HORSE COUNTRY

A Heroin Epidemic Runs Wild in Bucks County.

Some of the names in this story have been changed.

Two weeks ago, Doylestown police responded to a 911 call from a house where
19-year-old John Warren IV had been doing heroin in his upstairs
bedroom with Jeramiah Seger, a classmate bound for Florida State
University. Lt. Mike Cummings said both boys were dead when they
arrived shortly after 9 p.m.

"One was dead in a kneeling position, the other was sprawled, half
falling off the bed," says Cummings. "They had been dead for some
time when our officers arrived. They had lividity and rigor mortis."

The scene made Cummings suspect the boys had been killed by a drug
cocktail that has been blamed for more than 100 deaths in the greater
Philadelphia area this year. The blend is heroin laced with fentanyl,
a painkiller 80 times more powerful than morphine.

"Two people dying of an overdose at the same time makes it reasonable
to assume there's fentanyl involved," says Cummings, a 29-year police
veteran who hears about the trips local high school students make to
buy heroin in Philadelphia from talking to teenagers on the street.

"They've told me that kids pool their money and send one kid down to
the Badlands to buy a bundle of heroin," Cummings says, referring to
the street sale of 14 bags of heroin for the price of 10 -- $100.
"The one who makes the trip and the buy gets the extra four bags as a
bonus, after giving out the 10 bags to the friends who each chipped
in $10. Or, he may sell his bonus heroin to make a profit by charging
more to kids who weren't part of the pool." It's this easy access
along the Badlands-to-Bucks pipeline that has many worried the
problem is destined to get worse before anybody can even figure out
how to make it better. But if heroin is stately Bucks County's dirty
little secret, the mounting deaths are ensuring that it becomes a
poorly kept one.

Elizabeth Matson* is a senior at Central Bucks-West, the high school
that serves Doylestown, a picture-perfect town of well-maintained
Victorian houses on tree-shaded streets with litter-free sidewalks.
Its looks are deceiving, its growing problems hard to see.
"Doylestown is one of the biggest drug towns in our district," says
Elizabeth. "Pot is the number one drug and there's a lot of coke. But
heroin is becoming more popular."

That popularity made news Sept. 29 when Warren and Seger, who had
been a class ahead of Elizabeth, overdosed. "Most parents don't think
their kids are getting involved with drugs," she says during a series
of phone interviews. "They just get dropped off at Starbucks and
their parents think they're safe. But coke is very accessible and
some kids will start with pot as young as 12. I'd say a good
percentage of my senior class probably do pot. And some who take to
drugs more often will do heroin. It's really a progression. One of my
friends who just recently picked up heroin had been doing coke for
about two years."

Buying heroin typically involves a drive to Philadelphia's Badlands,
where it is freely sold on the street.

"One night, some friends and I got lost on our way to a music club
and then we were in the Badlands," says Elizabeth, who doesn't use.
"It was kind of scary. One of the boys in the car said, 'Hey, this is
where I buy my cocaine.' And I said, 'Great, why don't we let you off here?'"

The conversations with Elizabeth began in early September, several
months removed from the last publicized heroin overdose in the nearby
town of Newtown. Now, the drug is not new to either Doylestown or
other nearby picture-book communities in Bucks County. But newcomers
and old-timers alike are finally being forced to take notice.

Annual median household incomes in townships near Doylestown surpass
the $100,000 mark. It is a county where less than 6 percent of the
population live below the poverty line and some 92 percent are
Caucasian. The near nonexistence of violent crime puts the entire
county in the top one percentile of the nation's safest counties.

This should not be heroin country.

But even though Colombian heroin has been addicting and killing Bucks
teenagers for more than a decade, overdose death and addiction rates
are rising. The drug has never been so accessible, in such lethal
form, as it is today.

If that's not enough, Capt. Chris Werner of the Narcotics Strike
Force of the Philadelphia Police Department says he has noticed a
major change in the buying habits. It's not just that the only kids
he mentions doing this are from Bucks; it's that they're now going for volume.

"We're getting kids coming down from Bucks County now buying
quantity, weight," says Werner. "They used to just come and make a
street buy for themselves. Now the enterprising ones come to buy
enough to go back and sell to their friends. They also tend to have
phone numbers of dealers. They call up in advance to make an
appointment and meet the dealer at a street corner. That way, they
get their dope without ever getting out of the car."

That means fewer kids have to make the trek into one of Philly's
rougher neighborhoods.

