HEROIN BECOMING DRUG OF CHOICE IN SUBURBS

Parents' dreams for their children often include, among other things,
a good education, good friends, a good job and all the things they
didn't have and more.

Among the things they don't want for their children is a drug addiction.

But for a number of teenagers who've been raised in suburban middle
and upper-middle class households, the possibility of becoming
addicted to drugs is a reality, and the gateway to that addiction may
be sitting in your medicine cabinet.

"Prescription drug use has been on the rise for a number of years,"
said Limerick Police Chief William Albany.

Albany's department has seen the effects in certain crimes
escalating. In the fall of 2008, a series of residential burglaries
was linked to a group of young people addicted to heroin. The teens
and young adults were found to have become addicted to prescription
pain medications and turned to heroin use when the drug was cheaper
to buy. The burglaries were a way to fund their drug use, Albany said.

The addiction to prescription drug use, which can lead to heroin use,
often takes parents by surprise, shatters the dreams they have for
their children, and tears families apart.

Learning their child was addicted to heroin has been a treacherous,
never-ending roller coaster ride for Joe and Sue Parker of Linfield.

Joe and Sue, whose names have been changed to protect their privacy,
said they didn't know for certain their son was addicted to heroin
until he was arrested at the age of 17.

"He was going on 17 when he was arrested for breaking into houses to
support his drug habit," his dad said. The Parkers' son had been
using heroin for about six months by that time. Joe Parker said he
had suspicions long before that. "I caught him smoking cigarettes and
had him grounded to the house," he said. "He bugged to get out and as
soon as he did, he got into the kids who were just roaming and hanging out."

He noticed a change in his son's attitude, and his regard for
authority started to falter.

He discovered his son was using marijuana. At first he thought it was
"just a phase," but then realized that there was a chance his son was
using other drugs. He never suspected heroin.

"I told him your attitude's just totally changing and he'd just throw
out, 'I'm not doing heroin.' He just lied to the end. He became a
different person, totally, 100 percent," Parker said.

Parker said he often checked his son for signs of heroin use. "I
checked his arms and looked for the signs of needle marks, but they
weren't there." He said he didn't realize that the drug would be
"cheaper for them to go to the city and buy it and snort it."

Suspicions Fracture Family

Joe Parker said he and his wife often fought because he suspected the
drug use and she denied it.

"Parents need to realize that it can happen to their son and don't
say 'No, it's not happening to my son,'" Sue Parker said. "I didn't
see them," she said of the warning signs. "And when my husband was
telling me he was seeing them, that's when I was in denial.

"Me being in denial and my husband not being in denial it took a big
toll on us as a family," Sue Parker said. "Just day in and day out fighting."

She said she would ask her son whether he was involved in anything
and when he said no she took his word. "He was my baby, my baby
wouldn't do that," she said.

Joe and Sue Parker agreed that having the confirmation their son was
using heroin gave them answers, but it was devastating to hear their
worst nightmare was happening.

"It was terrifying," Joe Parker said. "It's just you hear so many
deaths from it and how it does break up families and how it ruins
somebody's life so fast. It's bad enough to find out it's just
marijuana, but to find out it's heroin, it's just every day just
seems so hard to track him and the worry of where he was, there was
just so many lies, on top of lies and lies. It's bothering to this
day that I knew something was going on, and it seemed I couldn't do
anything about it."

"My heart felt to the floor," Sue Parker said of learning the truth.
"I thought 'I've known people who were on heroin and it's killed
them'. ... I just thought 'Is he going to be hooked on this forever?'"

Both Joe and Sue Parker acknowledged that their son made poor
choices, but they felt the lack of activities for teenagers in the
Linfield area was a contributing factor to their son's turning to drugs.

"Here in Linfield, there's nothing for them to do," Joe Parker said.
"There's nowhere for them to play basketball. They are bored kids
that want to do something."

Joe Parker explained that his son used to enjoy BMX biking, and
although there are a few places in the local area where his son could
be involved in the sport, they weren't within walking distance or
within a reasonable distance so his son could ride his bike there.

"If parents don't have money to get their kids into things, they just
get really bored and look for a way out and something to do," Parker
added. "I noticed that most of his friends, the ones at school,
started hitting their parents medicine cabinets."

Belongings Pawned to Support Habit

Once his son became involved with drugs, Parker said he noticed that
his son lost interest in riding. Then, his son's riding gear and
other personal belongings started to disappear.

"Things are missing and all of a sudden he needed money every day,"
Parker said, explaining that his son pawned valuables to support his
drug habit.

"All my son's belongings, all the items are missing, his bicycles, to
paintball guns," Parker said. "All the things that were valuable to
him and he was interested in were gone. Anything they could make
money on they would take. I don't care if they could make $10 on it,
they'd get the money and take a ride down to the city."

Making the entire matter worse, the Parkers said they didn't know who
to turn to for help. "We got nowhere trying to get help for him,
seeing this coming, it just happened so fast," Joe Parker said. "The
parents that don't mind their child and watch what they do and their
e-mails and their phones, if they don't keep track of what they're
doing, they'll get blindsided and it will happen to them. It will
happen so fast it will seem."

