HEROIN MOVES INTO CONNECTICUT SUBURBIA

Heroin, a drug usually associated with skeletal addicts in the inner
city, is increasingly infiltrating Connecticut's suburbs.

The suburban heroin scene is more sanitized and less obvious. Users
are typically young and white and living in comfortable homes. Most,
at least at first, don't even inject the drug.

"The more refined, suburban way of doing things is snorting it,"
Glastonbury Police Chief Thomas Sweeney said.

In most cases, young suburbanites start out by trying, then quickly
becoming hooked on, prescription painkillers, authorities said. As
their addiction deepens and they need more of the expensive pills to
get the same high, they take a disturbingly quick path to heroin,
which is potent, widely available and cheap.

"In Hartford, it sells for as little as $4 a bag, and that is the
problem we have in Connecticut in a nutshell," said Wayne Kowal,
public education coordinator for the state police Statewide Narcotics
Task Force.

For the first time ever, heroin has surpassed alcohol as the primary
drug for those seeking rehabilitation treatment in the state, said
Peter Rockholz, deputy commissioner of the state Department of Mental
Health and Addiction Services.

Also, in the past couple of years, the number of heroin deaths in
Connecticut has doubled from one a week to two a week, Rockholz said.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration now considers heroin the main
drug of concern in Connecticut and the Northeast.

Common, Cheap And Pure

The highly addictive, dangerous drug has only recently emerged, at
least publicly, in towns such as Glastonbury, where it has taken two
lives in the past few months. This fall, local police made eight
heroin arrests and investigated two dozen home burglaries, some of
which police believe were committed by addicts seeking loot to pawn
for cash.

In Southington, heroin claimed at least four young lives in the past
two years, while East Haddam has lost one young person to the drug.
West Hartford police have been dealing with an uptick in heroin
trafficking in the past year, seizing hundreds of packets in
undercover stings at Westfarms mall and in the southeastern section of
town.

Glastonbury and East Haddam recently held forums to warn parents that
heroin has penetrated the sleepy suburbs.

"You can put your head in the sand and say it's not here. But heroin
is around, it's common, it's cheap, it's pure and that's problematic,"
said Sweeney, the Glastonbury police chief.

In fact, municipal and state police say that heroin is now in every
suburb in the state, from the poorest rural towns to the most
exclusive ones.

"You look in any affluent, upper-middle-class town where kids have
money and time and that's where it is," said Lauren Goodkin, 20, a
recovering OxyContin and heroin addict from North Haven. "It's the
kids who you would never tag - the kids who are on the honor roll, the
kids who play varsity sports, the kids who come from good families."

Goodkin's journey of addiction began when she rummaged through her
family's medicine cabinet, trying to find something to ease a case of
strep throat and bronchitis. She found an old bottle of her father's
Percocet, a powerful pain reliever.

"I thought, 'Oh this will help.' And that was it. It was a
split-second decision that changed the course of my entire life,"
Goodkin said

Goodkin, a student at the University of New Haven, finished the bottle
within a week. Soon after, when a friend offered her an OxyContin pill
- - another potent painkiller and, like heroin, an opiate - she
remembered the high from the Percocet and decided to try it.

She instantly developed a ferocious craving for "oxys" and began to
buy pills for $30 to $60 each. As she built up a tolerance to the
highly addictive drug, she had to buy more and more to achieve the
same high. Before she knew it, she had a $400-a-day habit.

When she couldn't find OxyContin or couldn't scrounge up the money for
it, she would turn to heroin. At $5 a bag, it was about as cheap as a
pack of cigarettes.

"It all comes down to money. You are trying to save money and you are
trying to get as high as possible," Goodkin said.

Moving Past The Shame

Many suburbanites are unaware of the problem or refuse to believe
it.

"I think the general public reaction is, 'Oh, come on, you're
sensationalizing again. It's certainly not my kid,'" Rockholz said.
"Well, if it's not your kid, it's one of your kid's friends. It is
happening in nice communities and in wealthy communities. It's
widespread enough to be considered an epidemic, not just a few
outbreaks here and there."

Heroin is most popular among young adults aged 18 to 25 in the state,
although there is rapid growth in the 13- to 17-year range. In fact,
prescription painkillers have now become the first drug that most
young people aged 12 and older try, surpassing marijuana, which had
always been considered the gateway drug, Rockholz said.

Between 2004 and 2006, emergency room visits related to prescription
drugs increased by 44 percent throughout the country, Rockholz said.