"You just go to the corner where kids gather at night," Elizabeth
says. "Ask the right questions of the right person, and you get a bag
of heroin. It's not expensive. For $40, you get enough to keep you
happy for a week.

"Once kids start using it regularly, they usually take after-school
jobs working minimum wage at fast-food places to pay for drugs.
Nearly all my friends work after school, and not all of them are
doing it to pay for drugs."

That cocktail of rising popularity and accessibility has officials
worried. "I've seen drugs come and go. Pot, speed, LSD, coke,
mushrooms," Cummings said in an interview in his office. "But there
never used to be heroin with this age group. Not with its prevalence,
the low price, the popularity and the purity which allows it to be snorted."

Purity is what makes the heroin finding its way to Bucks so lethal,
and not simply because of its dangerous power to kill through an
unintended overdose. It allows new users, who would never consider
using a drug that required injection by needle, to try it by snorting
- -- just like cocaine. Detective Dan Baranoski of the Middletown
Police Department, 15 miles south of Doylestown, explains that the
Colombian heroin Bucks County users buy on the street in Philadelphia
or Trenton is much stronger than heroin sold in the 1980s or early 1990s.

"Before the Colombians took over the market," says Baranoski, "you
couldn't get high from snorting heroin. You had to shoot it with a
needle. And that made it unattractive to a lot of kids."

More than unattractive. It was deemed downright ugly, considering the
potential transmission of diseases like hepatitis and AIDS. When
snorted, heroin becomes just another drug in a drug-tolerant teen
landscape. Today, says Elizabeth, girls use it because they think it
will impress boys.

"We were talking about heroin Friday," she says. Some classmates
"just kept going on about how it might up their status at school."

Baranoski has seen the popularity manifest itself through statistics.

"In 2005, for the first time, I made more arrests of people for
selling heroin than for possession," he said. "I'm busting kids
selling out of their parents' $600,000 houses."

A little more than a week before the deaths of Warren and Seger, the
neighboring Buckingham Police Department had responded to a call of a
heroin overdose. Detective John Lehnen said the victim was a
21-year-old girl who had overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin that she
had bought in Philadelphia.

"She was lucky it didn't kill her," said Lehnen, a 15-year veteran.

It was the girl's second overdose in less than a month.

"When I began in 1991, we'd get five or six heroin addicts a month,"
says Nancy Ennis, a physician assistant who, for 15 years, has been
providing detox services at Livengrin, one of three drug rehab
facilities in the county. "Now, it's six to eight a day." State
statistics show that the rate of admission to treatment programs for
heroin has tripled in Bucks County in the past 10 years while the
rates for admission for treatment for alcohol and crack cocaine,
formerly the number one problem drug, have remained stable.

So with a person-an-acre population density and median household
income of $82,000, Buckingham Township would also seem like an
unlikely place for drug deaths, though no more than nearby
Wrightstown, a village settled in 1680 and still a community with
more acres of farmland than residents. But it was there that Lehnen's
colleague, Detective Robert McLeod, had his first experience with a
heroin overdose in 1996.

The household and family seemed wrong for the 911 call that brought
him there. The victim was a soccer star at nearby Council Rock North,
a high school with such lofty academic standards that parents needn't
consider private schools to get their children into college.

His name was Adam Kufta, and he looked near death when McLeod arrived.

"There's that ashen color that you know is not good," McLeod said.
"His pulse was slow and weak and he was making those little sounds,
when people are struggling a get a breath. I guess you call it a death rattle."

When the paramedics arrived, they immediately set up an intravenous
drip of Narcan, a chemical that reverses the effect of heroin.

"It was amazing to watch the signs of life come back," McLeod says.
"First, his color started to come back. Then his eyes opened. Within
10 minutes, they were able to help him sit up."

McLeod had no doubt, as soon as he saw Adam, that he was looking at a
heroin overdose. Neither did the paramedics. But Adam's mother Mary
Lou, a schoolteacher, didn't think so. She knew that her son, like
most of his friends, had been smoking pot, but never imagined he
might have been using heroin. When she learned the truth outside the
hospital emergency room, it brought her to her knees.

THE CASUALTIES: Colletti and Kufta.

"The officer who told me caught me by the elbows," says Mary Lou. "I
wasn't fainting. I was conscious. My knees just buckled at the word."

By year's end, another overdose proved fatal. The tears still flow
from Mary Lou's eyes as she talks about it at a New Hope Starbucks, a
box of tissues in her lap.

