ISLIP, N.Y. -- As a high school varsity football player, Dennis
Fleming waited impatiently for afternoon practice to end so he could
sneak off and snort heroin.

After being expelled from school for assaulting another student -- "I
split his head," Mr. Fleming explained -- he indulged his appetite for
drugs full time. He was arrested several times for burglary and car
theft, spent a Christmas in jail and drove his mother to the brink of
despair, all for the sake of his next fix.

Mr. Fleming is one of a small number of suburban teenagers who have
become addicted to heroin after experimenting with it at increasingly
younger ages.

"I knew what I was doing was wrong," Mr. Fleming, now 18, said when he
returned recently to East Islip High School to tell other students
about his ordeal. "I felt suicidal. But the easiest way for me to deal
with it was to run to my drug of choice."

Heroin use by teenagers does not yet amount to a national epidemic.
But the average age at which heroin users first try the drug has been
dropping in the last decade for several reasons, drug treatment
specialists and law enforcement officials say.

Heroin is easier than ever to find. Its falling price puts it within
reach of a teenager's allowance. Its unprecedented purity allows users
to avoid using needles and to snort it.

And its popularity, sociologists say, has shifted from the inner city
to the suburbs, where few teenagers have witnessed the damage that
heroin can do.

Teenagers are still more likely to use alcohol and marijuana than
heroin. "It may have more the quality of a fad than anything else,"
said Dr. David F. Musto, a medical historian at Yale University.
"There isn't the atmosphere supporting heroin use that there was in
the late 60's and early 70's."

But the problem has produced overdoses and arrests in suburban pockets
around the country, from New York to Delaware, Florida and Texas.
Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has scheduled a hearing
on May 9 by the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics to look into
heroin use by suburban adolescents.

Although popular culture has been blamed for making heroin look
glamorous to adolescents, drug treatment specialists call such an
explanation simplistic; most of the recent initiates were still
children in 1994, when Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, killed
himself after struggling with heroin addiction.

And more than a few parents have been deceived into thinking that
their children could not possibly be using heroin because they do not
look like addicts. Dennis Fleming's mother never expected him to wind
up addicted, she said, because he played Little League baseball for so
many years. "I was never ever aware he had done heroin," Christine
Fleming said. "I didn't know the symptoms."

Heroin's attraction for adolescents has little to do with personality
traits, said Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, a child psychiatrist who is
president of Phoenix House, a nationwide network of drug treatment
programs.

"It's easy for us, as we get older, to forget how powerful peer
pressure is and how needy kids are to have friends and the acceptance
of their friends," Dr. Rosenthal said. "If they are pained and drugs
are available, and if they fall into a peer group where drugs are the
currency, it's really going to stack the deck against them."

When Mr. Fleming and nine other adolescents from Long Island discussed
their heroin addictions in a series of interviews, they said they were
not lured astray by music or other pop influences.

The teenagers, who were undergoing drug treatment at Phoenix Academy,
a program run by Phoenix House in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., and at Outreach
Project in Brentwood, N.Y., blamed stress in school or at home for
their heroin use. "I felt it was easier to handle the pressure when I
was high," Mr. Fleming said.

Most of them, in answering questions, said they came from broken or
troubled homes, lacked self-esteem or felt depressed, and craved acceptance.

"I felt what I was doing was the cool thing, to hang out with my
crowd," said Mr. Fleming, whose addiction landed him in treatment at
Phoenix Academy.

Some teenagers reported finding heroin for sale alongside the designer
drug Ecstasy at raves -- all-night underground dance parties. "I was
going to underground raves," Mr. Fleming said. "It would be like a
real zombie fest."

Several teenagers admitted they did not like heroin at first, but
feared balking in front of their friends. When Michael Nevins, 17, of
Lindenhurst, was introduced to heroin on his 13th birthday, he
recalled, "I was throwing up all over the place."

Heroin is plentiful around New York, law enforcement officials say,
because it is funneled by Colombian traffickers who undercut Asian
suppliers by offering a purer product. The high purity has enticed
adolescents who flinch at the notion of pricking a vein with a needle,
but will sniff heroin under the misconception that breathing it into
their lungs is less addictive.

Dr. Herbert D. Kleber, the medical director of the National Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, estimated that
at least half the sniffers wound up injecting their heroin as
tolerance developed for the drug. "There's a myth out there that you
can't die and you can't get addicted if you're snorting," Dr. Kleber
said.

