Maine woman tells story of drug abuse and death

HOULTON – Cindy Doucette did not know about all of the shadows of her daughter’s secret life until several months after the 18-year-old’s death.

She knew that her daughter, Candice, had been battling depression since she was 14 years old. She knew that she sometimes smelled the lingering odor of marijuana on the teenager, but Candice always brushed off her questions and accusations.

Candice had revealed to her that she had tried the drug Ecstasy, but said it had only happened once and promised never to do it again.

She knew all of that – but what she didn’t know was that her daughter was lying about her drug use. She didn’t really find out until a police officer came to her door a few weeks before Candice’s high school graduation, sat her down, and told her that her daughter had died from a methadone overdose in a New Hampshire apartment.

“I never heard of a drug called methadone until she died of it,” Cindy Doucette said Monday evening, sharing the story of her daughter’s addiction and her family’s heartache over her death before a crowd of more than 50 people at the Center for Community Health Education at Houlton Regional Hospital. “I still don’t know where she got it.”

The Berwick resident and author came to town at the behest of the Link for Hope Coalition, an alliance that has worked for years to create a safe, healthy and productive community.

Doucette wrote the book “It Can Happen to Any Family” after her daughter’s death March 28, 2003.

The 288-page book details the struggles and the grief the Doucette family endured as they dealt first with Candice’s depression and drug use and then with her sudden death. Cindy Doucette told the crowd that she now believes her daughter began smoking marijuana after she was diagnosed with depression. She began taking antidepressants, which Doucette now believes Candice never took as prescribed.

Doucette is now convinced her daughter was taking the antidepressants, and another of her prescription drugs, Adderall, which she took for attention deficit disorder, and trading them for other drugs. She also has since learned that Candice had been using Ecstasy on and off for a year before she first confessed to using it.

Doucette saw several signs that something was not right with her daughter. The teen was moody, easily agitated, she’d lost a lot of weight and was sleeping excessively.

“Those signs are also symptoms of depression, and it was easy for me to accept that those were symptoms of Candice’s depression,” she admitted. “It was so much easier to face her depression than drug use.”

Over the years, her daughter’s despair deepened. She talked of suicide. Doucette admits that she was sometimes afraid to question her daughter too much, or discipline her too harshly, because she was afraid that she might hurt herself, or that she might stop communicating with her altogether.

Candice never got into legal trouble, but she was hospitalized after she made threats of suicide when she was stopped by a police officer.

When a close friend died of an Ecstasy overdose six months before Candice, Cindy Doucette hoped it would make her daughter change. It didn’t. It was almost, her mother said, like Candice had proof that Ecstasy could kill, so she switched to a different drug. Around that time, her boyfriend broke up with her.

“After that, she spiraled downward, and we couldn’t reach her,” Doucette told the audience.

Five weeks after her hospitalization, she was dead.

Although she acknowledged that her daughter had talked of suicide, she said she is sure Candice was not planning to kill herself that night.

“I can guarantee you that the night she put that drug in her body, she was not planning on dying,” she told the crowd. “She had plans for her future, things that she wanted to do.”

If given the chance to start over again, Cindy Doucette said, she would do many things differently. She would have disciplined more and taken everything about her daughter more seriously. She also would have talked more about what her family was going through.

“From my experience, people don’t judge like we think they do,” Doucette said. “A lot of people are going through this.”

She encouraged the audience to educate themselves about drug addiction and to tap into the resources that are out there to help them.

“Drugs killed my child,” she said bluntly. “I hope we can prevent what happened to my family from happening to yours. … There are a lot of different stories about kids dying from drug overdoses, but if they end up dying from drugs, it’s the same story. It’s the same feeling. You never get over it.”

For more information about Doucette’s book, log on to www.myspace.com/itcanhappentoanyfamily.