Trying to be authoritarians with their 17-year-old son didn't work,
Joe Parker said.

"He pretty much took control of us," Joe Parker said. "He pretty much
found out 'You can't hit me, so I'll come home when I want, I'll
pretty much do what I want.'

"I had no say, he was the adult," Parker said of his son. "I was
afraid of him, really."

Parker said he doesn't think that teenagers today who are getting
involved with drugs like heroin really care about the serious
consequences of the drug. He said teens are probably aware that the
drug can kill them, but they are in denial that it will happen to them.

Since their son has been arrested and went to a treatment facility,
they said he realized that what he did was wrong.

"He regrets what he's done and the things he's done to other people,"
Joe Parker said. "Everytime I talk to him, that's all he says."

Looking Ahead

Joe Parker said right now he is focused on trying to help his son
however he can and he wants to inform other parents out there that
there is a chance their children are using prescription drugs and
could get involved with heroin use.

"They must follow what their children are doing every moment, every
cell phone, every email, before they take control of you," he said.
"It will happen or is happening. The more naive you are, the more
it's happening."

Sue Parker warned of the signs of drug use that she overlooked.

"Weight loss, anger, acne, defiance, thinking he was indestructible,"
she said of the things she saw in her son but did not connect to
possible drug use.

"Looking back, I didn't see how much weight he really lost," she
said. "He was always a skinny kid, but he was just withering away and
basically he was wearing clothes that covered the weight loss."

Above all else, Sue Parker reemphasized the importance of parents
trusting their instincts and not thinking their child, because of
their income level or where they live, will not get involved in drugs.

"Parents just can't be in denial, they need to keep their eyes wide
open, trust their instincts," she said.

She believes that if she had been more honest about what was
happening, perhaps her son would have been able to get help before he
was arrested.

"If I wasn't in denial we could have sought counseling or something,"
Sue Parker said. "But I just said he's not doing it. I believed him."

Gwyn Luciano and her husband work. They have a nice suburban home and
two children.

Their daughter, the oldest, lives on her own. Their 20-year-old son
Leonard, or Lenny as he is often called, is living at home while
awaiting sentencing for drug and theft-related offenses - offenses
his mother and grandmother say stem from a serious drug addiction to
prescription pain medications.

"This didn't happen overnight," Joan Luciano said of her grandson's
drug addiction and subsequent run-in with the law.

The two women decided to sit down with The Mercury and speak on the
record about the experiences their family has lived through the past
year. They said their hope is that other parents might be able to
prevent their own children from traveling down the destructive path
of prescription drugs.

Gwyn Luciano said her son is a good kid who made some poor choices.

"He did well in elementary school, and he did well in middle school,"
she said. In high school he maintained decent grades and worked,
including jobs at Lakeside Inn and CVS.

When he was in 10th grade he was cut from the baseball team, which
both his mother and grandmother believe had a profound impact on his
teenage life.

"That was what he wanted to do," Gwyn Luciano said. "He would keep
his grades up just to play ball."

No longer being on the baseball team also changed the crowd Lenny
hung out with, his mother and grandmother said. Soon after, Gwyn
Luciano said she found out that her son had been using marijuana.

She said Lenny started to hang out with a different group of friends,
but also maintained a relationship with his girlfriend, a
relationship that both his mother and grandmother viewed as a positive one.

Then on March 10, 2008, when Luciano was in his senior year, he and
his girlfriend were in a horrific vehicle crash. Lenny's girlfriend,
Ashley Bouher, a sophomore at Upper Perkiomen High School, was killed.

Lenny didn't go to talk to a counselor about his grief over Ashley's
death. In fact, his mother and grandmother said he looked to his new
crowd of friends to help get him through.

Cycle of Denial

Gwyn said she first found pills - Xanax - in Lenny's room about a
month after the crash.

"You think maybe they're not his, but the question's always there,"
Gwyn Luciano said. She asked Lenny about it, and he said he was
"holding them for a friend," his mother recalled.

She said she saw pills on a couple of occasions hidden under
something, not in plain view, and "it was only ever a couple" pills
she found at one time. "I thought maybe it was something he tried ...
something he wanted to experiment with," Gwyn Luciano said. That was
before she realized her son was addicted.

After a bit of time she noticed her son was selling his electronic
game systems and the games with them to pawn shops. He also sold a
bunch of his other belongings, including his boom box, lava lamps,
and other items.

When she asked Lenny about the items, he told her he was selling them
at pawn shops for spending money. Later, his family learned he had
also started to sell drugs to support his habit.

As Gwyn saw more negative things in her son's behavior, such as being
constantly tired, unmotivated, secretive, her thoughts went to ways
to help him.

"We've talked about 'Intervention,'" she said of the television show
on A&E where families, with the guidance of a professional, confront
their loved one who has a chemical dependency or other compulsive
behavior. "My daughter even went online" to apply for the show. But
they didn't hear anything.