With heroin cheaper than ever, users themselves say, a bag supplying a
single potent high averages about $10, or less than the cost of a
movie ticket with popcorn.

"The lifestyle goes on and people don't see it," said Megan, a
baby-faced 16-year-old who spoke on the condition that her last name
and hometown be withheld.

Megan was 14 when she started sniffing heroin because, she said, "a
lot of people that I know got high and they looked like they were
enjoying it."

Before she turned 15, Megan said, she was skipping school and
consuming six to eight bags of heroin a day. Even in treatment at
Outreach Project, she found it hard to see herself as an addict.

"When I think of a real junkie, I think of somebody sitting in a
corner with a needle in their arm," she said.

In the New York City region, suburban adolescents, a predominantly
white group, are now more likely to be seduced by heroin than urban
teenagers, many of whom are black and have rejected heroin after
witnessing the devastation it has wreaked among their elders,
according to Travis Wendel, a sociologist at John Jay College of
Criminal Justice. "There's a whole lack of generational memory with
the white kids," Mr. Wendel said.

According to the latest survey by the New York State Office of
Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services, conducted in 1998, about 3.5
percent of 198,000 Long Island students interviewed in the 7th through
12th grades acknowledged trying heroin. Two percent said they had done
so in the last 30 days, and 1 percent -- nearly 2,000 students --
admitted to being heavy heroin users.

Gwenn Lee, the office's communications director, said the numbers for
Westchester County were comparable. "Our biggest problems are in
Westchester and the Island," she said.

But in New York City, the same survey found that a smaller share of
adolescents had tried heroin -- 2.6 percent of 527,000 adolescents in
the 7th through 12th grades, with 0.9 percent saying they used it in
the previous 30 days and 0.6 percent acknowledging heavy use.

Nationwide, the Monitoring the Future Study at the University of
Michigan has tracked heroin use among high school and junior high
students since 1975. The yearly survey by the university's Institute
for Social Research showed that heroin use by high school seniors went
from 2.2 percent of the seniors sampled in 1975 to below 1 percent in
1991, only to rebound to about 2 percent in 1997, where it has pretty
much stayed. But the most recent survey, released last December, found
that although 2 percent of high school seniors had reported using
heroin, 2.3 percent of sophomores and eighth graders had admitted
trying the drug.

This experimentation among younger students has experts concerned.
Annual surveys of illicit drug use, conducted by the federal
government's Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, show that the average age at which heroin is first
used has declined from 26.4 years in 1990 to 17.6 in 1997.

Dr. Robert L. DuPont, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Georgetown
University Medical School, said he was seeing more middle-class
teenagers who had casually turned to injecting heroin.

"When they first use it, they tend to confirm their sense that they
can control it," Dr. DuPont said. "By the time they crash and burn,
which doesn't take very long, they're out of the swirl that spreads
the disease. It's that honeymoon period when they pass it on to their
friends."

Julie Dwyer, 19, tried heroin as a 16-year-old in Bayport, N.Y.,
because, she said, she resented the more popular crowd in school.
"Sometimes I think I did it just to be different from everyone I
hated," she said.

"I didn't think I'd get addicted," Ms. Dwyer said. "I told myself it
would only be now and then." She wound up shooting heroin daily. "I
just fell in love with the needle."

The Long Island teenagers interviewed said they traveled to Brooklyn
or Queens to buy heroin, and paid for it by reselling some to friends
in the suburbs at a markup. "The only hard part was getting a ride,"
said Anthony, 16, who asked that his last name and town not be used.

But Mark Ruperto, 17, said he had no trouble buying heroin in his
hometown, Brentwood. "If they told me I was too young," he said, "I'd
turn around and buy from someone else."

The adolescents scoffed at the stereotype of a predatory adult
loitering around the schoolyard to entice teenagers into trying heroin.

"In my town, the biggest seller was a 15-year-old kid who weighed 80
pounds," said Simona Troisi, who is now 20. "Sometimes the people you
cop from are younger than you are."

The teenagers said it had been easy to deceive their parents, who
wanted to believe they were not using heroin.

"Lies, that's how I got my money, lies," Megan said of her costly
habit. "I'd take it from my mother, steal it from my boyfriend. I owed
people hundreds of dollars."

Ms. Troisi said her parents learned about her addiction after she sold
her father's vintage Gibson guitar for $600 to buy heroin.

"It was the only time my mom said she ever saw my dad cry," she said.