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Brendan McDonald was one of those kids you never thought would start taking drugs.

The year it began -- the 2004-2005 school year -- he was an honor-roll senior at a well-regarded Jesuit high school in Boston, a varsity baseball player who had won early admission to the college of his choice. “Quiet, handsome and charismatic,” says his mother, Nancy Holler, of her oldest child. “He was always just a really good kid.”

But by that spring, something was wrong. Brendan wasn’t himself. His GPA had fallen. He was sitting on the bench during baseball games instead of starting. The school guidance counselor thought it might just be a case of “senioritis.” Brendan’s stepfather Steve worried it might be something else. Steve had degenerative disc disease that was being treated with Percocet, a powerful prescription painkiller. Recently he’d noticed that pills were going missing. When Nancy and Steve confronted Brendan about the disappearing Percocet, he admitted that over the winter he’d started drinking beer and taking pills with some of his friends. Steve and Nancy hoped it would stop. Instead, it escalated.

Brendan went to college that fall, but after just six weeks he returned home and got a job. It wasn’t the same Brendan. The old Brendan had been a snappy dresser who cared about his appearance. The new Brendan paid no attention to his hygiene. “He was wearing the same clothes to work every day, not taking care of himself, looking like a slob,” Nancy says.

Pressed, he confessed that he’d started taking OxyContin, an even more powerful prescription painkiller. He went into detox at Thanksgiving but couldn’t stay clean. He moved to California to work in construction with Nancy’s brother. He came back addicted to heroin. By the spring of 2008, though, things seemed better. He had completed a rehab program and got a good job. His parents had allowed him to move back into his old bedroom in their home in Quincy, just outside Boston. But one afternoon in May, Brendan came home early and went straight upstairs to the bathroom. Moments later, Nancy heard a crash. She ran upstairs. Brendan was face down on the bathroom floor, unconscious with a needle in his arm. But that wasn’t what alarmed Nancy most. What was truly terrifying was that Brendan was blue.

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