HOOKED ON HEROIN

Cheap Drug Turning Young Lives To Dust

Sliding the needle out from the crook of his elbow, Ben snapped off
the rubber strap, sending the heroin-spiked blood through his veins.
"That's it," he said.

Suddenly the shaking and pacing stops and Ben becomes calm. After a
moment's pause, Ben, a 20-year-old heroin user from Greenfield who
asked that his real name not be used, thought about what he wants
people to know most about his addiction.

"I wouldn't wish this on anybody," he said thoughtfully, getting up
off the bare floor to start cleaning his bedroom.

Even at this young age, Ben has been an addict for three years. All it
took was a bad day at work to give in to the peer pressure of
roommates and snort a line of heroin; he began injecting the next day.

"If you try it once ... it's over in my opinion," said Ben, who has
since been arrested for possession of heroin and is currently on
probation with the stipulation of remaining drug-free.

Police, health professionals and some local young people are in
agreement that droves of twenty-somethings are hooked on the
opiate-based drug. Price, availability and widespread use of the
less-intimidating heroin substitute, prescription pain reliever
OxyContin, have all contributed to the crisis. At about $6 a bag in
local cities, heroin is about the price of a six-pack of beer. Some
addicts vanish from familiar places. Others end up in jail or dead. A
2002 report from the state's Department of Public Health showed a 230
percent increase of opioid-related hospitalizations among
15-24-year-olds between 1994 and 2001.

Heroin abuse is more problematic in the Northeast than in any other
region of the country and will continue to increase among younger
individuals from suburban and rural areas, according to a 2003 report
of the National Drug Intelligence Center.

In Springfield, heroin is the No. 1 concern for the police Narcotics
Bureau. About 400 annual arrests are made for possession of heroin.
The drug is easier to find on the streets than both crack and powdered
cocaine, said Capt. William J. Cochrane.

"Jose," a user for 13 years at the age of 29, agrees. He said he had
been clean for a month and a half, since he was last released from
jail, as he stood on Main Street in the North End neighborhood of
Springfield where he lives.

Jose has never used a needle, but has snorted the drug for 13 years.
He's afraid of needles, he says, laughing with embarrassment. "I
decided to stop because it's no life," he said. "Wasting time being in
jail when you can do things out here; get a job; find a girl, you
know, this and that." Jose was 17 years old when his search for a high
stronger than marijuana or cocaine led him to heroin. Heroin, and
dealing it, has since led him to "places" that he never intended to
go.

Anthony J. Pettigrew, a public information officer with the Drug
Enforcement Agency in Boston, says Springfield and Holyoke are hubs
for a drug trade that funnels large amounts of Colombian heroin from
New York City into cities like Toronto and Boston.

In recent years, heroin has become not just a problem in cities. It's
an issue in the quiet town of South Hadley, where it's been
confiscated from high school lockers, and in West Springfield, where a
student was arrested for trafficking the drug at the high school.

In April 2005, Greenfield police and state troopers rousted about 40
alleged small-time drug dealers.

"The entire Pioneer Valley is inundated with these chemicals, and
younger and younger people are trying it for the first time," said
Thomas B. Hewitt, associate medical director at Providence Behavioral
Health Hospital in Holyoke, which treats various forms of drug addiction.

Accessibility to heroin has also increased greatly in the suburbs,
says "Kara," a 26-year-old heroin addict and mother of two. The
Pittsfield woman is recovering via methadone treatments at Habit
Management Inc., a Springfield clinic. Both Kara and Ben said many
users buy in bulk from Springfield and Holyoke dealers, then resell
the drug in the suburbs to support their own habits. A $6 bag of
heroin will sell for $15 to $20 in Pittsfield, Greenfield and
Northampton, Kara said.

"It's this mind-set that's really sick," she said. "But it's like, 'If
I can get someone else to use, I can have their money to cop and be OK
tomorrow.'" Susan A. Hearn, a parent of a young addict and member of
an outreach team recently formed by school officials in Agawam to
combat student drug and alcohol use, said heroin can also drive a
wedge in families once loved ones try it. "As a parent, it's hell to
have a child who is addicting to anything, especially heroin," she
said. "(Heroin users) are not capable of making a rational decision,
so someone has to intervene and give them help." Hearn said she found
out her son started using heroin shortly after he graduated from
Agawam High School in 2003. He has since been locked up for heroin
possession, and is now in recovery, she said.

According to Hewitt, much of the heroin coming into the country is now
at least 90 percent pure, a quality that allows users to get high by
smoking or sniffing it, rather than injecting it.

A growing percentage of heroin users are getting hooked after seeking
it out as a cheaper fix for their addictions to other opiates,
particularly OxyContin, said Linda Lynch, a clinic director at Habit
Management. The addiction comes from people who suffer withdrawals
after their prescriptions run out and from people who abuse the
painkiller as a "party drug." OxyContin can sell on the streets for
as much as $30 per pill. With its mind-altering chemistry, heroin just
may be the most difficult drug to stop using, medical professionals
say.

"I used to sit and look at the bags and say, 'How do these little,
tiny bags have such power over me?'" Kara said.

Hewitt said the drug permanently alters the chemistry of the brain,
leading heroin users to do anything they can to hit another high.
"Ultimately, what happens is that unless there's an opiate in your
system, your brain just isn't happy, and because your brain isn't
happy, you'll do whatever it takes to make it happy," he said.

Withdrawal from heroin leads to severe nausea, diarrhea, pounding
headaches, nightmares and body aches that leave addicts desperate for
another fix. "You just do whatever it takes to make it (the sickness)
go away ... I steal money usually, from family or friends ... It's
sad, you know," Ben said. To ensure that he went to his full-time
roofing job, Ben would give five bags of dope to his boss every week
to hold. Before starting work each morning, Ben's boss allowed him to
shoot up one bag in his truck. Though the small amount no longer gets
him high, Ben gets just enough heroin from one bag to survive the day
without being "dope sick." If he didn't give it to someone else to
hold for him, Ben said, he would use it all and, by Monday, run out
of money to buy more.

Kara, who has been clean for more than two years, said she receives
daily treatments of methadone, a drug that is frequently used to treat
heroin addiction. Ingested in the form of a cough syrup-like drink,
methadone has eased her withdrawal symptoms, she said.

Every day, hundreds of local addicts find their way to seven methadone
clinics, some of which are packed with youth who make daily commutes
there from all over the Pioneer Valley. Two of these are in
Springfield while Chicopee, Westfield, Holyoke, Northampton and
Greenfield maintain one each. Kara estimated that she overdosed at
least 10 times before going into treatment in January 2004. She said
that she realizes there's a stigma attached to using methadone, but
believes heroin addicts have very few options on the road to recovery.
Ben, who has watched other junkies die, wanted to try methadone but
had no health insurance.

Local methadone users afford the service through private health
insurance, MassHealth, and a sliding fee scale through the state
Department of Public Health. Ben and Kara both said that if they could
do it all again, they never would have tried heroin in the first place.

"Stay away from it. I won't give it to anybody and I won't shoot
anybody up," Ben said passionately. "That's the one place where I
would draw the line: I will not turn anybody on to it."

"There is no choice in this," Kara said, adding that a number of the
people that she used with have since overdosed and died. "Once you
shoot that dope or sniff that dope, the only choice is to put it down
and you're going to have to work pretty hard to do that."