UTAH TEENS' USE OF HEROIN GROWING

Starting Younger: Many Kids Begin With OxyContin, Then Move To The
Real Thing - And Real Consequences

By the time the police officers arrived at the door to his Sandy
home, Michael Martinez already had an idea why they were there.

Martinez had gotten a funny feeling when, earlier, he had heard on
the news that an 18-year-old man had been found dead in Draper. The
officers who knocked on his door confirmed his thoughts. The dead
18-year-old was his son, Zachary, who died around midnight March
10. He had been taken in a pickup to a park at the end of Steep
Mountain Drive in Draper and dumped.

"It was my Zacky?" Martinez asked the officers.

"Yep," they confirmed.

These days, Martinez says he feels stupid he never saw any signs of
drug use. All of the good in his son's life couldn't keep the teen
from using heroin. Not his straight A's at Valley High School in
Sandy. Not his full-time job. Not even his parents.

Then, last week, Martinez heard about another Salt Lake Valley teen
who suffered the same heart-breaking fate as his son. It was Amelia
Sorich, 18, of South Jordan, who died after overdosing on a
combination of heroin and cocaine at a party in Draper. Her body was
found June 27 in the foothills east of Bountiful.

"It seems like it is getting out of hand," Martinez said.

Utah narcotics officers say such happenings are now the reality of
life in the state: Teenagers and 20-somethings are getting into
heroin - and it is killing them.

No race, religion or class is spared, they say. Churchgoers,
returned missionaries and kids who have never touched alcohol or
marijuana are shooting, snorting and smoking heroin - once the drug
of veteran junkies.

"It knows no boundaries," said Lt. Mike Forshee of the Utah County
Major Crimes Task Force. "Everybody: rich, poor, middle class. It's
taken them all."

Today's young heroin users are starting with prescription medicine,
mainly OxyContin, a powerful painkiller. They either steal their
parents' prescriptions, buy from kids at school who stole it from
their parents or purchase it on the street, said said Sgt. Kevin
Matthews of the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office Neighborhood Narcotic Unit.

They crush the the pills to take away the drug's time-release effects.

"They're going to get immediate results by snorting it, and in some
cases, they're injecting it," Matthews said.

Because the drug is a legally prescribed pharmaceutical, young users
think it's OK and not as bad as heroin, said Sgt. Ryan Atack of the
Salt Lake City Police Department Narcotics Squad.

OxyContin, however, is just a synthetic form of heroin.

"They all eventually switch to heroin," said Mike O'Reilly, a former
methamphetamine addict who runs a treatment center in Orem.

He said his center, Clear Living, has been forced to turn away at
least six heroin users because they were under 18. In June, O'Reilly
got a call from a mother who said her 14-year-old had been doing
heroin for two years.

Atack says that young people often move from OxyContin to heroin
within two weeks, mainly because heroin costs less and, some say,
gives them a more-intense high. OxyContin sells on the street for
about $1 per milligram, or $80 per 80 mg pill, while Atack said users
can buy enough heroin to shoot up once for $20 to $40.

The young users don't know, however, the intricacies of heroin use.

Users can build up tolerances to the drug very quickly, but
first-time users are being introduced to heroin in doses too high for
their bodies to handle. The young users also don't understand that
they can lose their tolerance even after a brief absence from the
drug. All they know is they feel a surge of pleasurable sensations,
accompanied by warm flushing of the skin, dry mouth and a heavy
feeling in their arms and legs,

Once a tolerance level is reached, they need higher doses to get high
and become physically dependent on the drug. Chronic use can cause
several illnesses, including collapsed veins, liver disease,
pneumonia, cloudy mental functioning and slowed breathing - all to
the point of respiratory failure, according to the U.S. Office of
Drug Control Policy.

"Heroin is so addictive you can't use it recreationally," Matthews
said. The young users don't have a clue as to what the doses should
be, he said.

Some go through withdrawal even after one heroin hit.

Utah's heroin is being transported directly from Mexico, according to
the Utah Drug Threat Assessment, published in 2003 by the National
Drug Intelligence Center, an agency in the Justice Department.

These Mexican criminal groups "dominate" the wholesale distribution,
using a hierarchically structured, family-based system, according to
the Utah drug threat assessment.

On Utah's streets, dealers employ five to 10 "runners" who carry
between 50 to 100 balloons at a time. Detective Orlando Ruiz of the
Utah County Major Crimes Task Force knows of 10 main dealers doing
business in Utah.

"And it is directly going into our high schools," Salt Lake County's
Matthews said.

In the Salt Lake Valley, every police agency is making multiple
arrests of street-level heroin balloon dealers, Matthews said. The
arrests are "in droves."

And farther south, the Utah County Major Crimes Task Force, now
directed by that county's chiefs of police, is seeing a rise in the
amount of heroin it is seizing. Last year, the agency seized just 1
pound of heroin - more than the cumulative total of seizures from 2000 to 2003.

As of June, the task force had seized about eight times as much -
including busts of 2 1/2 pounds and 4 pounds. The nearly 8 pounds it
has seized just this year is more than enough for every resident in
Murray - a city of about 43,000 residents - to shoot heroin once.

Narcotics officers want parents to get involved.

Matthews encourages them to simply ask their children if they are
doing drugs. If the kids give them a reason, parents should search
their rooms. And if they find anything suspicious, they should
contact the proper authorities.

"Heroin's not a problem that you can brush under the table, and
they'll quit," Ruiz said. Users need professional help, he said.

Perhaps the most ironic thing about the heroin deaths among the
state's young people is that the narcotic users themselves have the
power to save their friends' lives.

Medicine found in ambulances can bring people back from a heroin
overdose almost immediately.

If only the people who had been with Zachary and Amelia when they
overdosed had called 911 and left them for paramedics or dumped them
at an emergency room, the teens could be alive today.

Zachary's father said the teens died in "senseless ways."

"It could have been prevented."