TEENS TREK TO CITY FOR HEROIN

Cops Cite Increase In Suburban Buyers

The teenage experimenters from Chicago's western suburbs have never known
the old heroin, the cooking spoons, the needles and the back rooms of drug
houses. Theirs is the user-friendly version, a cheap but pure white powder
inhaled with friends willing to make runs from suburbia to city
neighborhoods where the new heroin can be bought on the street.

Chicago tactical officers watch them from their surveillance posts in the
tough Harrison District on the city's West Side. Teens park their Honda
Civics or parents' SUVs and walk into busy open-air drug markets in a place
they call "K-town," police say, so dubbed for Kostner and Keeler Avenues
and other K-named streets that run through the sometimes troubled area.

"These kids drive in and park the car and walk down blocks that I would be
afraid to walk with my gun," Chicago Police Cmdr. Eugene Williams of the
Narcotics and Gang Investigations Section said.

Authorities say more and more teens are coming from across the area into
the city to buy heroin, but most are from DuPage and Kane Counties.

They are making the trek for the purer forms of the highly addictive
drug--and more of them are turning up for treatment at emergency rooms back
home.

National statistics from the federal Department of Health and Human
Services show heroin use among high school seniors last year reached its
highest level since the agency began its annual survey more than two
decades ago. Local experts said they fear teens in some suburbs are
experimenting at a rate that outpaces even those figures.

Although hard local numbers are difficult to come by, some suburban
hospitals and treatment centers say they are now handling more overdose
cases involving teens than ever before. The numbers began rising when
high-purity heroin, most of it from South America and Mexico, became widely
available in Chicago in the late 1990s, officials said.

Hospitals notice a change

Many west suburban hospitals report seeing several overdose cases a month
so far this year, compared with only three or four a year in the mid-1990s.
Most are described by hospitals as near-misses, but a handful of deaths
have been recorded.

Many teens believe the newer variety of heroin is safe, experts said,
failing to recognize that what makes the drug effective when snorted is its
dangerous purity level. Drug counselors said some youths don't expect the
powerful cravings, crippling withdrawal symptoms and lifelong addiction
that still come with its use.

Although alcohol abuse still affects many times more teens in the area,
heroin has extended its reach into some unlikely places, said Paul Teodo,
administrator of behavioral health at Central DuPage Hospital in Winfield.

"The shockers are the cases that are the type of thing you saw in the movie
'Traffic,'" Teodo said. "Maybe dad's an executive and the mother is a
stay-at-home mom or a schoolteacher. And they live in an area where you
wouldn't expect heroin to be a problem."

Young suburbanites have the money to experiment with the drug, which sell
for about $10 a hit, police and experts say, and the Eisenhower Expressway
offers a convenient way to get quickly into and out of city areas notorious
for heroin dealings.

For the most part, police said, neighborhood thugs know not to touch the
teens or their cars.

"They walk with impunity, because everyone knows why they're there and
where they're going," Williams said. "The sellers protect them because they
know these kids represent income, and they'll be back again and again."

As the number of teens coming into the West Side became more noticeable,
city police and the DuPage Metropolitan Enforcement Group, a collection of
the top drug cops from county departments, occasionally began to run joint
stings on the West Side.

Mark Henry of the DuPage group said officers have seen teens make drug
buys, traced the license plates of their cars and notified the registered
owner, often a parent, where the vehicle has been.

Williams said the teens who enter the drug markets are often are watched
but not arrested because surveillance teams fear tipping off the sellers to
busts like the one that resulted in more than a dozen arrests in North
Lawndale in May.

Risky experimentation

An overdose of the powerful opiate can slow breathing to the point that it
stops, and authorities said it's not difficult for teens new to the drug
culture to take a dangerous amount.

Dr. Jabeen Hussain, director of adolescent services at Glen Oaks Hospital
in Glendale Heights, said as recently as a year or two ago her facility saw
a few teenagers annually for heroin overdoses. The hospital now sees an
average of one every week or two, Hussain said.

One teen treated there this summer was the son of a Glendale Heights legal
secretary who asked that her name not be used. Her 16-year-old's friends
used heroin with the teen in her kitchen, and when he began losing
consciousness, they called 911 and left.

"I got home and my husband told me our son was in the ambulance, and that
he overdosed on heroin," said the mother, whose son survived. "I don't even
remember driving to the hospital after that."

New federal data released in July through the Drug Abuse Warning Network
shows a slight increase nationally in young teens treated for overdoses at
emergency departments in between 1999 and 2000, but officials say the new
figures are five times what they were in the early 1990s.

National data from the federal Department of Health and Human Services
released earlier this year showed that, among seniors in high school,
heroin use rose to 1.5 percent last year from 1.1 percent in 1999. While a
small jump, the increase resulted in what officials called the highest rate
of heroin use among seniors since the 1970s.

Don Mitckess, resource and referral coordinator for the Linden Oaks
treatment center in Naperville, said his facility typically sees 10 teens a
month seeking treatment for heroin addiction or counseling.

The purer heroin available today is so addictive that some teens find
themselves hooked after two or three uses, Mitckess said. Many turn to
injecting the drug and spiral into $40-a-day habits simply to stave off
withdrawal symptoms, which include severe flu-like symptoms and muscle
pain, experts say.

'A socially acceptable drug'

"Heroin has become more of a socially acceptable drug in this age group,"
Mitckess said, "and because of the purity and the ability to inhale it, the
stigma of the needle is no longer an issue."

Many parents awaken to their teen's habit when valuables go missing.

"It can be expensive, and to avoid withdrawal, life becomes a constant
search to score," he said. "It's a daily hustle to get money, and their own
stuff starts to disappear--CD players, the VCR, TVs. You ask, 'Where'd it
go?' and they say, 'I don't know.'"

Although the DuPage coroner's office could not provide a number of teen
fatalities involving heroin, officials said cases involving accidental
fatal overdoses of heroin are no longer viewed as uncommon.

One such case involved Frank Mondia, 16, of unincorporated Wheaton. The
teen's last conversation with his father, Frank G. Mondia, was not an
extraordinary exchange.

"He was coming in that night and he said, 'Dad, I'm taking out the
garbage,'" Mondia said recently sitting in the dining room of his home. "I
said, 'I'm going to bed, I love you,' and he said, 'I love you too.' It was
the last thing he ever said to me."

Sometime that night, a few days after Christmas, Mondia's son sneaked out
and joined a group of youths to cruise the streets of Chicago looking for
heroin. They found it, and the teen, a popular sophomore football player at
Wheaton North High School, died of an overdose. His stepmother found him
the next morning in bed, and an autopsy revealed a lethal amount of heroin
in his system along with cocaine and prescription drugs.

Mondia said he had been trying to get his son help at a rehabilitation
facility after finding syringes in his room.

He was a good-natured, lovable kid who made some bad choices and didn't get
the kind of help he needed quickly enough, Mondia said.

"We talked about finding things to replace this: God, church, music,
anything," he said of his son, who was Mondia's best man when he remarried
three years ago. "He wanted to straighten his life out and break away, but
he just got sucked back in."