YOUNG AND SUBURBAN, AND FALLING FOR HEROIN

THE kids weren't all right. They lived in the same comfortable Long
Island town and were barely in their teens when they took their first
hit of marijuana or sip of alcohol, propelling them on dark journeys
they couldn't seem to escape. Within a couple of years, they were in
heroin's grip.

"My parents had no idea," said one of them, a 17-year-old girl who,
like other formerly addicted youths interviewed, spoke on the
condition of anonymity because of her past drug use. "My mom thought
I was smoking a lot of weed and taking diet pills, because who
would've thought that such a bad drug could be so easily accessible to me?"

The girl grew up in western Suffolk County, in a town where, she
said, "everything is perfect," with white picket fences and two cars
in each driveway; for her birthday last October, she received a black
Jeep, and she went to a wealthy, high-performing public school.
"Growing up, everything is pushed on you," she said. "You're trying
to be the smartest, trying to compete with everyone."

Heroin, she said, was an escape. The girl said that she had not used
drugs since entering rehabilitation in January, but that many of her
former friends were still hooked on heroin, and at least two had
fatally overdosed.

They are part of a new wave of heroin abuse that officials across the
New York region are grappling to understand. During the first six
months of 2009, 25 people in Nassau County died of heroin overdoses
- -- more than from homicide and drunken driving combined; in 2008, 46
people fatally overdosed on heroin, up from 27 in 2007, according to
Nassau officials.

In New York City, recent drug raids of so-called heroin mills have
yielded hundreds of thousands of bags at a time, up from several
hundred bags a year ago, according to Bridget G. Brennan, the city's
special narcotics prosecutor. What is especially worrisome to law
enforcement officials and treatment experts is the fact that many of
heroin's newest addicts are in their teens or early 20s; many also
come from middle- or upper-middle-class suburban families.

At Blue Hills Substance Abuse Services, a treatment center at
Cedarcrest Regional Hospital in Hartford, about 10 percent of young
adults had cited heroin addiction during admission in recent years;
this year, it's closer to 30 percent. At the Mendham site of Daytop
New Jersey, an adolescent substance abuse center, the portion of
teenagers entering treatment for heroin addiction has doubled to 40
percent in the past year.

"The problem is the kids are using younger and younger," said Howard
Riesel, coordinator of the adolescent-services unit at Glen Cove
Hospital on Long Island. "It's cheap. It's accessible."

Experts trace the spike in heroin use to its widespread availability
and low cost. A bag of heroin can sell for $5 to $25 and induce a
six- to eight-hour high, according to officials and former users.
Cocaine, by comparison, can cost $40 to $60 for a 30-minute high,
while prescription painkillers like Vicodin or OxyContin sell for
upward of $40 a pill on the street.

"It's becoming cooler," said Dr. Carlos Hernandez-Avila, a medical
director at Blue Hills.

Long Island residents were brutally awakened to the heroin problem in
June 2008, when Natalie Ciappa, 18, an honors student from
Massapequa, fatally overdosed. Suffolk and Nassau Counties passed
laws in her name to build Web sites tracking heroin arrests. The
Nassau County executive, Thomas R. Suozzi, put together heroin
summits to raise awareness, and last week police in Suffolk county
began making anti-heroin presentations to eighth graders, an
initiative that will soon extend to other grades.

Still, in the past eight years, the number of young people entering
the county's detoxification centers and withdrawal programs has
mushroomed. In 2000, 59 people ages 19 to 25 entered Nassau's
detoxification and rehabilitation centers for heroin abuse, according
to Arlene Sanchez, the county's commissioner of mental health,
chemical dependency and developmental disabilities services. In 2008, 458 did.

Jonathan, 19, a former addict who attended Mr. Riesel's program on
Long Island, said he took his first puff of marijuana at 13, and it
made him feel gloriously liberated from the awkward, chunky boy he
had been. Within two months, he was popping Vicodin pills,
dextromethorphan (a cough medicine that can have psychedelic effects)
and, eventually, Xanax and OxyContin. He made much older friends,
began selling drugs and prided himself on his high drug intake.

"People almost gave me praise for it," Jonathan said. He said he
tried heroin shortly after he turned 15, while high on Ecstasy and
cocaine. It blew him away.

"It hits you so hard, but it's so smooth and enticing at the same
time," he said. "It hits you like a train of false love."

The heroin available in the Northeast these days is purer than the
kind that ravaged New York City in the 1970s, experts say, and almost
certainly as lethal, if not more. Dealers often mark the bags with
words like "Red Bull," "Lexus," "Kiss of Death" and "R.I.P.," or a
skull and crossbones.

"It's part of the attraction of the drug, to get so close to dying
but come back," Ms. Brennan said. "The results can be tragic."

One of Jonathan's friends, a 21-year-old former addict from Long
Island named Brian, said heroin was cheaper, and often more
available, than marijuana or ecstasy.

"Believe it or not, as a high school teenager, it was easier for us
to get than alcohol," he said. "It's cheaper than anything out there."

The 17-year-old girl from western Suffolk said she moved to heroin
after she could no longer support her two-pill-a-day OxyContin habit,
which she had financed by stealing from her parents. Her first drive
in her new black Jeep was to a heroin dealer. She grew thin and
listless, stopped showering and began sleeping at all hours, but said
that her parents did not suspect the worst.

"Parents are working hard out here and giving their kids all this
stuff, and still kids are getting hooked," she said. "I think parents
put a blinder over their faces."

Another friend of Jonathan's, a high-achieving student named Alex,
passed under the radar until he was arrested for possession at 16. "I
had a 98 percent average," he said. "I was in honor societies. I was
a peer mediator." Now 20 and in college, Alex said he had been drug-
and alcohol-free for two and a half years.

For all four former addicts, it took being arrested, often several
times and nearly always for drug-related offenses like stealing or
possession, before their addictions came to light.

All four said they also witnessed friends overdosing, sometimes
fatally, or had overdosed themselves. Brian knew young people who
gave unconscious friends CPR until the ambulance arrived. Last
October, Jonathan overdosed and was shocked back to life by
defibrillator paddles in a hospital emergency room. The first thing
he did after waking up, he said, was reach into his pants' pocket to
locate his drugs.

He eventually got clean, earlier this year, after spending time at
St. Christopher's Inn, a friary, rehabilitation center and homeless
shelter in Garrison, N.Y. He is healthy now and stands tall in his
6-foot-1 frame.

When local officials began focusing on heroin last year, Jonathan
said his friends all had the same thought.

"This has been a problem for a while," he said. "We all wondered,
'Where have you been?'"