HEROIN DAMAGE: RISING USE OF OPIATES TAKES TOLL ON NORTH SHORE FAMILIES

Before he became district attorney two years ago, Jonathan Blodgett thought
heroin was a city problem, and one mostly from decades past. Now he knows
better.

One year ago December, Blodgett attended the wake of a 19-year-old from
Peabody who grew up with his son. He was a typical teen, a good athlete and
student, and never in any trouble.

But he became addicted to OxyContin. Then he tried heroin, just once. The
next morning his father found him slumped over his computer, dead. Blodgett
tells the story almost every time he speaks publicly about the area's
growing opiate epidemic, which he does often, and with urgency. He recently
told the story to a reporter, and despite himself, the burly prosecutor
started to cry.

"It can happen to anybody, and that is why I get emotional about it,"
Blodgett said. "It doesn't matter who you are or where your family is from.
It only takes one mistake, one mistake that will follow you for the rest
of your life if it doesn't kill you."

A Salem News investigation has reached the same conclusion: Essex County is
under siege by opiate abuse among young people. And there is no coordinated
battle plan to fight the scourge.

What needs to be done? Leaders say the following steps must be taken:

* Communities need to launch a major education effort to let parents and
young people know the dangers of experimenting with prescription drugs.

* The state must better track overdoses so everyone knows the severity of
the problem and how to dedicate resources.

* Hospitals need to report overdoses to police. Also, emergency room
doctors must accurately record when a person dies of an overdose, instead
of trying to spare families the stigma of a drug-related death.

* More money must be spent on treatment. The state is spending less now in
the midst of an opiate epidemic than it was 1 years ago.

* The makers of OxyContin need to make a pill that young people can't abuse
by chopping. Researchers are now studying ways to add ingredients to
OxyContin that would block the high if the pill's time-release coating
were crushed.

* Essex County needs more inpatient treatment centers for teens addicted
to opiates. One is planned to open in Danvers in March. It will have
15 beds and only take boys.

But not everyone agrees on what needs to be done, and that's a big part of
the problem.

While the DA wants mandatory reporting of overdoses, for example, the
medical community fears addicts won't seek treatment if police get called.
Drug counselors are calling for more education, but some school leaders
don't believe the problem is as serious as they suggest.

Calls for help For more than two decades, law enforcement has waged a
seemingly endless war on drugs. But police in Essex County have been struck
lately by the feeling that they are moving backward.

Police say they are overwhelmed by the amount of heroin and OxyContin on
the streets and disheartened by the ages of this new generation of addicts.
Law enforcement can't handle the problem alone, said George Festa, director
of the federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area office in Methuen, one
of 8 such offices in the United States.

"I wish I could say, 'Hey, we are doing a great job,'" Festa said. "And we
are working very, very hard. But we definitely need more resources to
tackle this problem."

The solution is not simply to throw more money at police departments so
more arrests can be made, he said. Instead, they need schools and parents
to acknowledge the epidemic exists and then together warn young people
about the dangers of trying opiates.

In Lynn, where police say kids as young as 1 have been found using
OxyContin, there were 17 confirmed heroin overdoses in 3. Some people
dismiss those statistics, saying there is a big difference between Lynn and
such towns as Boxford, Marblehead or even Peabody. But about half of
Lynn's overdose victims lived outside of Lynn and came from places like
Boxford, Marblehead and Peabody.

The numbers frighten the city's police chief, John Suslak, and he has
reached a grim conclusion: "We are not going to arrest our way out of this
problem." A new gateway drug The epidemic stems from kids trying
prescription drugs without realizing how fast they can become addicted. But
school departments have been agonizingly slow to respond.

The DARE program that grew to prominence in the 198s has mostly disappeared
from North Shore schools. Instead, drugs typically are only addressed in
school health classes. But those classes rarely extend beyond ninth grade,
and often don't discuss heroin and OxyContin.

"Schools cannot expect to address this with a few health classes over the
course of four years," said Alex Packer, president of FCD Education, a
Newton-based nonprofit organization that creates anti-drug curriculums
for schools. There is no doubt heroin and OxyContin have made their way
into Essex County schools, including the prestigious private ones. In
response, Blodgett has spoken to dozens of superintendents and principals
during the past year and a half to ask for help.

So far, Blodgett knows of no Essex County school system that has launched
any new programs.

In Peabody, 4 people overdosed on heroin in 3, and four died, including a
recent high school graduate. But in April, when Blodgett hosted a forum at
Peabody High to discuss the growing drug problem, four parents showed up.
"I do believe there is a disconnect somewhere and we are not getting the
point home," said Essex County Sheriff Frank Cousins, who will co-host with
Blodgett a conference about the area's heroin and opiate epidemic next
week. "I haven't seen anything dynamic that is being taught in a school
that is turning this thing around."

The numbers say little In the past two years, people who treat opiate
addicts have begun using the word "epidemic" when they describe the area's
heroin and OxyContin problem among young people. But exactly how bad
things are here no one can say. Statistics from the state are old and of
little use when it comes to identifying the full extent of the problem.

In 1, 58 people died in Essex County from opiate overdoses, according to
the state's Department of Public Health. But the state won't say how many
people died last year, the year before or the year before that. The 1
statistics are the most recent available, and there is no word on when
more up-to-date information will be released.

