THE NEW FACES OF HEROIN - DRUG USE ESCALATES AMONG TEENS,
EVEN IN THE SUBURBS

A drug epidemic has hit the North Shore and the victims are not the
usual suspects. They are middle-class kids from the suburbs who start
experimenting with prescription drugs for fun, but before long are
opiate addicts, desperate for the next fix.

Heroin and its legal sister drug OxyContin are destroying families,
and police predict the area is on the brink of a major crime wave. The
price of heroin is at a record low, sometimes costing less than a
six-pack of beer. But when the price goes up as expected, so will the
number of crimes in every Essex County community, as addicts steal to
pay for their addictions. "It's not a Lynn problem and a Lawrence
problem," said Peabody police Chief Robert Champagne. "It's a Peabody,
Salem, Marblehead and Danvers problem. It's everywhere. It's just that
nobody knows. It's taboo" one of those things no one talks about."

But Essex County District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett is talking. Some
could say he's screaming. He has called heroin and OxyContin abuse
"the greatest threat facing our youth today."

"I'm scared," he said. "The kids who are getting involved in it and
hooked on it are getting younger and younger."

A Salem News investigation into heroin and OxyContin abuse in Essex
County has found the following: The number of deaths from opiate
overdoses in Essex County over the last 10 years has increased 300
percent" from 19 people in 1991 to 58 in 2001. Every one of the
34 cities and towns in Essex County has had at least one
heroin-related incident in the last year.

The purity of heroin seized by the Essex County Drug Task Force over
the last three years has become so potent it can now be sniffed,
which eliminates the need for needles that had kept many from trying
the drug. Law enforcement is overwhelmed by the amount of heroin and
opiate abuse among teens and people in their 20s. Police and
prosecutors are looking to the schools to step in, but most have been
slow to react and some appear reluctant to acknowledge the problem at
all.

In the last two years, drug treatment offices in Danvers and Salem
had to start support groups for parents of opiate addicts. Many who
attend are white, middle class, and come from the suburbs.

The spotlight is now on the North Shore, and Peabody specifically,
after former Peabody High baseball player Jeff , 20, publicly
blamed OxyContin for derailing his professional baseball dreams. One
of his best friends at Peabody High, 19-year-old Joel , the son
of Salem's school superintendent, and Brad , 24, the son
of the longtime Peabody High football coach, also have admitted
addictions to OxyContin.

Alarmed at the scope of the problem, Blodgett and Essex County Sheriff
Frank Cousins have organized a full-day seminar for next week, the
first of its kind, to bring North of Boston police, counselors and
educators together to confront the opiate epidemic.

They want people to walk away knowing that today's heroin and
OxyContin addicts are not inner-city people in back alleys with
needles in their arms. They are regular kids. They are our children.

Cousins knows it's true. Two of his former paper boys, kids he watched
grow up in Newburyport, were recently sent to his jail in Middleton.
Both are heroin addicts. They are 19 and 20.

Even people who are not directly affected by the epidemic should be
concerned, police say.

Once addicts have pawned their own property for drug money, they turn
to stealing from others. They shoplift. They grab purses. A rash of
burglaries in sleepy Topsfield this past summer and fall were linked
to drug addicts, and Blodgett predicts the number of crimes is going
to skyrocket. "We feel the breeze, " he said, "but we know the
hurricane is coming." Heroin is here Heroin has had a home on the
North Shore for decades. But in the past five years, the number of
addicts has increased dramatically. The reason is now clear: OxyContin.

OxyContin is a synthetic opiate" essentially heroin made in a
pharmaceutical lab instead of a Colombian jungle. The prescription
pill has been a godsend for cancer patients and those who suffer with
chronic pain. But people who abuse OxyContin do not take the pill with
food and a glass of water every 12 hours as prescribed. Typically they
chew it, which gives them an instant, euphoric rush and leaves a
greenish-blue stain on their lips and tongue. More experienced users
crush the pill to circumvent the time-release coating and snort it
like cocaine. It also can be broken, dissolved in water and shot into
the bloodstream intravenously.

"OxyContin has all the same addictive properties and the same
withdrawal consequences as heroin," said Steve Chisholm, clinical
supervisor at CAB Addiction Services in Danvers.

OxyContin and other prescription drugs often are obtained by "doctor
shopping" receiving prescriptions from several different doctors.
Users also forge prescriptions, steal prescription pads, and rob
homes, drug stores or individual patients who use the drug for
legitimate medical reasons. The drugs also can be purchased illegally
over the Internet.

Thanks to a rash of pharmacy robberies that began in early 2000, most
people have heard of OxyContin.

Still, many parents know little about the drug. Even the most aware
can miss the warning signs because they closely resemble the moodiness
and estrangement typical of adolescence.

