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Francine Haight had never let her kids have a TV or computer in their own rooms. "I wanted them to be with the family, so the computer was in a den we had off the family room," says the former nurse, who stayed home full-time with her three children in a suburb of La Mesa, California. She kept pretty close tabs on them all, and took good care of them too.So when her 18-year-old son Ryan, an honors student, came home that night three years ago, after his Sunday shift at the local Kmart, she sent him off to soak in her Jacuzzi tub while she made his favorite soup, spicy chicken.
After dinner, Ryan played Nintendo and then listened to music in his room until, around midnight, Francine tried to shoo him into bed. "But there's no school tomorrow," he answered, reminding her that the next day was a holiday. So she kissed him good night, told him not to stay up too late, and went off to bed herself. "He gave me a hug, said, 'I love you, Mom,' and that was it," she remembers tearfully.
The next afternoon, when Francine got back from running some errands, she discovered that Ryan still hadn't gotten up. She went into his room to check on him -- and found him dead. In the heartbreaking chaos that followed, a sheriff's deputy discovered a bottle of pills in Ryan's room. "Did you know about these?" the deputy asked Francine. She hadn't, of course. She hadn't known he had used the Internet to order the pills that took his life -- which turned out to include the potent painkiller hydrocodone -- nor, as she puts it, "that he could get drugs without even leaving the house. We didn't know we had to worry about the drug pusher in our den."
Clayton Fuchs, the pharmacist who operated the online outfit Ryan used to buy at least some of the drugs, is in jail now. Dr. Robert Ogle, who prescribed the pills without ever laying eyes on Ryan, will soon be sentenced. Yet, according to officials at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, there are plenty of others like Fuchs and Ogle who are still in business, a mere click away on thousands of web pages that direct people to shady online pharmacies. And as Ryan's story shows, law enforcement has a long way to go in tackling the problem.
It was not a surprise to Francine that her son had been feeling down. She and her husband, Bruce, a doctor, were going through a divorce at the time, and Ryan had always been a sensitive kid. In grade school, he'd come home crying even when it was other kids who were getting picked on. Ryan was also the quiet type, and had never been very social.
Moreover, there were warning signs. In the fall of 2000, some months before his death, Ryan had come home from a party woozy and claimed someone had slipped something into his drink. Another time, he confessed to having taken a Valium. Ryan's dad heeded the warnings by taking Ryan to the doctor periodically to have him tested for drugs, and Francine sometimes went through Ryan's things when he was at school.
Rather than resist these intrusions, Ryan tried instead to be reassuring, saying things like, "Mom, you never even have to get after me to do my homework." True, he was as warm and responsible as ever, Francine told herself, working two jobs in the summer, for Kmart and for the San Diego Padres, selling sodas at home games. And she was fine with him spending time on the computer, knowing he liked to play video games and trade baseball cards on eBay.
But Ryan had also used the computer to order some of the hydrocodone pills that were found in his system from Fuchs's online business, Main Street Pharmacy. He simply filled out a questionnaire on his computer screen in which he described himself as a 25-year-old with chronic back pain.
A package arrived for Ryan just two days later. It was all very discreet.
Right on the bottle of pills discovered by the sheriff's deputy were the names of the prescribing doctor and the pharmacy that filled the order. The doctor, Robert Ogle, lived in Dallas, and in fact was an ex-con who had been sent away before for illegally prescribing addictive drugs the old-fashioned way. His medical license had previously been revoked, too, but was later restored to him.
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