YOUNG & STRUNG OUT

Alarming Trend Of Younger Users, Like Matt, On LI

When Matt locked himself in the bathroom of his parents' East Meadow
home last year to take his first shot of heroin for the day, he knew
immediately that this hit was different.

The cooked heroin, packaged under the name Pyramid Papers, was
unusually thick and oily. He cinched a belt around one arm to ready a
vein and turned on a hot shower to intensify the effect.

As he pressed the dope into his vein, he felt all the blood rush to
his head: "I heard, 'Whomp whomp whomp' and then I was done, just
out."

Matt came to on the bathroom floor - an hour later? two? - with the
belt still on his arm, the empty syringe beside him.

"I guess it was a small miracle I woke up at all," he said. Matt said
he was terrified by the overdose - but shot up again anyway within
hours. "If anything, I was more excited because the heroin was so
good," he said.

Matt, who asked to be identified by his first name, was one of what
police say is an alarming number of young people on Long Island using
- - and overdosing on - heroin and prescription painkillers.

Matt is 20 years old, with pale blue eyes, a wide smile and a quick
laugh. He's been clean four months, the longest he's been off drugs
since he was in middle school.

"I spent years learning to depend on drugs, and now I'm learning to
cope with life," he said. "I'm getting ready for the real world again."

Sitting on a sidewalk bench in East Hampton last week, Matt drew
deeply on a Marlboro and spoke about his nearly fatal heroin
addiction with the fragile confidence of a person in the first flush
of recovery.

Teen's Downward Spiral

Matt first tried marijuana and alcohol when he was 14 years old and
hanging out with an older crowd in his middle-class neighborhood in
East Meadow. He said he was frequently in trouble at school and he
got his first taste of opiates two years later when a hospital
doctor gave him morphine and Vicodin after he was injured in a
school-yard fight.

Matt says the drugs had an immediate effect on him, soothing his
insecurities and enveloping him in "complete warmness."

"All the anxiety, all the depression I had, it was all swept away,"
he said. "I thought, 'This is it. I feel complete.'"

After leaving the hospital, Matt began taking as many as five pills
of Percocet or Vicodin a day, at $4 a pill. Occasionally, he splurged
on a $20-to-$40 hit of OxyContin, a potent painkiller that kept him
high for hours.

Despite his rapidly advancing drug use, Matt says he maintained a
facade of normalcy by keeping his evening high school grades up and
holding a steady job.

But Matt said he soon lost the job for dealing marijuana to
co-workers to pay for his pill habit. His parents caught him stealing
from their home several times but knew little about Matt's drug use.
That changed in July 2003 when he was nearly arrested for forging
prescriptions from a stolen doctor's pad.

With the support of his family, Matt entered a drug treatment center
in Hampton Bays, where another patient introduced him to heroin.
Eighteen months later, Matt had an $80-a-day intravenous habit and
quickly relapsed after a second trip to rehab in 2004.

"I knew I was in trouble but I still thought I could quit without
anyone's help," he said. "Those times in rehab, they were more like
little breaks than recovery. I mean, I met all kinds of people I
could do drugs with in there."

At 19 years old, Matt's life revolved around his four or five daily
injections of heroin. He knew where to sell stolen jewelry and
electronics, had learned to switch injection spots to minimize track
marks, and kept a supply of methadone ready to ward off withdrawal
symptoms on the rare days he couldn't score.

If he tried to go a day without heroin, he was wracked with nausea,
anxiety and depression. "I couldn't do a thing, couldn't even get out
of bed. If anyone came to my door, I'd just scream at them," he said.

Desperate for help, Matt says last May he broke down and asked his
father yet again for help. After a five-day drug detox at a Nassau
hospital, they went together to check Matt into the year-long rehab
program at Phoenix House II in Wainscott.

Like many addicts trying to kick drugs, Matt's recovery was almost
derailed when he relapsed two months into the program. He downed
several painkillers offered by an unsuspecting hospital nurse.

"I thought I was strong enough to say no but I guess not," he said.
"I took them fast, before I gave myself time to talk myself out of
it."

Ever-Present Temptations

But Matt says he has been clean ever since. He does maintenance work
around Phoenix House II, recently got his final high school credits,
and has a job helping new arrivals learn how the rigorous recovery
program works.

"I never thought I'd be responsible for anything, and look at me, I'm
responsible for all sorts of things," he said.

Phoenix House administrator Kate Quigley, who confirmed many details
of Matt's story, is guardedly optimistic about him. She says Matt,
like many young addicts, never learned to cope with responsibility or
deal honestly with others or themselves.

"He's so charming and funny, but he can use that to manipulate you as
well," she said. "He's still got to learn to get deep with himself."

After he finishes rehab in the spring, Matt says he wants to get a
well-paying job; he's not sure doing what. He also plans to move to
his parents' new home in Ohio, in part to help him avoid some of the
temptations he knows await him.

"I don't ever see going back to East Meadow and being sober," he
said. "Everything is just an arm's length away."