HEROIN REIGNS AS MOST LETHAL IN ALLEGHENY, 4 NEIGHBORING COUNTIES

She was the hardest worker they knew.

Melissa Lockovitch toiled the 2-10 p.m. shift as a nurse's aide at UPMC
South Side. Then, with the energy only a 20-year-old could muster, she
darted into a restroom and changed uniforms for her overnight security
guard duty at the University of Pittsburgh.

For the former straight-A Keystone Oaks student, the long hours, the
scrimping and saving, had paid off. She'd just been accepted into nursing
school. She ordered new scrubs. It was time to celebrate.

Her mother, Janet Kapsis, saw her last on Oct. 20, when the daughter she
adored dropped off her dirty laundry.

"She looked so pretty. Curly hair. Pink top. So pretty," Kapsis said. "She
told me, 'Just think, Mummy, in three weeks I'll be 21.' "

But Melissa never got the chance to blow out the candles. The night before
Halloween, she died alone in her Whitehall apartment, a crumpled packet of
heroin at her side, her lungs drowning in their own blood.

"Every time I look out the window, I see her car and think she's come
back," said Kapsis.

"I cry a lot."

Heroin now reigns as the most lethal drug in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler,
Washington and Westmoreland counties, based on autopsy reports at area
coroners' offices. Last year, heroin killed Lockovitch and 190 other people
across the region. That's more than double the 2000 death count and it
doesn't include several dozen Allegheny County cases pending lab results.

But it's not the unprecedented body count that's causing parents in
picture-perfect communities to take notice. It's who's dying. Never before
have area victims of drug abuse been so young or so white.

According to death records on file at the coroners' offices:

Heroin's victims are getting younger. Across the region in 1999, heroin
killed four people under the age of 24. Last year, 27 died.

Four out of five heroin deaths are male, but more women are dying from the
drug than ever before. Last year, 37 perished, double the 2000 count. The
youngest was 19, and five were under 30.

Heroin is an equal-opportunity killer. Heroin claims 10 times as many
whites as blacks, but it also remains the deadliest drugs for black abusers.

It's more than a city problem. Seven out of every 10 heroin deaths occur
outside Pittsburgh, in predominately white rural and suburban enclaves
spread across five counties.

"The perception is that it's an inner-city problem. That's why they moved
to the suburbs in the first place, to escape stuff like drugs," said Bethel
Park Police Chief John Mackey. "They don't understand that kids have the
opportunity to travel, to spend money, like never before.

"I tell parents, 'People don't drive to Bethel Park to buy drugs. They
drive to the North Side or Duquesne, and bring the drugs back. But that
doesn't mean our kids aren't doing drugs, because they are."

If smack had its own calendar for 2001, May would feature a 25-year- old
electrician found face-down in his South Park lawn; September, a Fox Chapel
High School senior who died in his friend's garage; and for April, a
22-year-old Pitt man, set graduate that weekend.

"One would think that after awhile, the message would get out to people,"
said Allegheny County Coroner Cyril Wecht. "Heroin use is a very dangerous
endeavor to engage in. Anyone can die from heroin."

Wecht's prescription: A large-scale effort to educate people about the
dangers of illegal opiate use, plus more coordination with police, health
providers and schools to reach the youngest potential users and,
especially, their parents. Wecht said the region's 438 heroin deaths since
2000 comprise a public health issue, one that's hidden behind the myth of race.

"The problem is that the great majority of people believe this problem
affects largely African-American young adults," said Wecht. "I really
believe that racial bias is a big factor explaining the lack of a public
outrage, of people asking, 'What's going on here?'"

In 1985, when Melissa Lockovitch was three years old, black men had the
highest drug death rate in Pennsylvania, six times higher than whites,
according to the state Department of Health. Then, drugs killed about 29
out of every 100,000 black men; for whites, 1.4 in 100,000.

The typical victim was an aging black junkie in the slums of Philadelphia
or Pittsburgh using heroin or crack cocaine, according to the state
Department of Health.

Fast forward to 2000 and the trend is reversing. Black male drug death
rates have plummeted 75 percent to 6 in 100,000. For white men, the rate is
soaring Nearly six out of every 100,000 will die this year.

Bethel Park, an upper-middle class South Hills suburb, is 97 percent white.
Officials there suspect that, based on calls to treatment centers and the
number of arrests, up to 10 percent of the borough's high school uses
heroin. That's more than five times the national average, according to a
survey by the U.S Department of Health and Human Services.

Authorities thought they had no option but to place a full-time cop in the
school.

"These are kids with enough money, who are mobile, who have cell phones.
They can get heroin easily, and they do," said Bethel Park policeman James
Modrak, who now walks a beat on the high school campus.

