HEROIN USE IN REGION AT HIGHEST LEVEL EVER

Their smiling photos conveyed youth's bright hope. Accompanying
newspaper stories blared addiction's blind hopelessness.

One of them, a 24-year-old full-time substitute teacher at the city's
Creative and Performing Arts high school, was charged late last month
in a bank heist with her boyfriend and with stealing more than $22,500
in laptop computers from CAPA to feed the couple's $100-a-day heroin
habit.

The other, a 20-year-old student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh,
was killed early last Sunday in McKees Rocks when a deal to trade his
iPad for $200 worth of heroin went bad, police said.

Aberrations?

Hardly, say police and addiction treatment specialists. They view the
tragedies of those two young lives -- one now seeking reclamation, the
other lost -- as vivid examples of heroin's vice grip on far too many
in the region. Philicia Barbieri of Shadyside, the former teacher, and
Malachi Urbini, the Art Institute student, make clear the nature of
the drug's power, indiscriminate of race, socio-economic status or
age, with users ranging from teens to late middle age.

"For the media, those were high-profile cases, but we see it every
day," said Pittsburgh police Lt. Bill Mathias, head of the bureau's
narcotics and vice unit. "Heroin is our biggest problem. We see heroin
all day, all the time."

"Right now there is more heroin being used in the Pittsburgh area than
at any time in our history," said Neil A. Capretto, Gateway
Rehabilitation Center's medical director. "It's a major problem. The
scary thing is, I see it getting worse before it gets better. More and
more people are getting into it and less are getting out of it."

Dr. Capretto estimated treatment for heroin addiction at Gateway has
increased about 600 percent since 1998.

And, he noted, "the faces of heroin have changed."

No longer are heroin addicts mostly poor African-Americans in an
economically deprived inner city neighborhood, he said. Now, they are
Caucasians, primarily well-educated professionals and students from
well-heeled city neighborhoods and suburbs, whose powerful addictions
make them jeopardize careers, families and friends in search of the
next fix.

"A lot of people think only bad things happen in the city, but there's
no bubble to keep them out of the suburbs," said Mt. Lebanon Police
Lt. Aaron Lauth. "The drug of choice right now is heroin. We see it
all of the time.

"We're not seeing the violent crime but that doesn't mean there is any
less use of drugs. The users in our neighborhood aren't out robbing
and stealing. They have money, at least for a while, to support their
habits. When we investigate property crime ... it's [usually]
drug-related.

"It's that serious, that prevalent, that it is necessary for us to
dedicate one officer full time to narcotics investigations."

Dr. Capretto said even small towns like St. Marys, Elk County, and
DuBois, Clearfield County, have major heroin problems.

"We've treated thousands of middle-class people in their 20s, 30s,
40s, 50s -- educated people with college degrees from Sewickley and
Mt. Lebanon and Fox Chapel and from small towns like Sharon," Dr.
Capretto said. "Now heroin is everywhere."

Two decades ago, he would see a couple of heroin users a month. Now,
he sees five to 10 a day.

"I just saw an 18-year-old girl from a good middle-class family, a
good school district, who has been using heroin for a year and half,"
he said. "Several have come in at 14 years old. Parents are fooled,
communities are fooled because it's not on their radar screen in good
areas.

"One mother said to me, 'I don't know how this could happen to my son.
I went to all of his soccer games.' "

While Pittsburgh normally lags years behind national drug abuse
trends, such as with crack cocaine, it was at the forefront of
increased heroin addiction because of what Dr. Capretto called a
"perfect storm."

One element was the development of OxyContin, which, like other opioid
drugs such as Percocet, Vicodin and Dilaudid, possess some properties
characteristic of opiate narcotics like heroin, but are not derived
from the opium poppy. The powerful drug is prescribed here more than
in other areas because of the region's large elderly population and
the large number of former industrial workers who suffered
work-related injuries.

Some of those people prescribed OxyContin become addicted to it and
when the prescriptions run out, they seek it on the street where it
can sell for as much as $80 for a single 80 milligram pill.

At about the time OxyContin made its debut, purity levels in heroin,
which traditionally had been about 10 percent, rose to as high as 90
percent and prices dropped to as low as $10 a bag.

The relatively low price made heroin a bargain compared to illicit
OxyContin, and the purity levels meant it no longer had to be injected
- -- it now could be snorted or smoked, thereby removing what had been a
stigma for many people.

"No one is going to pick up a needle and try it for the first time,"
Lt. Mathias said. "But if you're drunk or high on marijuana and
someone sticks a line in front of you and says 'This is great' you
don't think twice about snorting it." And then, for many, they're hooked.

With regular heroin use, tolerance to the drug develops. After a time,
snorting no longer provides a high, just a way not to be sick. That in
turn leads to the needle because that delivery system produces a more
powerful high. But, again, after a time, tolerance develops and more
and more has to be used to keep from getting ill.

"Years ago, it was rare for someone to use seven or eight bags a day.
Now it's rare not to use 10 bags a day or more," Dr. Capretto said.

In cutting the supply, Lt. Mathias said his department, like law
enforcement agencies everywhere, faces economic realities that have
stretched manpower thin.

"We're like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike," he
said.

From the demand side, he, Lt. Lauth and Dr. Capretto said everyone,
from parents to their children, need to be educated to the fact heroin
is here and a real threat.

"For me, professionally and personally, it is my biggest fear," Lt.
Mathias said. "As my kids grow up, I worry there will be peer pressure
and they will be tempted to try it.

"I'm afraid because I see how getting involved in it ruins lives."