LOCAL STUDY SHOWS HEROIN TRENDS

Use By Teenagers Jumps In Suburbs

Heroin is a resurgent problem in most big cities, but researchers say a new
epidemic is worse in Chicago than in most of the U.S., with suburban
teenagers increasingly among the users.

Researchers at Roosevelt University found in an 8-month study of heroin use
that demographics have been changing in the Chicago area, where a higher
proportion of people end up in emergency rooms from heroin use than in any
other metropolitan area.

In 2002 the Chicago area recorded 12,982 heroin-related emergency room
visits, the most in the nation for the fifth consecutive year, according to
federal statistics. That year 220 people per 100,000 population in the city
and suburbs were hospitalized with heroin problems. Only Baltimore and
Newark, N.J., also had rates over 200 per 100,000.

The rise of heroin use, and the changing demographics of users, are
expanding the risk of HIV infection and hepatitis C for younger people, the
Roosevelt report says.

In the city, heroin users are primarily minorities and are getting older,
said Kathleen Kane-Willis, a researcher at Roosevelt's Institute for
Metropolitan Affairs. But in the suburbs, the trend is toward younger,
white users.

Chicago still has more users than the suburbs, Kane-Willis said, but based
on statistics from drug treatment facilities, the number of teens in the
city treated for heroin shrank between 1995 and 2002. The numbers in
suburban Cook County more than doubled. The numbers more than quadrupled in
the collar counties.

Kane-Willis said the problem in the suburbs is still seriously
underestimated, partly because the thought of middle-class teens using a
hardcore drug is difficult for many parents to accept.

"Parents need to be educated about this," she said. "They need to know what
the signs of use and addiction are. We need to do more research on [the]
new heroin ... generation ... to know where their first use is occurring,
where they're buying, how they support their habits."

Kane-Willis and her co-author, researcher Stephanie Schmitz-Bechteler, are
leading a panel discussion on their report at 10 a.m. Monday at 430 S.
Michigan Ave.

Since the mid-1990s Chicago has been more of a national hub of heroin
trafficking than it was in the past. One of the results is that much of the
heroin is purer, meaning the quantities sold on street corners are less
diluted, and thus more addictive.

Chicago police have targeted street corner drug markets at an increasing
rate in the last year, conducting dozens of sting operations, followed by
reverse stings. Most have been conducted in poor, high-crime neighborhoods
on the West and South Sides, but between 30 and 40 percent of the would-be
buyers arrested in the reverse stings are suburbanites.