Heroin still carries a social stigma. Parents feel guilty and ashamed
that their children are addicts, and others worry that raising the
issue will tar the image of their bedroom communities.

Mary Marcuccio, a Southington mother whose son is fighting a heroin
addiction, said that she was told to hush up when she started speaking
out about the problem in Southington.

"I was told point-blank, 'Don't you know what you are doing to
property values here?'" she said.

During a well-attended drug forum in Glastonbury last month, a local
pastor scolded the audience for not talking about the "elephant in the
room."

"We're dealing with a drug that has a connotation associated with it.
People don't necessarily even want to hear it spoken out loud. It's
hushed up so real estate values aren't affected negatively," Paul
Habersang, a pastor at St. James Episcopal Church, said later. "That's
screwed up. If we're valuing real estate values over the lives of our
youth, something's wrong."

Losing Erika

Heroin began oozing into Connecticut's suburbs about eight years ago
in Fairfield County towns such as Newtown and Ridgefield, Rockholz
said. The popularity of the drug spread along the I-91, I-95 and Route
8 pipelines, and today, suburban users can drive into any major
Connecticut city to buy heroin.

Most of Connecticut's heroin comes from Mexico, smuggled in by
vehicles or in human body cavities over the Southwest border.
Connecticut's supply is as much as 80 percent to 90 percent pure
before it is cut with fillers, which enables users to snort or smoke
it and helps erase some of the stigma that comes from using needles.

"Some young adults believe it is not addictive because they are not
injecting it," Kowal said. "The more they use it, the bigger their
tolerance is to it, so they have to use more. Eventually they will
start to inject it."

Like Goodkin, most heroin users start by taking prescription pain
medications. Nearly 70 percent start by helping themselves to
prescription painkillers they find in their family's medicine
cabinets, Rockholz said.

Some hold "pharming" or "bowling" parties, in which they take whatever
pills they find at home and toss them into a bowl and everyone takes a
handful.

"This is very frightening. They just dump them all in and take
handfuls and put them in their mouths," Rockholz said.

Many times, young people mistakenly believe that such drugs are safe
because they're prescribed, albeit for other people, by doctors.

"Nobody tells you, 'Oh, by the way, painkillers, that's [just like
taking] heroin.' That's what I would like to see. I'd like to see it
written in really big, foot-long letters," said Goodkin, the
recovering addict.

"You quite literally beg, borrow and steal from absolutely everyone,"
she said. "You start by stealing little things at first, like change
from the pockets of winter coats, and going through the laundry. It
progresses slowly to outright theft."

Goodkin's addiction changed her personality. She became more irritable
and secretive, consumed with getting her next high.

"It just escalates so rapidly. I tried everything in the world to
stop," said Goodkin, who has been drug-free for nine months after
seeking treatment. "People are under the impression that we enjoy the
lifestyle we lead. It's just not the case. We enjoy it for a little
bit until we start getting sick."

It also destroys families who often don't realize what's happening
and, when they do, feel powerless to stop it.

Ricky Hebert, 23, of Southington, who lost his sister, Erika, 21, to a
heroin overdose in June, feels the pain of her loss most keenly in the
morning when he drives to work and is lost in thought.

Hebert watched his warm, caring sister withdraw and let go of her
appearance as the drug swallowed her up. The family got her to rehab
and tried to support her.

"It was very hard on me. I try to be the core of family support, the
one that people lean on. To see my parents break down in front of me
was hard," Hebert said.

The family was acutely aware of the social stigma of having a heroin
addict in the family.

"You feel like you are kind of an outcast. You feel like people are
judging you. It tears your life apart," Hebert said.

He and others are trying to raise awareness of the epidemic of
prescription drugs and heroin in the suburbs. They want to urge young
people not to start in the first place, and they urge families to
clean out their medicine cabinets and throw out any old
prescriptions.

The state also is rolling out an awareness campaign to urge parents
and grandparents to discard old prescription drugs and keep track of
how many pills they have in each bottle.

At the same time, the state is ramping up a prescription monitoring
program to track the prescribing practices of doctors. The idea is to
keep a database of controlled substances to inform doctors about
patients who might be taking other prescriptions and to crack down on
addicts who "doctor shop" to get painkiller prescriptions.

"Someone's gotta save the next generation of kids from living this
life," Goodkin said. "We've got to talk about it."

For more information on heroin and prescription drugs, see
ctclearinghouse.org, ncadi.samhsa.gov or jointogether.org.