Law enforcement officials say the delay is making their job more difficult.
Without the hard numbers, they can't convince people that the epidemic has
hit the suburbs.

"With all due respect to the Department of Public Health, it has been a
struggle to get them to identify the problem that we see locally," said
Suslak, the Lynn police chief. "We have to get the cold, hard, objective
data here." In an e-mail to the Salem News, Charlene Zion, a statistician
for the Department of Public Health, explained the delay this way: "It's a
very lengthy process from the day a death occurs to the time it is
available for use on computerized files, as there are literally multitudes
of steps that are necessary."

State officials do acknowledge, however, that some death statistics may not
be complete. Sometimes emergency room doctors and medical examiners
inaccurately label an overdose a "heart failure" in an attempt to spare
families the heartache. "It is diagnosed, but it is not recorded for what
it actually is," said Teresa Anderson, director of statistics at the
state's Bureau of Substance Abuse Services. "Even doctors in emergency
rooms that we have had discussions with over the years will put 'cardiac
arrest,' or they will put 'respiratory failure,' and they won't list heroin
overdoses because they want to avoid this stigma." Quietly overdosing Under
current practices, police departments and the district attorney are often
unaware when a rash of overdoses is underway.

State law requires hospitals and medical professionals to notify police
when they treat knife or gunshot wounds, but there is no such law for
reporting overdoses. Blodgett wants a state law passed that would force
emergency rooms to notify police when an overdose victim is brought in. He
said he will make the proposal his No. 1 legislative initiative in 5.

"We are not going to be handcuffing people to gurneys as they are treated,"
Blodgett said. "But if there are five overdoses in a weekend that are
nonlethal, we need to know that immediately. Some emergency rooms flat out
refuse to give us that information."

With it, the police could go after the dealers selling the bad heroin and
warn addicts to stay away. They would also have a better handle on the
scope of the problem. When asked about privacy rights, Blodgett said he may
not need the names of the victims.

But medical professionals were aghast when told of Blodgett's proposal,
saying it would almost certainly discourage addicts from bringing overdose
victims to the hospital.

"Instead of bringing people to the emergency room, they'll either try to
resuscitate them themselves, or dump them outside the emergency room and
make a cell phone call," said Dr. Poule LaPlante, the medical director at
the Addison Gilbert Hospital methadone clinic. "So two or three minutes
might be wasted when a person is not breathing."

Blodgett also wants the state Legislature to implement tougher sentencing
rules for dealers and for people who profit from opiate distribution. Right
now, dealers typically get 1 to 15 years in state prison for heroin
trafficking. Blodgett wants the crime to carry a mandatory penalty of life
without parole. Lack of beds While law enforcement searches for ways to
address the county's OxyContin and heroin epidemic, the medical community
has its own problems. In the past three years, the state has cut $16
million from the Bureau of Substance Abuse Services budget. Six of the
state's detoxification centers have closed in the past two years.

In Essex County, there are a total of 11 free detoxification beds available
each day -- six at CAB Addiction Services in Danvers, and five at the
Lowell Community Health Center in Tewksbury. There are about 6 other beds
available at those two facilities for people with cash, MassHealth or
private insurance coverage. And finding inpatient treatment is particularly
difficult for young people. Most state addiction centers do not accept
people under 18, though occasionally a 17-year-old will be accepted with a
parent's permission. Generally, anyone under that age must travel outside
Essex County to Brookline, Marlboro or Holyoke for treatment.

Many parents are sending their kids out of state to get treatment at
private facilities.

"If someone called me today and said, 'Where is there an adolescent detox?'
I would have to look it up," said Steve Chisholm of CAB Addiction Services
in Danvers. "They are not well established."

Counselors lament the budget cuts, of course, but law enforcement officials
are equally concerned. The police are tired of seeing the same people being
arrested for low-level drug dealing, shoplifting and identity fraud. "We
have to give people a way out of this hell they are in," said Festa, the
area's federal drug investigation coordinator.

There is a glimmer or hope on the treatment front, though. Kevin Norton,
CAB's president, announced plans last month to open a 15-bed treatment
center for adolescent boys at its Danvers campus in March. There are
presently no plans for a female treatment center in Essex County for teens.
Teach your children well Of all the groups involved in the county's opiate
epidemic, parents have perhaps the most important role to play. They must
forget what they thought they knew about heroin and the people who use it
and start asking their children questions: What drugs have they heard about
in school? Does anyone in school use drugs? Do they have any questions
about drugs?

"By asking young people about things, it gives them more of an invitation
to come to you," said Jayne Wilson, a nurse who works for a Peabody
methadone clinic. For his part, Blodgett said he will not allow the silence
that surrounds OxyContin and heroin addiction to continue to hide the
problem. "I am firmly convinced the only way this is going to stop is to
have a huge education effort," Blodgett said. "The only way you choke off
the supply of heroin or any drug is to educate young people at a very early
age that it is not the road to go down."

Blodgett spoke recently of a phone call he got from the mother of a Peabody
fifth-grader. She was upset with the posters that his office had placed in
her son's school that showed a graveyard and the words, "Heroin can kill
you." She told the district attorney he was scaring the children. His
reply: "Thank you ma'am."