LONG ISLAND: SECURING MEDICINE CABINETS

When Lawrence W. Mulvey became Nassau County's police commissioner in
2007, he was struck by the number of young people being arrested for
heroin possession. In his earlier police experience, heroin addicts
were usually decades older. But the mean age for those being arrested
on heroin-related offenses was 24, with some as young as 14.

"These kids aren't able to reference the heroin plagues of the '60s,
'70s and early '80s, the skid-row type of alleyways and discarded
needles," Commissioner Mulvey said. Their entry into heroin use, he
added, was often through medicine cabinets -- belonging to their
parents or parents of their friends -- or opiate-based prescription
painkillers that, like heroin, induced euphoria.

"They're not fearful of using, having been pounding OxyContin or
snorting the pills," Commissioner Mulvey said.

With these thoughts in mind, the commissioner designated a day this
month when people could anonymously drop off unwanted pharmaceutical
drugs at some of the county's police station houses. The plan netted
700 pounds of drugs.

"One thing we clearly need: to secure the pharmaceuticals that are
unprotected in parents' medicine cabinets," Commissioner Mulvey said.
"This is how kids get involved in this."

Still, heroin-related arrests and deaths continue to climb in Nassau.
Forty-six people there died of heroin overdoses last year, compared
with 27 in 2007. And as of Sept. 17, there had been 293 heroin arrests
in Nassau, compared with just over 200 last year.