LOCAL FAMILIES SHARE HEROIN HORROR STORIES

ABINGTON-- Bethany became addicted to drugs like so many other
teenagers: She took a pill at a party, sat back, and enjoyed the feeling.

Only this drug was Oxycontin, and it didn't take long before the drug
owned Bethany, body and soul.

"I had never felt better. Before I knew it, I was addicted. I had to
have it," said Bethany, a recovering addict who was raised in a
strict Baptist home.

She remembers wanting to get high before going to her father's 50th
birthday party. When she couldn't obtain Oxycontin, she took a chance
on heroin.

She was 18 then. Soon she was completely addicted to the drug.

One day she decided to shoot up heroin at her parents' house.

She never dreamed that her mother would discover the needle before
she got home. Her mother panicked, and locked herself in her bedroom.

"She said, 'I'm not coming out. I don't know what you will do to me
to get these drugs,' " said Bethany, struggling through tears.

Bethany's message at Wednesday's anti-drug forum was that addiction
is not only powerful, it is destructive. And it can strike any
family, no matter how seemingly normal.

And it's happening everywhere.

The forum at the high school was sponsored by the Abington Rotary
Club, Police Department, and Learn To Cope, a parents support group,
to raise community awareness of the drug plague sweeping across the region.

More than 100 people attended the event, which lasted two hours and
featured a number of guest speakers.

"It's not just Abington. It's happening in every community," said
Learn To Cope Executive Director Joanne Peterson about drug addiction.

"When everybody starts to come together, then the community can work
together," she said.

The group, which formed three years ago, now has 450 members and
continues to grow by as many as three parents each week, she said.

Abington Police Chief David G. Majenski gave a presentation on the
different kinds of popular drugs and their effects. He began with the
"gateway drug," marijuana, and ended with the most powerful and
deadly opiate -- heroin. In the past 10 years alone, he said, arrests
of drug dealers in Abington have skyrocketed, from 10 between 1995 to
1997 to 120 between 2005 and 2007. Much of the department's success
at drug interdiction is because of an increasingly proactive approach, he said.

"We want to send a clear message that (drug dealers) are not welcome
here," said Majenski, who has four children. "I'm scared to death. As
a parent, as a police chief, I'm not immune" to the problem.

An Abington mother of a daughter recovering from addiction read a
poem, written by another woman in recovery, about broken lives,
broken families, and broken dreams left behind by drugs.

"Life is too beautiful to carry so much shame," said the mother,
sobbing as she read the words.

Elaine, another Abington mother, shared with the audience the
heartache of watching her daughter's life being ripped apart by
Oxycontin and heroin.

In May 2003, "I found my beautiful daughter, my baby, on the basement
floor, in full convulsions," she said.

But her daughter was one of the lucky ones. She has been in recovery
for more than two years.

James Kenney, program director of the Women's Addiction Treatment
Center in New Bedford, said that making a full recovery depends on
"not giving up hope."

"If there is one message that gets out there, it's never giving up
hope," he said.