BABY TALK

Our Top Officials Warn of Predators Seeking to Addict Our Children To
Drugs, but It's the Adult Users We Should Be Worrying About

FOR THE RECORD, roughly one of every 65 Boston teens has used heroin,
whereas about one in four lives in poverty; one in four has been
driven by a drunk driver in the past month; one in six carries a gun
or knife; one in seven has starved him-or herself to lose weight, and
one in nine has attempted suicide in the past year. (These figures
come from the National Centers for Disease Control -- see
http://apps.nccd.cdc.gov/YRBSS/index.asp -- with the exception of the
poverty-rate figures, which are provided by the Boston Public Health
Commission.) But the mayor and the governor want to talk about how
heroin is destroying our kids, so let's talk about that.

At the three-hour New England Governors Summit last Wednesday, the
speakers repeatedly invoked "the children." Governor Mitt Romney
focused on the addiction rates of 12- to 17-year-olds, and spoke of
heroin dealers loitering around playgrounds. Mayor Tom Menino spoke
specifically about heroin dealers targeting children as young as 12.
Karen Tandy, administrator of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA),
described heroin addicts 13 and 14 years old. John Walters, director
of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, called school drug
testing a "magic bullet" for solving the drug problem.

Connecticut governor John Rowland and others invoked children in
arguing against the medicinal use of marijuana.

The hyperbole and outright misinformation ran thick.

Tandy, elaborating on how heroin is "clearly readily available" to
youth, mentioned the arrest of a Connecticut dealer less than 1500
feet from an elementary school -- roughly the distance across the
Longfellow Bridge, or from South Station to Post Office Square; even
Fenway Park's famed peanut-tossing vendors would have a tough time
completing that transaction. Menino claimed that distributors now
decorate drug packaging with bright colors and cartoon characters in a
deliberate attempt to hook kids as young as 12. This became the
central image of the day, and the lead in the next day's Boston Globe.

Yet these images are actually age-old street-distributor branding.
"You may have a glassine bag with a tiger paw, so if you go out
looking for heroin you might ask for the tiger paw because you
perceive it as being stronger or of higher purity," explains Anthony
Pedigrew, spokesperson for the Boston office of the DEA.

Indeed, not everyone in the field of drug-law enforcement agrees that
drug dealers are out there doing everything in their power to ensnare
children. "I don't think we have a Joe Camel type of campaign here to
get the 12-year-olds hooked," says Assistant District Attorney Brian
Cullen, who heads the narcotics and asset-forfeiture unit for the
Suffolk County District Attorney's Office. "They don't have to --
there's a big enough market already."

That's what the kids themselves say. "I hear some kids saying 'I'm
doing weed Saturday,'" says Shanna Ridley, a 13-year-old student at
East Boston's Umana/Barnes Middle School. "They're just talking.

I say, 'Why you bugging about something you're not even
doing?'"

According to Menino, heroin dealers in Boston are targeting Ridley
with sophisticated marketing techniques. Yet she hasn't seen it.
Neither has Cassandra Diaz, 16, who attends East Boston High School.
"Mainly weed, and more alcohol than weed," she says of drug use among
her schoolmates. Ecstasy is around, and she sees some kids starting
with cocaine. "Heroin -- that's crazy," Diaz says.

Boston is not a teeming cesspool of drug use among children.

In fact, adolescents and teens in Boston are far less likely to use
drugs than are kids in the rest of the state, in similar cities, or in
the country at large. That's true generally, and of heroin
specifically: 1.5 percent of high-school students in Boston have used
it, compared with three percent in Massachusetts, 3.1 percent
nationwide, and between 2.4 and three percent in Chicago, Dallas,
Houston, Philadelphia, and San Diego. Just 263 Bostonians under the
age of 18 entered publicly funded substance-abuse programs last year,
accounting for barely one percent of all admissions -- and most of
those were for alcohol.

In addition, Boston high-school students are no more likely to have
been offered drugs at school than are their counterparts elsewhere.

Drugs are not in the school hallways; pushers are not hanging around
the schoolyard or harassing pupils as they walk home.

No, the kids are alright in Boston, which is much more than one can
say of the city's adults.

They are in serious trouble, if anyone cares.

HEROIN IS FAR more addictive, corrosive, and destructive than other
drugs in popular use. "My big issue is people who are trying out
heroin just like other drugs," says Cullen. "It's simply not an
experimental drug." Heroin-overdose deaths in Boston have risen
sharply, to 66 last year -- and they were all adults.