"You can be intoxicated on heroin, and as long as you are not very
heavily intoxicated, you can look relatively normal," said Dr. Poule
LaPlante, director of Addison Gilbert Hospital's methadone clinic in
Gloucester. "My patients who are on OxyContin say to me that you can
go to school on it." When Peabody's first methadone clinic opened two
years ago to treat opiate addicts, company officials expected a
maximum of 180 clients. Today the Route 1 clinic is filled with 350
patients per day.

"There is no community that is untouched," said Matt Davis, director
of the Peabody clinic. "And the clients just get younger and younger."
A new pattern Medical professionals now see a new "classic" pathway to
heroin abuse among young people.

"They are starting with stealing pills, including Percocets and
codeines," LaPlante said. "In some cases they don't know exactly what
they are taking. It is this kind of garbage-pail mentality."

Some of the young people experimenting assume the drugs are safe
because they are legal. But then they try OxyContin a few times, and
quickly become so addicted they feel sick without it. Many eventually
switch to sniffing heroin because it's easier to get and costs as
little as $4 a bag, compared with as much as $80 for a single
OxyContin pill.

The needles come next because eventually addicts build up a tolerance,
and shooting heroin is the most effective way to get the drug into the
system. Treatment specialists agree it is young people's willingness
to try new these highly addictive prescription painkillers in the
first place that is causing the new wave of heroin addicts.

But convincing adults of this phenomenon is no simple task. About two
years ago, Chisholm, of CAB in Danvers, was asked to speak at the
Beverly Rotary Club about employees with substance abuse problems.
Chisholm mentioned the growing heroin and OxyContin problem among
young people here. He said he was met with blank stares.

"I was a bit stunned," Chisholm said. "I didn't know exactly what to
say in the moment. I see this day-in-and-day-out here, and now I am
one town away and people do not seem to recognize the problem."

Communities in crisis Law enforcement officials and clinicians say
that addicts rarely seek treatment unless they are forced to by the
courts or family. So it is impossible to accurately gauge how many
young addicts are living in the area. But when overdoses are compiled
for a particular community, the result is a chilling portrait.

The Salem News identified 39 fatal drug overdoses in Essex County in
2003 by using the Freedom of Information Act to request numbers from
every Essex County police department.

The number of deaths is likely higher, however. Some departments did
not respond to the request or repeated follow-up phone calls. Others
said older computer systems prevented them from providing the
information.

Only a handful of communities approached the request with a sense of
urgency. In Peabody, Blodgett's hometown, the police chief assigned an
officer to review all heroin-related incidents in 2003. That review
showed that heroin abuse is prevalent throughout the entire city: in
the affluent neighborhoods of West Peabody, the blue collar areas in
South Peabody, and inside the somewhat seedy motels on Route 1.

Four people died of heroin overdoses in Peabody that year: A white
30-year-old on Sherman Street in South Peabody who sniffed the drug.
A 19-year-old West Peabody man who was an OxyContin user trying
heroin for the first time.

Two people in Route 1 motel rooms a 29-year-old with a stolen
car, and a 40-year-old with a history of drug abuse.

The other 20 heroin overdose calls in that city were for people of all
ages" 16, 18, 19, 20 and up.

In 2004, three people under 21 died of opiate overdoses in Peabody
alone, Blodgett said. All four were graduates of Peabody High School,
and all played on sports teams there. Why take the risk?

Statistics for some communities are better than others, but a quick
review of daily police logs reveals the everyday existence of
OxyContin and heroin among young people throughout the area.

During a one-week period last year, for example, a 20-year-old Peabody
man and an 18-year-old Salem woman were arrested at Kohl's in Danvers
for shoplifting and OxyContin possession. A 21-year-old man was
arrested for having a hypodermic needle following a disturbance on
Summit Street in Peabody. And a 19-year-old Beverly man and his
20-year-old female companion were arrested on Route 128 after police
found more than 55 OxyContin tablets, a drug scale and a pill cutter
in their car.

"When you're looking at all of the break-ins that occur to motor
vehicles and houses where there are easily fenced goods"
televisions, radios, car speakers, coin collections a=80" that's the
kind of stuff that is indicative of a drug problem," said Champagne,
the Peabody police chief.

The examples seem endless, and each raises the same question: Why are
so many teens trying opiates?

The reason, says Donna Harrington of CAB, is no different from why
kids sneak into their parents' liquor cabinet or steal from their
older brother's pot stash. "C'mon, do you remember being an
adolescent? You want to rebel," she said. "You wanted to do anything
your parents didn't want you to do. You want to try things. It is the
perfect age to try this kind of stuff. At my age it was pot and beer"
that is what we would experiment or try. But now they are doing it
with opiates.

"Kids are kids, adolescents are adolescents. That doesn't change," she
said. "What has changed is the drugs out there."

Most everyone agrees today's drugs of choice are to blame for this new
generation of addicts who will do whatever it takes to get their next
high. "The community order is at stake here, and the preservation of
the way of life people have come to expect in their communities,"
Blodgett said. "It is time for people to wake up to that."