TEEN RECALLS HEROIN ADDICTION AND ROAD TO RECOVERY

Deadly Form Of Heroin Continues To Destroy Lives Across Long Island,
Trampling Across Age Groups And Economic Lines.

Amanda Singer, a teenager from Sayville, is still escaping a scene
known well to girls such as Natalie Ciappa, a Massapequa teenager
whose death from an apparent opiate overdose last month underscored
what police say is a rise in heroin use among young people. Shaun
Collins, a former military medic, looks back on the 20 years he's
given to the drug life. For the parents of 17-year-old Michelle
"Misha" Nardone, the lessons have come too late. They are three faces
of heroin addiction on Long Island, right now. One could not tell her
story. Two others are now clean, and fighting to stay that way.

As she tells the story of a near-deadly heroin overdose last summer,
18-year-old Amanda Singer's demeanor is as calm as the facts are extreme.

Last June, as her father slept nearby in the Sayville home they
shared, Amanda and a friend cooked up a bag of heroin and filled a syringe.

"My lips turned blue, I looked in the mirror, and I just collapsed on
the floor," she said. As she spoke, she sat side-by-side with her
mother at a Brentwood youth treatment center, her home for the past 10 months.

Amanda awoke in an ambulance speeding toward Southside Hospital. The
EMTs had given her a fast-acting anti-opiate drug. " ... And I was
mad because I felt I wasn't high anymore," she said. "The EMTs had
just saved my life and I was more concerned about the $20 I'd spent
on the heroin being wasted."

It's a hard image to reconcile with the young woman who proudly shows
a visitor around the center's crisply clean meeting rooms, where she
now helps introduce the often reluctant newcomers to a sober life.

It can be a tough transition for young users, especially for those
like Amanda with heroin addictions. Days at Outreach House II are
tightly scheduled with classes and counseling sessions, many led by
the kids themselves. The pleasant but sparse bedrooms hold little of
the typical teenage clutter. Privileges are won and lost based on the
willingness to live within the rules and stay clean.

"It's an important job. Those first few weeks are the worst. It's a
lot to take in," she said. "I never thought I'd be the person to be
doing this or even be able to do it."

Growing up in Sayville, Amanda says she never felt like she fit in.
She had few close friends and was more comfortable with her many pets
and on horseback than with other kids.

But as she moved into adolescence, Amanda found that using marijuana
and alcohol gave her a sense of belonging with others. "We had our
first boyfriends together, we got high for the first time together.
It was like a bonding experience," she said.

Amanda's mother, Debbie, who separated from Amanda's father in 2004
and left the home, said she was initially happy to see her daughter
make more friends. "In retrospect, I think I maybe missed a lot of
the warning signs," she said. "I thought, 'Wow, she's starting to
feel socially accepted,' and that was a good thing, I thought."

Amanda, who had once rarely looked anyone in the eye, says she was
fearless when it came to drugs. During her sophomore year at
Connetquot High School, she and her friends began pooling money to
buy cocaine and other drugs. A friend's boyfriend soon introduced her
to Xanax and OxyContin, which she learned to grind and snort.

"I'm an extremist. I was the one who could do the most and get the
highest. I'd, like, huff dust until I passed out in public," she
said. "My friends would be like, 'Whoa, Amanda, what are you doing?
We're having fun but you're going crazy.'"

"I wasn't scared of the drugs, I was scared of what other people
thought of it."

Last May, scarred with track marks and scared, Amanda agreed to enter
an upstate rehab facility. She lasted five days before she pretended
she was going to kill herself and persuaded her father to pick her
up, she says. After a subsequent arrest in New Jersey for carrying a
syringe and burned spoon, she was clean for a month while living in a
Suffolk facility. But within a week, she was using again.

After Amanda's father, who is retired with a disability, found her
shooting up and snatched away a bag of heroin, she chased and
threatened him, prompting another arrest, she says. After a week in
the Riverhead jail, a judge offered Amanda a sentence or an extended
stay in an inpatient center.

Sitting with her mother in an administrator's office last week,
Amanda spoke calmly about where she has been. She struggled for
months to shed her defiance and was often in conflict with the staff.
But she got through a difficult six-month treatment for hepatitis C.
Now she is trusted to help guide others into the program.

If Amanda can stay clean, she'll soon be allowed to enter an
outpatient program. She hopes to get a GED and study nutrition or
journalism in college.

"I needed time away from the drugs to figure out who I am because I
was still so lost. Today I'm OK with telling people my story because
I see where I am now and it doesn't bother me," she said. "I don't
care what anyone thinks anymore, I know where I stand today. I'm
comfortable in my own skin and that's something I've never felt."