But the number of lives ended by heroin is nothing compared to the
many lives destroyed by it: roughly 9000 heroin addicts are admitted
each year to publicly funded treatment centers in the city.

It's also true that heroin admissions are declining.

But that's not because there are fewer addicts.

It's because budget cuts have reduced the number of spaces for addicts
seeking treatment (see "Sentencing Addicts to Death," News and
Features, May 23). In September, 120 drug and alcohol addicts who
contacted Boston's central intake phone line asking for help were
turned away because no space was available, says John Auerbach,
executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission. That's up
from 30 just six months earlier. "People are unable to find a bed or a
drug-treatment program, so they are continuing to use," Auerbach says.

"The level of usage is clearly tied to the availability of funds for drug
treatment and prevention," agrees Suffolk County sheriff Andrea Cabral.
That's causing a big problem for Cabral: the county's holding jail is at
double capacity because judges who would ordinarily send offenders to detox
are now ordering them to jail when no detox facility is available.

At last week's summit, Romney spoke of the need for prevention and
recovery services, but it's hard to take his newfound concern seriously.

After all, this is the same man who not only pared down drug-treatment
programs, but personally eliminated Medicaid coverage of emergency and
second-stage detox services, and then ended the MassHealth Basic program.

Taken together, the governor's efforts have forced a dramatic
reduction in prevention and recovery programs.

Making Romney's negligence and deceit all the more lethal is the way
supply and demand on the street are driving down the cost of heroin --
leading to more users.

A price war has been going on, triggered by the rise in popularity of
club drugs, such as MDMA (ecstasy), ketamine, and GHB. The market is
working itself out; as heroin importers have flooded the Boston area,
ecstasy has dropped from $25 or more per tablet to $15 or less, and
ketamine goes for $20 to $40 a bag. The hot pharmaceutical OxyContin
retails for $20 per 20-milligram tablet and $40 per 80-milligram
tablet. Recently, the extremely harmful drug methamphetamine, once a
virtual non-factor in Boston, has also begun to infiltrate the area.
(You may recall the infamous Dr. David Arndt -- he of the
patient-left-on-the-operating-table episode -- getting caught with 56
grams of crystal meth in a pinata last August.)

As a result of such competition, some heroin now goes for just $4 for
a bag of between 1/100th and 2/100th of a gram -- enough to get two
people high for the evening.

That's the low end, however, and available only if you're buying in
some bulk. Typical prices in Massachusetts this year have been $15 to
$25 a bag, according to DEA reports; Cullen of the Suffolk DA's Office
says that in Boston it's cheaper, running about $6 to $10.

Of course, one drawback to doing heroin, even at discount prices, is
that you have to stick a needle in yourself, which most casual users
do not want to do -- at least initially.

But that problem, too, has been worked out: really pure heroin -- say,
85 percent and up -- can be snorted and is now widely available.

These days, South American ultra-pure heroin accounts for most of
what's circulating in Boston, according to Cullen. Law-enforcement
officials say that OxyContin users in particular, already accustomed
to crushing and snorting those pills, are eager to switch from a drug
that costs up to $40 a hit to one that goes for as little as $4.
Cocaine users sometimes go that route as well, although powder
cocaine, at about $12 a hit, remains relatively inexpensive. Moreover,
cocaine is logistically difficult for the end user, who generally must
shell out at least $40 for, say, a quarter-gram and then must hang
onto what's left, making it relatively easy for authorities to find.
That's all the more reason to do heroin instead, which you can buy in
individual-dose bags for a few bucks, and then roll up and hide in the
knot of a shoelace.

But heroin is really brutal, and most users eventually require
substance-abuse treatment.

Unfortunately, soon after making the switch from some other drug to
heroin, two big things happen.

For one, the body quickly craves more and more of the drug. Where
cocaine, OxyContin, and ecstasy users usually remain at a steady level
of use, heroin users rapidly escalate to five-, 10-, and, eventually,
20-bag-a-day habits.

Not only is heroin highly addictive, but users quickly learn how
inefficient snorting is for delivering their high. The vast majority
who start out snorting (vowing they'll never inject) end up with a
needle habit, according to Cullen.

DESPITE THE FACT that cheap, plentiful heroin is ravaging a small but
growing number of adults, the legislative and political focus on drugs
is aimed squarely at hyping fear over "the children." Let's just state
for the record that there's no question teenagers can find the drugs
they want if they go looking.

