Body Politic by sharon lerner

SMACK ATTACK - HEROIN DEATHS RATTLE THE EAST VILLAGE

Rob MacDonald Died Of An Overdose On June 6.

It all started on a Monday about a month ago. Three people, thought to
have bought their heroin in the East Village, overdosed in one day.
Richard Spadafora, a 42-year-old printer, died on Hudson Street.
Matthew Boyd, a 26-year-old who used to hang around in Tompkins Square
Park, was pronounced dead at Beth Israel. And Peter Brown, a white
dentist from New Jersey, was found dead in his car on East 9th Street.
The next day another man overdosed in his room in the Brooklyn YMCA.
Less than a week after that, a 23-year-old died on East 9th Street, at
the same spot where Boyd overdosed.

It's no wonder the East Village was in a panic. Drug use seems to hit
the streets full force every year around this time. As the weather
heats up, the parks fill with people who spend their scant money on
drugs rather than shelter. And as schools let out, students on summer
vacation flock to Avenue A to get high.

But by the end of this overheating spring, something seemed to be going
terribly wrong for heroin users who buy
in the East Village. Several locals attribute shockingly high body
counts to tainted, or just very pure, heroin. One veteran Tompkins
Square Park watcher, Kim Yarbrough, estimates that more than 30 people have
died from heroin overdoses since mid-May.

"Something's definitely going on out there," says Yarbrough, who also
reports a recent increase in neighborhood police presence. The New
York Times even weighed in on the phenomenon, running an article that
focused on the death of the white dentist, a long-distance runner and
gardener who was mourned by his shocked suburban neighbors.

Then, just as the hysteria was beginning to subside, local activist
Rob MacDonald died of an overdose. MacDonald, who was found dead in
his Harlem apartment on June 6, fought for free speech, organized
student protests over budget cuts at CUNY, and, most famously, led the
annual marijuana marches in Washington Square Park.

Despite the fact that MacDonald appears to have bought his final heroin in
Harlem and not the East Village, his
death extended speculation about the heroin supply: Are bad batches of
dope taking out unsuspecting users? Or has New York's heroin- which is
well-known to have gotten purer in recent years- become so strong that
it's poisoning people who aren't prepared for its strength?

Experts seem to think neither scenario is particularly likely.
Tragically, it wouldn't be unusual even if, say, 30 people had died
from shooting heroin in the past month or so (something the medical
examiner's office can't yet confirm, since it usually takes about six
weeks to officially determine the cause of death). There were 582
overdoses from heroin and other opiates in New York City in 1997,
according to the most recent Health Department statistics. Not being
in surprising clusters or affecting white suburbanites, most went
unnoticed in the press.

And whether or not there has been a recent spike in heroin-related deaths,
New York has actually experienced a
decrease in heroin overdoses over the past 10 years- even,
surprisingly, as heroin ODs are increasing

throughout the rest of the country. That may be because New York's
drug users, as many and experienced as they are, have evolved ways of
looking out for one another.

Down at the Lower East Side needle exchange, where drug users trade in
old needles for clean ones, problem batches are regularly posted on
the dangerous drug board. Since last month's ODs, the board has listed
a "chocolate colored dope," brand name "daze out," to which it
attributes "six deaths in one week." And, because the strength of
drugs is always an unknown, needle exchange workers advise against
slamming, or injecting all the heroin in the syringe at once.

"Slamming gives you a really, really powerful rush," says the
exchange's Drew Kramer. Instead, a flyer handed out by the exchange
advises shooting the drugs little by little. "It's not the intense
high you get when you suddenly have all this drug soaking your brain.
But you have a chance to tell what's happening in your body," says
Kramer. For the same reasons, Kramer also cautions against shooting
into the neck, legs, guts, or groin, where veins provide especially
quick entry into the bloodstream.

Drug users have also been circulating tips for how to react when a
person does overdose. Don't be afraid to call 911, suggests a brochure
put out by the Harm Reduction Coalition. When you call, "you don't
have to say the person has overdosed," says the coalition's Allan
Clear. "And when the ambulance comes, you can say 'the person
sometimes takes a certain drug.' "

You might think longtime users would accumulate this kind of
knowledge, and that neophytes would be the most likely to succumb to
overdoses. Yet, even as the media make much about young and
white-collar- or just white- drug casualties, it's actually the
longtime users who are most likely to die. MacDonald fits this
pattern, having been addicted to heroin for years.

So far, the medical examiner has finished investigating just two of
the heroin overdoses that started the latest surge of anxiety. Both
point to another trend: that deaths attributed to heroin often involve
many drugs. Weighing against the idea that a single batch was to
blame, it turns out that Boyd died from both alcohol and heroin, and
that Spadafora had taken heroin, cocaine, and Valium.

The reports on the 34-year-old black man who overdosed in the YMCA in
Brooklyn and the 43-year-old black man found dead by the eastbound
Brooklyn Queens Expressway aren't in yet, so we don't know exactly
what killed them. And, as attention drawn by the question of
mysterious drug batches and the death of a dentist fade, we probably
never will.