Parents, Children and the Loss of a Son : Coroner says young actor River Phoenix died of massive drug overdose

Once upon a time America declared a “war on drugs”--and the prospect of victory against a hard, destructive plague was held out.

Americans are still waiting.

Victory is not in sight.

On Friday the Los Angeles coroner’s office announced its finding in the shocking death of River Phoenix outside a Sunset Strip nightclub Oct. 31. The death was shocking not simply because Phoenix was an extremely talented young screen actor for whom even greater entertainment-industry glory was predicted. It was shocking because the sudden death of this idol of the health-conscious, this subject of a Vegetarian Times cover, seemed explicable only as some bizarre act of God . . . or as the more common drug overdose.

And while drug use is scarcely unknown in the nightclub scene, no one wanted to believe that of this putatively clean-living young man.

Especially of someone with the kind of parents he had. They were, by many accounts, not the cliche Hollywood stage parents. Though their strict philosophy of sparse living and vegetarianism was not to everyone’s taste, no one said they were not caring, loving, committed. They shunned Hollywood’s vulgar excesses, trying hard like many parents to keep their children’s heads on straight.

And then, as a Saturday night faded into a Sunday morning, they had to be told that their son had fallen dead on a Sunset Boulevard sidewalk. Dead at 23. Dead, now says the coroner, of a massive overdose--the tests found morphine (a breakdown product of heroin) and cocaine, along with lots of other chemical additives like Valium and marijuana.

The reactions will be predictable. Some will call for the inevitable crackdown on drugs in the nightclubs. Even if a crackdown occurs, in a few months the heat will be off (the police have too much to do to stay in any one spot forever) and the scene will probably revert to what it was.

Others will react by demanding stiffer drug sentences--as if the jails weren’t already jammed full of drug convicts, with so infuriatingly little to show for it.

But one reaction must be anger: anger that the rebelliousness of too many of our young--the generational risk-taking that occurs among rich and poor, black and white--continues at this lethal level.

And, finally, the deepest response must be sadness that sometimes the efforts of even the most committed and most caring parents can come up so tragically, shatteringly short. This is profoundly upsetting.