But at the same time, they have little trouble avoiding them. Menino
and Boston police commissioner Paul Evans should take great pride in
what they've done to keep the city's kids off drugs (or at least off
drugs more serious than marijuana). The city's expansion of
after-school programs is probably a big part of it, as is its success
in driving the drug business off public street corners.

The mayor and police commissioner should urge the rest of the state to
adopt these approaches. Instead, they seem intent on exploiting the
public's fear of predatory dealers luring children to Satan. The
misguided speechifying about drug-packet logos was just the latest
example.

Two months ago the duo held a press conference in South Boston's
Independence Square Park on M Street to declare their support for a
bill that has languished for years, with good reason, at the State
House. It would take the current mandatory-minimum 30-month prison
sentence for intent to distribute within 1000 feet of a school zone
and 100 feet of a park, and extend it to 1000 feet of any school,
library, park, or playground. The proposal is silly enough for
outlying towns like Woburn, whose representatives have touted the
bill. But in Boston the bill would turn the entire city into a
mandatory-minimum drug zone -- entirely eliminating the distinction
between dealing near and far from children, for purposes of
punishment, that is the intent of the law. When Menino argued in favor
of expanding mandatory-minimum sentencing, he pointed to a known
heroin-dealing spot not far from the park on M Street, which lies
beyond the current zone. According to reports in the Boston Herald and
Boston-Bay State Banner, the mayor spoke of protecting the helpless
young people of the park. But kids in the park are not approached by
dealers, who are out of sight making their connections in the
industrial lots across East First Street. If the pushers did approach,
they would enter the existing 100-foot mandatory-minimum zone --
giving Evans's cops the opportunity to invoke the mandatory prison
time. In other words, the current law is working -- if its intent is
to keep drug dealers away from children and teenagers.

The original school-zone law was part of a sweeping anti-pusher effort
that has succeeded to the point of frustration for law enforcement.
That is, the drug-dealing industry has retreated out of sight, causes
little commotion, and is thus very difficult to locate and stamp out.
"Police have driven dealers off the street corners," Cullen says.
"It's not the same scene of a guy waiting on a street corner with the
stash nearby."

This is, one would think, a good thing. "I haven't seen that [heroin]
has become the sort of problem crack was, when people would shoot each
other over a street," says Cullen. Cocaine continues to cause these
sorts of problems, as evidenced by the recent indictments and arrests
of feuding gang members in the Bowdoin Street and Uphams Corner
sections of Dorchester and Roxbury. Those cocaine-distributing gangs
are allegedly responsible for shootings dating back to 1995.

Drug dealing in most of Boston today -- particularly for heroin --
generally uses a "beep and meet" system, according to both Cullen and
the DEA. The buyer pages his contact, who calls back with a place and
time for the exchange.

Usually the location is inside an apartment or in a parking lot.
Outdoor selling, then, consists of quick, transitory exchanges
arranged minutes beforehand. Indoor selling is even harder to stop, as
it requires warrants for search and seizure.

Street selling persists in some areas, particularly the South End and
Dorchester. As a result, more arrests and seizures take place there,
and among the city's African-American population, even though white
residents account for the bulk of the use. "It's attributable to the
physical plant of the surroundings," says Cabral. "As opposed to
getting into apartments in South Boston, you make arrests where it's
easy to make arrests."

The only possible reason the mayor and police commissioner could have
for wanting to expand the current law is to throw more dealers in
prison for a longer periods of time by making them eligible for
mandatory-minimum sentencing. (A 2001 Boston University School of
Public Health study of drug-dealing cases in Fall River, New Bedford,
and Springfield found that despite the law, almost 80 percent of cases
occurred within 1000 feet of a school, and were thus eligible for the
mandatory minimum.) Regardless, Sheriff Cabral doubts that additional
punishment is much of a deterrent to begin with. "People have a much
more casual attitude toward doing time," says Cabral.

Let's be fair. Mayor Menino is right to worry about the city's
children. But he's wrong to put so much emphasis on the drugs they may
do now. More than two-thirds of those seeking treatment for heroin
addiction in Boston are between 30 and 49. They are the parents of the
children Menino talked about at last week's drug summit.

When those adults' lives collapse to drugs, their children
suffer.

And just like children of alcoholics and physical or sexual abusers,
they are learning behavior they will emulate later, as Cabral points
out.

So for now, the kids are alright.

But give them another five or 10 years and see where they are then.