MAKING SENSE OF CHAOS

Heroin: A Mother's Sophisticated Campaign Against Drugs Reaches Far Beyond
Its Carroll County Origins.

When Linda Auerback walked into Westminster High School on Jan. 12, 1998,
she was stunned to find students in the hallways with tears streaming down
their faces, some dashing toward guidance counselors' offices, some pouring
into the main office to get permission to go home early.

A 15-year-old schoolmate, Liam O'Hara, had died of a heroin overdose.

"I have never seen anything so chaotic in my life," Auerback said. She had
gone to the school that day to pick up her daughter, Lacey, who had been
dating Liam.

"To see such chaos in a school when kids are sitting quiet in class one
minute, and then they hear an announcement and everyone's running through
the school the next, I knew I wanted to do something. I had a gut feeling
that something was terribly wrong in our community, and I knew I had to do
something."

Auerback's "something" was the formation of Residents Attacking Drugs, a
grass-roots organization whose reach has gone global.

The group's short film, "Heroin Kills," is being shown to teen-agers in 43
states and eight foreign countries. A new MTV-style music video set to the
film's rock song of the same name earned a standing ovation May 22 when it
premiered at Carroll County's annual drug summit.

A sheriff's office in Maine has just formed the first RAD chapter. And in
its first three years in Carroll, the organization is credited with raising
awareness and helping reduce the number of heroin overdoses in the county
by a third.

"I wish we had a better way to gauge the impact they've made," said retired
Maryland State Police Sgt. Michael College, who was a state trooper for 26
years and supervised Carroll's drug task force before he retired in January
2000. "We can look at the ages of the overdoses coming out of the hospital,
and where they used to be under 18, they're now over 18.

"But really, what I can say is that I'd hate to think what things would
have been like if it hadn't been for Linda and RAD. I'd hate to think of
what would have happened if they weren't around, beating the bandwagon
about the dangers of this thing."

Joanne Hayes has spent 11 years working with Carroll public schools as a
substance-abuse prevention coordinator. She acknowledges that she was
skeptical of RAD's first idea - to produce a fictional movie about a
teen-age boy who is pressured to try heroin, slowly falls victim to an
addiction and dies in his bed from an overdose.

"I tried to discourage them from doing 'Heroin Kills' because we see so
many videos come into the school system that are made by professionals and
that are too long and do not have the salient points we need in them,"
Hayes said. "I was very nervous trying to support the activities of this
group that was so determined to make a difference in our community."

Now, Hayes is one of RAD's biggest advocates.

The stark, 35-minute film has become part of the health curriculum in
eighth grade and high school. And newcomers to the county have confided
that the aggressive anti-drug campaign helped them decide where they wanted
to raise a family.

"People have told me that the reason they came to Carroll County was
because they know heroin is all over Maryland but that Carroll County was
the only place that was doing anything about it," Hayes said.

"What we know about in my line of work is risk and protective factors
relating to substance abuse, and we know that the very existence of Linda
Auerback and her organization is a protective factor for us because they
have gotten word out about the dangers of heroin. And it's not a one-shot
deal - they're back at it again and again."

To many, Shirley Andrews and Michael O'Hara are the public faces of RAD.
Both lost their sons to heroin overdoses - Andrews in 1996 and O'Hara two
years later. They are the RAD members who regularly speak to schoolchildren
and PTA members across the region. They've even shared their stories on the
television talk shows of Oprah Winfrey and Sally Jessy Raphael.

Catalyst and motivator

Auerback is more of the organizer, described by those who know her as a
catalyst and a motivator, an angel and the glue that holds RAD together.

The 48-year-old darts around a room as if she hasn't a moment to spare. And
yet she forges such strong connections with people that teen-agers,
paramedics and others in the community ensure that she is almost always
among the first to know when another young person dies of a heroin overdose.

The mother of four and the religious education office manager for St. John
Catholic Church in Westminster, Auerback now confesses that she was
somewhat resistant to the idea of forming a group.

"We were just parents meeting in my living room," she said during a recent
interview in her office at St. John, where family photos and angel prints
crowd the walls and ledges. "I had a gut feeling that forming a group would
be like having another child."

She was right.

The computer room and basement of Auerback's six-bedroom home are brimming
with videotapes and CDs and brochures and displays for RAD. She bought a
computer and hauled in a donated photocopier to reduce the number of
late-night photocopying runs. Her husband, Steve, a program analyst with
the Social Security Administration, only half-jokingly refers to her car -
also strewn with RAD materials - as "the trash pit." And she estimates that
she spends between 25 and 30 hours a week on RAD business.

Viewers express thanks

"What impresses me the most is that sometimes when I feel like this is an
awful lot of work, I'll get a packet of letters from kids thanking us and,
more than that, telling us what they got out of the ['Heroin Kills']
video," Auerback said.

She still tears up when talking about a posting on RAD's Web site
(www.heroinkills.com) from a woman in Canada whose drug-abusing son had
seen the film in school and came home to talk to her and her husband for
the first time in years.

"He walked in and hugged me and told me how much he loves his dad and I,"
she wrote. "I nearly fainted."

The boy told his mother about the video, how he envisioned his parents
standing at a casket just like the parents in the film's final scene and
how he never wanted to hurt them that way.

"Thank you for giving me my son back," the woman wrote. "It may not be
forever, but I will cherish this day forever and it is all because of what
you do."