"I'll always regret that I didn't take it more seriously that Adam
was using pot," she says, "but I never imagined he'd been doing
harder drugs. He was just snorting it, and he overdosed the third
time he did it. Kids think that because they're snorting instead of
shooting heroin that it's safer. They think it doesn't really count
as doing a hard drug."

The conversation about Adam had been sparked by the overdose death of
Tom Colletti, another Council Rock North sports star. A three-year
honor student and two-sport varsity player, Colletti died two days
before his scheduled graduation last June. He was bound for Drexel
University after a final summer season of Newtown American Legion
Baseball. As a tribute, the coach canceled the first week of the
season, but without reference to the cause of death. There was no
mention of it at graduation, either, but on campus, Colletti had a
known drug problem. A fellow baseball teammate who graduated in 2005
said he even planned to talk to him about it but couldn't summon up
what it took.

A year later, he attended Tom's funeral.

The lack of a cause-of-death acknowledgement, emblematic of civic
denial, evoked memories of an athlete killed by heroin three years
earlier. Katie Kevlock was 16 when she died of a heroin overdose in
the summer of 2003. Her field hockey coach would dedicate the next
season to Katie without mentioning what killed her, either.

Her mother Sue Shields, like Mary Lou Kufta and a few other mothers
of heroin overdose victims, sees the curtain of silence as a big part
of the problem.

"There's a real head-in-the-sand attitude toward this drug problem,"
says Nancy Ennis, who lost a niece to heroin in 2002. "It's a nasty
problem that people don't want to acknowledge because it's not the
kind of thing people want to believe is happening here."

Ennis, Kufta and Shields want that to change. They all take part in a
drug awareness program run by Detective Dan Baranoski, who functions
as a county anti-heroin crusader. Baranoski began noticing fatal
heroin overdoses in the mid 1990s and saw heroin use spread to become
what he considers an epidemic. In 2002, he put together a drug
warning program that he calls NAIVE. It begins with a video montage
of smiling teenage faces underlined by their names, dates of birth,
and years they fatally overdosed.

More than 150 faces killed since 1998 pass across the screen. He says
they represent only part of the death total.

"Those are only the faces of kids whose parents would participate in
the program," says Baranoski. "Some just didn't want their child's
picture shown. Some are still in denial."

In August, Baranoski said there had been 20 heroin overdoses in
Middletown Township alone. "Not all of them were fatal," he said,
"and not all heroin deaths are from overdoses. There was a kid living
near [Middletown] who couldn't stand it any more after being an
addict five years. He blew his brains out a couple of weeks ago."

It's a trend that has left Republican state Rep. Eugene DiGirolamo
angry, even if many elected officials don't often speak about the
unpopular subject. That could be because his namesake son became
addicted to heroin in 1998. (He has since recovered.)

"Where is the outrage over the number of heroin deaths and overdoses
in this county?" asks the legislator from Bensalem. "A day does not
go by that my office doesn't get a call from someone needing help
with a heroin problem."

DiGirolamo has fought in the legislature on behalf of the state
requirement that health insurance companies provide 30 days of
inpatient recovery programs to heroin addicts. A group of health
insurance companies has banded together to fight the law. Meanwhile,
heroin treatment programs go underfunded while addiction rates rise.

"Our department had run through its funds for the year 2006 in
April," says Marge Hanna, executive director of the Bucks County Drug
and Alcohol Commission. "There isn't nearly enough money to deal with
the people who need treatment. It's not a sexy issue to ask for funding."

Hanna and others agree that heroin's stigma presents hurdles.

"Heroin is a dirty word," says Jane Glenhurst, a mother of two, one
an honor student, the other a heroin addict recently released from prison.

Worse for her than the lying, cheating and stealing that often
accompanies such an addiction was the dread of the phone call that a
Gardenville resident named Suzan Bartels got about her son Ian nine
years ago, the call informing her that her son was dead.

Her son, like Mary Lou Kufta's, had gone to Council Rock North. Like
Adam, he was a gifted musician. And, like Adam, he had gotten
addicted to heroin.

"I keep hoping and expecting it will get a little better," Bartels
says, "but it never does."

In mid-August, the Philadelphia Police Department Narcotics Strike
Force arranged for Officer Greg Fagan to give this reporter a tour of
the Badlands. "The Dominicans pretty much control the street heroin
distribution," says Fagan, a big man with a friendly face, thick
curly black hair and quick eyes that miss nothing.

We cruise down the street past families gathered on stoops. Kids ride
bikes in the street. Cell phones are everywhere. Three slender,
short-haired young men sit in a doorway.

