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It was forming in his mind on the drive to the hospital, the fatherly speech about drug use.

He had no reason to believe his boy was an addict. But when sheriff’s Major Jeff Taylor got the message in June 2003 that his son, Matt, had overdosed, his years of leading the Lee County sheriff’s narcotics unit kicked in.

What in the world is the matter with you, Taylor planned to say. Don’t you understand drugs can kill?

“Halfway down Summerlin (Road),” he said, “I got this cold chill and I thought, you know, he might not have made it.”

Minutes later, Taylor watched an ambulance pull into the hospital and a paramedic shake his head over the 18-year-old’s body.

But even if he’d had the chance to talk to his child, Taylor knew virtually nothing of the painkiller that killed Matt. Watching the national news recently, Taylor hailed the guilty pleas of three pharmaceutical executives accused of concealing from the public how addictive, and dangerous, OxyContin can be.

“I felt I let him down. To this day,” Taylor said. “How did I not know how dangerous this drug was?”

According to media reports, Perdue Pharma and three of its executives agreed to fork over more than $600 million for misbranding the powerful painkiller OxyContin. Faced with doctors’ concerns the drug could be highly addictive, the government alleged, Perdue Pharma instead publicized claims the pill was safer, and less habit-forming, than others like it.

With the help of trusting doctors who prescribed it for debilitating pain, OxyContin spread around the country in the late 1990s. But by 2003 in Lee County, no less a drug expert than Taylor had barely heard of it. Then he learned.

Taylor said his son also had trace amounts of cocaine in his system when he died. But he’s certain the boy — who had finished high school weeks before — wasn’t an addict.

After Matt died, his father popped open the teen’s locked box and found all the checks his relatives gave him for graduation. If he were an addict, Taylor said, Matt would have spent that money.

So the teen had likely tried OxyContin as a recreational drug. Chewed, injected or snorted, a pill can produce a euphoria similar to using heroin, authorities say. Locally and across the country, addictions were born that way.

But Taylor also learned the drug was being prescribed for a wide variety of ailments to unsuspecting people whose recovery from, say, a work injury quickly turned into a struggle with addiction.

“To this day many people think, how bad can it be if it’s prescribed by a doctor?” he said.

Now come the guilty pleas and the revelations about OxyContin as a habit-forming, and potentially lethal, narcotic. Taylor said in many ways it’s too late. For his boy, yes, but also for another man in his early 20s who recently overdosed on the drug in Lee County, and died.

“He was legitimately involved in an accident,” Taylor said of that victim, whom he declined to name. “Without that accident, he wouldn’t have been getting the painkiller.”

It’s been years since Matt’s funeral. His father still goes out to sit on a backyard bench by a little memorial garden at home, and he thinks about his boy.

Matt loved diving, loved motorcycles. He’d razz his dad about working at the Sheriff’s Office. Great place to be, Matt would say, everyone’s got a tattoo and rides a bike.

“Until he died — I ran the narcotic unit for five years — I never saw OxyContin,” Taylor said.

As a father, a deputy and a detective, he said, “I didn’t tell him about that. I didn’t know.”

“I regret that, and I’ll regret that forever.”