OXYCONTIN LEADS FENWICK GRAD TO HEROIN, THEN JAIL

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 a=80" 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 a=80" 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 a=80" 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.