Gwyn Luciano said there were times of "constant arguing," and times
when Lenny seemed incredibly depressed. She continued to try to
convince him to go to talk to a counselor about the vehicle crash and
the death of his girlfriend, but he didn't. He was 18 by then,
legally an adult, and she said she couldn't force her son to go to
counseling at that point.

One day in May 2008 she came home to find her son in the process of moving out.

"I came home and he was packing his stuff and leaving," she said. "He
said, 'I'm just gonna leave, go somewhere else. ... I'm leaving.'"

Gwyn and Joan Luciano said they still don't know exactly where Lenny
slept during his time away from home, but they suspect it wasn't in a
cozy environment and it certainly wasn't drug-free.

Escalating to Heroin

After time out on his own, Lenny moved in with his sister, her
boyfriend and their infant child. That's when it was discovered he
had been using heroin.

"When he couldn't get the OxyContin, he got the heroin," Gwyn Luciano
said. "My daughter found a bag of heroin" and called me.

Gwyn Luciano explained that heroin can be appealing for prescription
drug users because it's often cheaper than prescription drugs on the
street, it gives a comparable high and often it doesn't need to be
ingested via needles.

"OxyContin can be anywhere from $30 to $60, $70 per pill," she said.
"Heroin's $10 a bag."

She asked her son where he was getting the heroin, and his response
was startling.

"He said you can get it right down the street in Royersford," she
said. "... This stuff's right here, right in our own backyards."

"You can go into the school any time of the day and get drugs," added
Joan Luciano, referring to suburban schools throughout the area,
including Spring-Ford Area High School, which Lenny had attended.

Vicious Cycle With Nowhere to Turn

While the family knew Lenny needed in-house treatment for his
addition, rehab facilities are expensive and most insurance plans
don't cover more than 30 days.

Even more frustrating for the Lucianos, because Lenny is over 18 and
legally considered an adult, he had the option after going through
detox to leave rehab if he wanted.

The women said there are waiting lists at several area rehab
facilities, which is indicative of both how big the drug problem is
as well as how underprepared society is to handle it.

They have similar thoughts about the legal system.

"Where are they getting the guys (dealing drugs) at the top?" Joan
Luciano said. "They're never gonna get that guy.

"This thing is so big right now and it's young kids who don't stand a
chance in hell," she added.

She said it seems that a lot of lower level dealers like her
grandson, who was dealing drugs not to make a living but solely to
support his drug habit, are the ones getting caught.

But the bigger dealers are smart, and keep getting more and more
people addicted so they can become sellers of the drugs when people
like her grandson are arrested, she said.

Additionally, parents and family members need to have some place they
can turn, other than to law enforcement which is going to punish the
person doing drugs because they're breaking the law, both women said.

"It would be nice to turn to somebody and say, 'My son is 18 and I
need help,'" Gwyn Luciano said.

"These first-time offenders, they need to help them," Joan Luciano
said. "Eighteen to me is not an adult. I don't care what people say,
until 25, you're not an adult."

Lasting Effects of a Wrong Turn

Joan added that it's a real shame that so many young people, her
grandson included, are losing their young adulthoods in a world of
drugs and alcohol, and it's time they can't get back.

"It was traumatic that he never got help (dealing with the crash),
turned to his friends and they put him on the road to some really bad
things," Joan Luciano said.

Both women were adamant that there are a lot of good kids out there
who are making bad decisions and there aren't any resources for
families to help them.

"These are good kids," Gwyn Luciano said. "Lenny comes from a good family."

"It can happen to the best of anybody," Joan Luciano added.

When asked why she never resorted to calling the police on her son,
Gwyn Luciano said the thought never crossed her mind. Besides, she
didn't know how that would be helpful.

Gwyn Luciano said her relationship with her husband, Lenny's father,
has suffered because of the turmoil of Lenny's drug use, running away
from home and getting arrested.

"You ask, 'Where did I go wrong?'" she said. "Not knowing where he
was (when he ran away), you blame each other."

Although Lenny has been through a lot and still has a long road ahead
of him, both his mother and grandmother are hopeful that he can turn
things around if the right support system is in place.

Asked what her greatest hope for her son is, Gwyn Luciano said "that
he can stand strong, fight the addiction, and have the everyday normal life."

"I don't want him yo-yoing," his mom said. "You worry about if he
could relapse and do heroin, that he could OD on it."

Lenny's grandmother echoed the same sentiments.

"I hope he gets strong enough to get through this," she said. "I hope
he can get help, get his life back on track. I think he needs to go
back in a rehab. The drugs gotta stop. With the drugs it's either
going to be dead or jail time.

"We just want, not only for our son and grandson, but for other kids,
to not get involved with the drugs," Joan Luciano said. "It ruins
people's lives."

She was adamant about continuing to get the word out, even if she
didn't immediately know who to talk to to make a difference.

"We cannot just let this die," she said, adding that the issue of
prescription drug us "is an epidemic."

"Too much hurt has happened in this family," Joan Luciano said. "They
need to help these kids."