Part one of a three-part series

I t took David Johnston 30 minutes to destroy the future he’d been working toward for 18 years.

Strung out on cocaine, heroin and an assortment of other drugs, David and a fellow user hatched a plan to rob the home of an acquaintance. Their bounty: five firearms, including an AK-47 assault rifle, worth thousands of dollars.

The plan was simple. Call to make sure no one was home. Smash the window. Go inside. Steal the guns. Sell them to get money for drugs.

Unfortunately for David and his two accomplices, the police weren’t far behind.

In 2010, less than a month before graduation and with no previous criminal record, he was arrested, convicted of first-degree residential burglary, and sentenced to a year in county jail; he served seven months. Even worse, the kid who was used to receiving high marks in the classroom received his first strike under California’s Three Strikes Law.

How does a promising youth with ties to the church go from dreams of football stardom to the commission of a felony robbery in less than a year?

“Drugs are the only reason I robbed that house. Just to make money to buy them and sell them or do whatever,” David, 19, said. “I had never even gotten a parking ticket before then.”

Raised in a good home with a father who was the pastor of a local church, David and his two brothers, Mark, 18, and Johnny, 20, now share more than a family name. They share a frightening affinity for heroin.

David and Mark moved to Thousand Oaks from Santa Cruz just weeks ago to escape a life of panhandling and stealing to support an addiction to smoking heroin. They agreed to share their story in hopes that others might not make the mistakes they did.

“You don’t really realize what you’re doing,” David warned. “For me, it was seeing my parents cry. . . . Hearing that jail door close behind me, I thought this is no longer just about me. It’s about my family, my friends, everyone who cared about me. It affects them, especially my parents. You don’t realize how badly it can hurt them.”

First pill

David and Mark tells a tale that is becoming increasingly common in America: Young people are graduating from prescription painkillers to heroin.

An afterthought on the local drug scene in the early to mid- 2000s, heroin is seeing a resurgence in Ventura County. Some feel the trend is due to more people abusing prescription painkillers like Vicodin, Norco and OxyContin, which, like heroin, are opiates— drugs with morphine-like effects derived from opium.

“Most (of the heroin users) I’ve talked to have evolved from the pills,” said Detective Sgt. Robert Thomas, head of the Ventura County Sheriff Department’s East County Narcotics Street Team. “The opiate usage out there is just so overwhelming.”

Capt. Derek West, the department’s top narcotics cop, agrees that painkillers are playing a large role in the area’s growing problem with heroin, which reportedly was responsible for 26 overdoses in Thousand Oaks and the surrounding unincorporated areas from Jan. 1, 2009 to March 15, 2011. Five of the overdoses were fatal. The number does not include Thousand Oaks High School senior Griffen Kramer, 18, who authorities believe died Oct. 30 after injecting heroin in a parked car.

“These kids get strung out (on pills) and after a period of time they can’t afford them, so they go out and get the heroin for cheap and get the same, if not a better, high,” West said. “They don’t think about the consequences.”

With the drugs ranging in cost from $5 for a Vicodin pill to $80 for a single 80-mg OxyContin— one of the most powerful prescription painkillers—those who become addicted to synthetic opiates are at risk of making the deadly jump to heroin because it is less expensive and increasingly more available, West said.

In September, the East County Narcotics Street Team arrested 26-year-old Ronald Hernandez of Los Angeles for allegedly distributing large quantities of heroin in the Conejo Valley. After authorities pulled him over to arrest him, they reportedly found in his vehicle a quarter-kilo of heroin with a street value of $16,000.

From smoking to shooting

Thomas said users often progress from eating pills to smoking pills to smoking heroin. Once they reach that point, he said, the likelihood that they’ll decide to inject the drug increases tenfold.

“It takes control of your life,” he said. “If (a user) can get the best high by taking the drug intravenously, they’re going to do it. At that point, your ability to make good decisions isn’t working anymore.”

Mark Johnston got his first taste of opiates at 15 when a friend handed him a percocet. And when Mark’s father returned from the hospital a year later with a cupboard full of prescription painkillers following a surgery, he was all too willing to help himself.

“When he was sick he had oxycodone 10 mg, percocets, Norcos, OxyContin,” Mark said. “He had 150 and he’d get a refill every few days, so I took what I could.

“He didn’t think we’d take them so he just had them in the cabinet; he didn’t know that we were into that. . . . I would take 15 if I wanted. He had so many it wouldn’t make a dent,” Mark continued. “I sold some, did some, gave some away. I always had them.

“The thing about opiates and pills is that I could take them and all the worry, all the anxiety, all that stuff, was gone. I could just go to school and be happy.”

Starting young

Mark is further evidence that adolescents are experimenting with prescription drugs at an increasingly young age. In a survey taken in 2009 in the Conejo Valley School District, 4 percent of ninth-graders reported having used prescription painkillers.

Speaking at a prescription drug forum at Newbury Park High School in September, Ventura County Assistant Sheriff Gary Pentis told parents it’s important to decipher warning signals and understand current drug terminology.

Finding burned foil in the trash could mean a user is heating OxyContin to inhale its vapors, he said. A text message with a “v” for Vicodin or an “m”—which stands for 15 mg of Oxycontin—could also mean someone is using the drug.

The assistant sheriff, who has worked in county law enforcement for more than 30 years, said someone dies from drug abuse every 14 minutes in the United States.

“Drug deaths outnumber traffic fatalities in the U. S. That’s unheard of in our lifetime,” Pentis said.

The biggest obstacle to stopping prescription drug abuse is “a small percentage” of doctors who prescribe unnecessary medication.

“These ‘doctor feelgoods’ are putting tens and tens of thousands of prescription drugs in our community,” Pentis said.

“We’ve got a doctor right now in the East Valley that wrote 4,100 prescriptions in the last two months. . . . We just tied two deaths to him,” he said.

But it could take months, even years, to investigate and prosecute a doctor on criminal charges related to prescription drugs, Pentis said.

“I’m frustrated by that because there are four doctors I’d like to arrest tomorrow. It’s going to take a year to 18 months to get to those four. . . . This is a nasty cycle we’re in and I don’t see it going away soon, so we need everyone’s help to make an impact,” he said.

A lifelong fight

Although their battle to overcome drugs is only beginning, Mark and David are taking the necessary steps toward recovery.

They’ve started working and attending services at Calvary Chapel GodSpeak in Newbury Park, where Pastor Rob McCoy, an old friend of their father’s, is giving them an opportunity to earn a living and prove they’re ready to give back to society.

More than anything, David says, he’d like to become the big brother to Mark he knows he should be, and to begin to rebuild a relationship with his parents, who have suffered so much because of their sons’ drug use.

“I want to be at a place where (Mark) can look up to me, and any time he has a desire (to use) he can come to me and know I’m going to tell him not to do it,” David said.

His younger brother has this advice for kids:

“I would tell them if they haven’t done a lot of drugs, don’t do it because before you do the drugs you have this youthful joy about everything, everything is just chill,” he said. “But once you start doing them, your brain gets messed up. Playing sports, video games, going out, doing all that isn’t even fun anymore.

“And if you’ve started, quit as soon as you can. Because the deeper you get into it, it’s harder to live life on the other side.”

Part two will look at the increasing availability of prescription drugs. Anna Bitong contributed to this story.