OXYCONTIN LEADS FENWICK GRAD TO HEROIN, THEN JAIL

MIDDLETON -- Shawn Harnish never imagined trying a few pills on weekends
with his Bishop Fenwick buddies -- smart, middle-class kids like him --
would turn him into a junkie behind bars.

Most days he lied and stole -- from stores, family, strangers -- to get
money for OxyContin and later heroin. Tuesdays were his best days. That's
when the new DVDs came out and he could steal several and resell them to
other stores the same day.

Then he got caught shoplifting, writing bad checks and carrying a
hypodermic needle. In October, a judge sentenced the 23-year-old to one
year in Middleton Jail. But jail, he says, does not scare him. He hates
it. But at least he's safe and alive. What scares Shawn Harnish is heroin's
call after his sentence is up. What will he do then?

Hooked in high school Harnish grew up in Salem, the only son of a single
mother who sent him to a Catholic elementary school. Sometimes when he's
clean, he thinks back to when he was a boy playing Little League. Those
were his best days. Harnish went to Bishop Fenwick High School in Peabody
and graduated in 1999. He said he was well-liked there, got good grades and
pitched on the varsity baseball team.

On weekends he hung around with a crew of about 15 other teens from across
the North Shore. They all tried different drugs together, he said, because
that's what people do in high school.

By his junior year, Harnish was living what he said was a normal high
school life. He drank at house parties. He occasionally tried prescription
drugs like Percocet and Vicodin. He smoked pot, and tried acid once. "We
thought that was what you do in high school," he said. "You experiment and
as long as you are getting your grades up, you know, not dropping out or
whatever, you have no problem."

Then Harnish and his friends started taking Ecstasy -- a party drug that
gives a euphoric feeling. They used them until around the last week of
Harnish's senior year, when someone at a party offered them a new
prescription drug called OxyContin. Once the group got a taste, it quickly
took hold. "We'd eat them Friday and Saturday, every weekend." By Monday,
he'd feel sick -- like he had the flu -- but still he craved more Oxys.
The sickness, Harnish now knows, was opiate withdrawal. The craving was
addiction. Despite the drugs, Harnish enrolled in college. He spent a year
and a half at Salem State as a communications major, hoping to become a
sports broadcaster. He used OxyContin nearly every day, but his grades
were good enough to transfer to Northeastern University. He switched his
major to psychology, thinking it might help him understand his own
troubles. It didn't. "It made me feel too bad about myself, know what I
mean? It made me think too much about my life."

Harnish left Northeastern after a semester. For the next two years he held
different jobs and tried four different drug rehabs. But things got worse.
He began stealing from his friends and family to pay for the $80 pills. He
sold everything he had -- his big-screen television, his stereo system, and
nearly the entire contents of his room. At one point, his habit was
costing him $500 a day.

"My mother kicked me out because I was stealing from her all the time," he
said. "She just couldn't take it anymore. She was waiting for me to die."
Homeless and desperate to get better, Harnish left the North Shore and
enrolled in a halfway house in Boca Raton, Fla., at his mother's expense.
There, Harnish found heroin.

Harnish failed two drug tests and counselors threw him out. He returned
home to find his old Oxy pals were using heroin, too, because the pills
were too expensive. By the end of 2003, he was living at the Mayflower
Motel in Beverly in a room he knew well because several addict friends had
lived there first. Living in that dank room, which his mother paid for to
keep him off the streets, was Harnish's lowest point.

The room came with a small couch, a single bed, and a television no one had
managed to steal because it was bolted to a dresser. The only personal
touch was a black-and-white picture of Ted Williams he hung crooked on the
wall. His most treasured possession was the slightly bent syringe tucked
inside the lining of his bed's mattress.

During the six months he lived there, Harnish sat on that bed and shot up
hundreds of times. The evidence was his white comforter. It was covered
with dozens upon dozens of cigarette burns -- at least one for each time
heroin lulled him to sleep with a lit cigarette in hand.

Some days Harnish's old high school friends would drop by the room,
including his best friend, the son of a local police officer. He had become
an addict, too. Desperate life Over the past five years, the longest
Harnish has stayed clean is about a month. "You dream about it every night.
You can't sleep. You wake up in cold sweats." When he is drug-free, Harnish
has the same dream almost every night: It is Easter, and he is going around
his childhood home picking up plastic eggs. He opens the eggs, and inside
every one is an OxyContin pill. "I'd find like a 100 Oxys. But there is a
hole in my pocket, and it would fall out. Every time I would pick it up,
try to put it back in my pocket, but they would all fall out."

Last June, Harnish overdosed after shooting heroin in Lynn. He spent two
days in the hospital. After that, he said over and over again, he would do
anything to be free from addiction. But he had little hope. His mother
found him another rehab spot, and there was the stay at a halfway house in
Malden. But jail seemed inevitable.

On Oct. 19, Harnish sat silently in a Salem courtroom as Judge Patricia
Dowling spoke to the 21-year-old girl standing next to him. She was
beautiful, with long brown hair and a smile that revealed perfect teeth.
She, too, was a heroin addict.

As the girl's well-dressed parents looked on, Dowling sentenced her to one
year in jail for violating probation for testing positive for heroin. "I
may look old to you," Dowling told her, "but I'm really not that old. But
all the people I grew up with in Lawrence who used heroin are dead. You're
dealing with something deadly, something vicious that is trying to destroy
you." When it was Harnish's turn, Dowling looked at his history of
shoplifting and bad check writing and sentenced him to a year in jail, too.
"The bottom line is you have a very serious addiction that you have been
unable to handle," the judge said. "You're at the end of the line here."
Harnish's mother has stood by her son and was in court the day of the
sentencing. She didn't want to use her name for this story, but said this
is what life has become -- days in courtrooms and visits to jail. She
tries to see her son at least once a week.

Dreams for a future Sitting behind a glass partition speaking on a
telephone at Middleton Jail recently, Harnish doesn't look like a heroin
addict anymore. He looks like anyone's brother and sounds like a
well-educated young man with a future, talking about politics and the Red
Sox' loss of Pedro Martinez. It's been two months since Harnish was
sentenced, and he says he doesn't crave the drug every hour of the day
anymore. He hopes it will stay that way, too. Any day now, Harnish expects
to be transferred to the Correctional Alternative Center in Lawrence, known
as The Farm, where he will be able to go on work release programs. After
perhaps a month, he may be allowed to go home to his mother's house in
Salem with an electronic bracelet on his ankle. Harnish has plenty of
plans. He will try to move to Florida and stay in a halfway house there.
Then, maybe he'll enroll at the University of Miami. He's been working out
in the jail's gym, paying particular attention to his left arm -- his
pitching arm -- so maybe he might be able to play baseball again. His
mother says this is the Shawn she knew before OxyContin stole him away --
ambitious and filled with dreams.

It's certainly a different person on the other side of the smudged
glass. This one believes he has a future. Eight months earlier, the only
future he could see was death by overdose, death by suicide, or jail. Just
a week before Christmas, Harnish expressed hope for himself, but little for
society. When asked what parents, police or anyone else can do to end the
heroin and OxyContin epidemic on the North Shore, his optimism disappeared
along with his smile.

"It can't be done," he said.