OxyContin Invasion

A PARISH BURIES ITS OWN, DEAD FROM OXYCONTIN

After OxyContin abuse killed three teenagers in St. Anne's parish, the Rev.
Patrick E. Sweeney began comparing the drug to a plague.

"It's ruined these families," said Father Sweeney, 57, who for three years
has been pastor of the Roman Catholic church that serves the Fishtown,
Kensington and Port Richmond areas. "It's ruined so many young people's
chance for happiness or success in life.

"It seems right that we're having funerals for 80-year-olds," he added
quietly. "But it doesn't seem right that we're having funerals for teenagers."

In one grim winter week, Father Sweeney buried one teenager on a Thursday
and another two days later.

About 1,600 residents of the river-ward neighborhoods seek spiritual refuge
at St. Anne's, built at Memphis Street and Lehigh Avenue in 1845 for Irish
immigrants. The tight-knit congregation remains mostly of Irish, Italian
and Polish descent.

"Parents had this security and sense of safety in this community," Father
Sweeney said. Then OxyContin swept their neighborhoods. "It made them seem
much more vulnerable. Parents looked at their children differently and
tried to keep them closer. . . . They tried to shield what they gave life to."

The priest said he has seen a complex response to the deaths.

Parents gasped, "How could they do this to themselves?" while feeling
helpless to rein in their own children.

Teens tried to rationalize how a prescription drug could be deadly; their
neighborhood is filled with pharmacies, and their grandparents' lives often
depend on medication.

And many struggled with how to acknowledge a drug problem without calling
the area another Badlands.

Yet the greatest strain Father Sweeney sees is the suffering of the
victims' loved ones.

With each OxyContin death, he said, they anguish over "the fact that other
people have not benefited from the terrible price they paid as parents."