April 25, 2015 – American-Statesman —The night before Logan Scott consumed a lethal cocktail of up to 10 illegal and prescription drugs, his worried father drug-tested him. “He was clean,” Lance Scott said. But Lance and his wife, Irene, knew their son had been abusing illegal drugs, and they were trying to help him.
What they didn’t know was Logan was using heroin. Nor did they know the extent to which he also was misusing prescription drugs, including Adderall that a doctor had prescribed, along with pills he likely bought on the streets, including hydrocodone and anti-anxiety drugs. Logan was 20 when he died of an overdose Nov. 19, 2013, in Austin.
Ten days later, 54-year-old Kimberly Dupree died of a mixture of prescription pills and alcohol in Austin.
The Travis County Medical Examiner’s Office attributed Logan’s death to “mixed drug toxicity” and Dupree’s to “multiple drug and ethanol toxicity.” The death certificates use the same words, but they don’t name the drugs the medical examiner identified in the toxicology screen, family members said.
That lack of specificity is common and it’s one reason many overdoses in which prescription drugs play a key role don’t get tallied as such, said Bob Anderson, chief of mortality statistics at the National Center for Health Statistics at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “You cannot produce a reliable number of prescription drug deaths if so many are unspecified,” Anderson said.
That’s a concern to the Scott family and to Dupree’s daughter, Felicia Cantu of Gonzales. That’s also a concern to Travis County’s new medical examiner, Dr. J. Keith Pinckard, who started in March. “I have directed that … we list the drugs — not just on the autopsy report but the death certificates” his office signs, Pinckard said.
For 2013, the most recent year for data, Pinckard’s office administrator counted 114 prescription drug-related overdose deaths in Travis County, second in Texas only to a count of 275 in Harris County. “I think a lot of people don’t realize the degree of the problem,” said Cantu, now 39.
Her mother suffered from depression and anxiety, as well as alcoholism, Cantu said. Dupree had sought treatment for her drinking and had been taken to the emergency room previously for mixing prescription drugs with alcohol. On the night before she died, she drank alcohol and had “taken a bunch of (prescription) pills,” she told her boyfriend, after he found her vomiting, the medical examiner’s investigation report said. She was unresponsive the next morning, and he called 911, the investigation report said. Although she had casually referred to suicide before, the death was ruled accidental. Cantu said she agreed with that assessment.
Logan’s death also was deemed an accident. He had bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, said Lance Scott, a nurse anesthetist in Austin. “Because of his mental illness, there is such a desire to escape,” Lance Scott said. “I blame the mental illness” for his death.
Raised in an upper-middle class family, Logan was highly intelligent, musically gifted on the guitar and living on his own in an area where he had ready access to drugs, his father said. He and Irene Scott took Logan to five psychiatrists in three years, Lance Scott said.
“We were begging the psychiatrist to admit him somewhere, because we knew he was in danger,” he said. “The only option was three days at the state hospital or a private thing for $70,000. … There was no place that existed that we could afford.” Another complication was Logan himself. He didn’t want that kind of help nor did he think he needed it, Lance Scott said. “It was painful to watch him suffer, and he didn’t know how to get himself out of it.”
He supports better tracking of drugs that contribute to a death so decision-makers can get more reliable data on overdose deaths. He and his wife are moving back to Seattle but are discussing how they can help others struggling with mental health problems.
