matt died. Since then, they have channeled that grief into a cause to spread the word against the prescription painkiller OxyContin.
It is Jeff Taylor's most personal fight. But it is not his first.
As a fixture of the Lee County Sheriff's Office for 26 years, he started on its lowest rung as a road patrol officer when Bonita Springs was still Dodge City rather than a procession of gated communities. Back then, street fights were ordinary and feuds often resolved with machetes outside bars.
Taylor ascended the law enforcement ladder, moving up to detective, supervising the major crimes unit and then taking control of the narcotics task force. In September, he was promoted to captain and is now a watch commander for the county.
The years on the job gave him plenty of experience in notifying families when awful things happened to their loved ones.
"Of course, I never thought I would be on the other end of it," he said.
Taylor, 55, told his story at his rustic home, which sits at the end of a bumpy driveway in south Fort Myers. His wife, Terri, also works for the Sheriff's Office. An imposing man with a graying walrus mustache, he spoke deeply, clearly and steadily, almost never pausing.
He has guns on his fireplace and photographs of Matt everywhere. A book on OxyContin rests on his coffee table next to magazines about cars and motorcycles.
There was no question that his son's death has wounded him deeply. Every so often, without any prompting, he would get up and describe the story behind a photo of Matt. Or note that his son liked motorcycles just as he did.
But it was also just as clear, as he told of the night his son died, that he was determined not to wallow in grief, but to use his sadness as fuel to prevent other deaths.
On June 19, Taylor was at the office when another deputy told him that his son had overdosed and was being taken to Gulf Coast Hospital. It came as a shock, he said. Matt was a teenager, but Taylor had drilled into him the importance of avoiding drugs. Maybe this will be a lesson, he thought.
When he arrived at the hospital, he saw his co-workers there, weeping. Then the ambulance came and his son was carried into the hospital. Matt looked asleep. Taylor touched his shoulder. Matt was cold. He had spent 12 years working in homicide. Matt was dead.
"I knew he didn't make it," Taylor said.
Matt Taylor was 18, a clean-cut kid with a wide smile. He had just graduated from high school and planned to join the Army.
It turned out that Matt had taken some pills at a party that night. His family and one of his best friends all say that it was a one-time thing, the type of mistake that even the best teenagers make at a summer party.
"It took me completely by surprise. It was something he had not been into," said Josh Campbell, 19, a best friend of Matt since kindergarten.
So began the dark days for Matt's family. Taylor locked himself away for weeks. "I couldn't do anything," he said.
Matt's mother, Brenda, 50, who lives in Bonita Springs, remembered she was "very distraught," just like her two other children, Erik, 23 and Holly, 21.
"I had never heard of it" she said about OxyContin.
Then, she says, she found something to fight for.
"I talk to the Lord daily," she said. She was asking about Matt's death. Then, she woke up on a Saturday after the death and "she knew."
"My purpose was that I teach other people about drugs ... what to be looking for," she said. "God spoke to me."
Jeff Taylor felt the same message. First, he investigated Matt's life to make sure his son had not been into drugs. He found the checks he had given Matt for his birthday, uncashed, and no evidence that he had taken OxyContin before.
Then he called Purdue Pharma, the company behind OxyContin. He told them: "I want my son back." It was not, he said, a "successful" conversation.
Soon, Taylor learned everything he could about OxyContin, the drug that was so small a presence he had not dealt with it while heading the county's drug task force. He went to the Web site oxyabusekills.com and read letter after letter written by parents like him who had lost children.
Taylor acknowledges that OxyContin, a painkiller with an active ingredient twice as potent as morphine marketed by Purdue Pharma, can help people in severe pain. But he, like others who have lost relatives, maintain that Purdue marketed OxyContin too recklessly, ignoring evidence on how addictive it can be or how easy it is for people to overdose on the drug.
A General Accounting Office Report to Congress found that Purdue and the Drug Enforcement Administration had started campaigns to combat abuse of the drug. But it also found that "Purdue's aggressive marketing of OxyContin focused on promoting the drug to ... physicians who may not have been adequately trained in pain management."
For his part, Taylor has written to legislators that "If Purdue had not marketed this drug so irresponsibly ... it would not have been readily available to our youths."
Brenda Taylor has held gatherings at her home for Matt's friends. Campbell noted that they had steered one kid away from his own drug problems. She and Jeff Taylor plan to talk at schools and churches; he is preparing a presentation.
Mike Johnston, the current head of Lee County's narcotics unit, said that OxyContin abuse was brand new to Southwest Florida. They have seen an increase in the last 18 months, but it has not become an epidemic like it has in Appalachia.
"It comes from prescription fraud rather than outright theft," Johnston said. "I see it more often," he said, noting that dozens of instances a year was a "conservative estimate."
Taylor has made it his mission to keep it from ravaging Southwest Florida. He has written to every local legislator and plans to attend a congressional hearing in Winter Park on Feb. 9. He is not sure if he will get to tell his story there, so he has written a letter to U.S. Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind., who is chairing the hearings.
It describes his experience, his son's death and his own investigations. It tells of how he taught his son to dive and how the men in his underwater operations unit asked to be the pallbearers at Matt's funeral. It ends with a prayer that the committee will do "whatever is possible to stop this epidemic."
"Do this for Matt, and all those other young people who have been cheated out of their futures," writes Taylor. He concludes: "God Bless you and your committee
|