"These guys on our left, on the steps, sell from there. They keep
their stash on the abandoned property right there," Fagan says,
pointing to a spot farther down the block. "That guy there with the
cell phone is running the corner, making sure the business is going
right. That kid on the bike in front of us, he's the lookout."

He points to a vacant, derelict house next to a weed-covered lot.

"The sellers would let you go inside, if they know you, and let you
shoot up," he says.

This house, on this block, would not even figure in a Bucks County
parent's nightmare. Unless that parent knows his or her child is a
heroin addict.

We pass the corner of Mutter Avenue and Cambria.

"This used to be so bad because of all the Bucks County people comin'
down and drivin' through that they had cops stationed here who
wouldn't let anybody drive down the block," says Fagan, who explains
that different organizations control different blocks, selling their
own cut in sealed glassine envelopes stamped with a brand name and
often a logo. "On the block we just passed, the heroin is called Bart Simpson."

A day later, in conversation at the Buckingham Township Police
Department, detective Robert McLeod recalls that the heroin that
killed Adam Kufta was brand-named Batman. He mentions that such
branding is important for dealers. Users will seek out a brand of
heroin known to have killed people, including the heroin-fentanyl mix
known this year as "killer heroin."

"Fatal overdoses mean that the heroin is really strong, which is
great advertising for addicts," McLeod says. "Everybody thinks that
even though it killed someone else, it won't kill them."

Lehnen recounts stories of emergency workers being sworn at or even
attacked by users they have revived from coma.

"They say the overdose victim comes back from death," Lehnen marvels,
"and they're angry at the emergency workers for spoiling the best
high they ever had."

Liz Raffin understands that seemingly unbelievable dynamic. Another
Council Rock North graduate, she has been a heroin addict.

"You're always chasing that best high," she tells me. "Even when
you're sitting there nodding, almost going unconscious, you're still
saying to yourself, 'I could get higher.'"

Liz graduated from Council Rock North in 1999. Her older brother,
also a Council Rock North grad, died of heroin overdose in 2003. She
says that when her brother began using at 17, she hated him for what
he was doing to their family. Then, in college, she started doing it herself.

"The first time I snorted it and I was sick as a dog -- puking,
nauseous," she says. "But it still felt good even though I was sick."

So she did it again.

"It's very inexpensive to try out," she says, "and you don't ever
believe you're gonna become a junkie. And then all of a sudden you're
there. It's like its claws dig into you and won't let go, and you
don't realize it until it's too late. And then you have to do it, or
else you're sick.

"There's this idea that if a kid's doing heroin they had a bad
childhood or something, but many kids who use it grow up with
wonderful parents and a wonderful upbringing. I certainly did.
There's no rhyme or reason; it just happened. I was [an] ... honor
student, German honor society, varsity soccer since ninth grade. I
was a good kid. Probably one of the last kids you would think would
get into it."

Larry Ruskin is a schoolteacher in Newtown whose 19-year-old son Tom
is a Council Rock North grad and a heroin addict. Tom is on his third
try at rehab and so far he's clean, but his dad worries because he
knows Tom can get a $10 bag of heroin locally by making a phone call.
"That makes it cheaper and easier on a Friday night in Newtown to buy
a bag of heroin than to go to the movies," Larry says.

It bothers Larry that there seems to be so little acknowledgment at
the county level -- in the school system, or even in the justice
system -- of a local crisis. All the police officers interviewed for
this article, as well as NAIVE executive Nancy Ennis, agreed.

"Dan Baranoski puts on the NAIVE program at high schools and gets a
big turnout from students. At Pennsbury High, I think there was a
turnout of over 300 students," Ennis says. "And then the follow-up
showing and discussion for parents, which is what really counts, only
got about 35 people."

One approach to addressing the problem has law enforcement going after dealers.

Chris Abruzzo is head of the Narcotics Strike Force for the state
Bureau of Narcotic Investigation in Harrisburg. Early in 2006, a
long-range undercover project aimed at top level heroin distributors
in the Badlands took down eight men described as "kingpins." How long
would it take for them to be replaced?

"A week or two," Abruzzo acknowledged. "I can't say we made much of a
dent in the heroin supply."

Conceding that there's really no way to stem the flow of heroin into
the region, Abruzzo considers the theory that police would have to go
after users to reduce the demand. But when asked for a solution, Mike
Cummings, who's seen the bodies of young victims in a county that
doesn't want to acknowledge an epidemic, remains at a loss.

"I have no idea," the veteran police lieutenant concedes. "It takes a
smarter mind than mine to figure that one out."