"It's just as bad in the parochial schools or Upper St. Clair or anywhere
else. All the kids in the South Hills can make the trip to St. Clair
Village or the North Side and score heroin. But do parents check the miles
on the car? They know how far it is to the North Side. They go to Steelers
or Pirates games.

"Listen, if you can go to a game, your kids can go get heroin."

Last year, Bethel Park cops busted a 14-year-old heroin snorter. They
caught a 15-year-old girl who shot up. Then they nabbed an Eagle Scout as
he swallowed a balloon filled with heroin when they moved in for the arrest.

Supply and Demand

The heroin that ended up in the belly of a Boy Scout began its journey in
Colombia.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, 70 percent of all heroin
sold east of the Mississippi - and nearly all of Pittsburgh's smack - comes
from Colombia, which is also the world's biggest cocaine mill.

In the mid-1990s, Colombian farmers began switching from cocoa plant
cultivation to poppy flowers, the root of heroin. They swapped coke for
heroin for the simplest reason: They made more money.

Colombian suppliers then won the eastern U.S. market in a price war that
shoved out more expensive Southeast Asian, Mexican and Afghani heroin, and
cleared the way for kilos of bargain basement "Colombian White."

Once boiled down and dried into a powder, poppy sap can easily be converted
into opium, heroin or any of the other opiate building blocks that get kids
high, including prescription pain-killers like Percocet and Oxycontin.
These opiates kill by depressing breathing, suffocating victims.

Michelle Mullen, 18, of Bethel Park started with "oxies" at 15. By her
senior year, Pittsburgh police had arrested her scoring heroin on the North
Side. Her odyssey from innocent freshman to hardened drug user is one
repeated every day by teen junkies in Mt. Lebanon, Upper St. Clair, Plum
and Cranberry.

Mullen tried rehab twice. The final straw came when she was busted by
police on Bethel Park's campus. That brought an end to a $700 weekly heroin
habit.

"I started snorting oxies and got hooked," she said. "Then I started
selling them, because I needed to snort. My tolerance went up, so I started
shooting heroin. After a couple of months of shooting, I was up to, well,
12, 15 packets (a day). It depended, you know?"

As the South Hills drug epidemic surged this year, heroin prices in the
city plummeted, making it easier than ever before to get high or hooked on "H."

Two years ago, a teen had to pay $25 for a tiny bag of heroin along East
Ohio or Federal streets on the North Side, two of the city's largest open
air drug markets, according to kids and cops interviewed by the Trib.

Thanks to Colombian exports, a seller now is lucky to get $7 to $10.

Steppin' on the Street

For nearly two years, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review has talked to drug
dealers, the police who chase them, and the customers frequenting their
services. All tell the same story about how drugs arrive in town, and how
the dope is distributed. Their testimonies are backed up by DEA field
reports, which report much of the same findings.

Every week, couriers motoring in from Philadelphia, New York and other
northeastern cities drop off dope. Much of it flows into Pittsburgh along
the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

In March, for example, state troopers on the Turnpike stopped Pamela
Watson, 57, a North Side grandmother with no criminal record. Under her
minivan's floorboard, officers found 6 pounds of high-grade heroin - enough
dope to fill more than 77,000 packets on the street.

The benchmark weight for heroin leaving South America is a kilo of 90
percent pure "Colombian White." U.S. middlemen cut it with corn starch,
talcum or baking soda, then sift it into small sachets for retail street
sales. As the drug moves through the Pittsburgh's chain of local
wholesalers to curbside dealers, it's "stepped on," with more filler added,
making it slightly less pure but more expensive.

It's the underworld's version of shipping and handling.

A generation ago, junkies were lucky to score heroin that was about 3 to 6
percent pure, and to get high they had to inject it into their veins.
Today, the Allegheny County drug lab finds most heroin peddled to suburban
teens is about 70 percent pure.

That's up to 23 times more potent than heroin sold a decade ago, at a
fraction of the price. New teen users typically don't start out shooting
smack. They begin by inhaling a potent product and, only after their
tolerance increases, do they turn to the most efficient means of getting
opium to their brain: the syringe.

The customer's race determines the price. In the black neighborhoods of the
Hill District and the St. Clair Village housing project, city junkies pay
$3 for a balloon filled with heroin. The deluge of cheap heroin now makes
the drug $2 cheaper than a baggie of crack cocaine sold in the same
neighborhoods.

But "Special Delivery," a St. Clair Village batch reserved largely for
white consumers, costs more than twice that much, and it's sold to a
regional pool of addicts. Last year, coroner records show that "Special
Delivery" killed two white men, one in Bethel Park, the other in Tarentum,
showing just how far a sachet of St. Clair Village heroin can travel.

When selling to suburban teens, marketing matters. Dealers don't use drab
balloons or plastic wraps, the packaging that's bundled for sales to inner
city consumers. They instead craft brightly illustrated packages, often
spangled with jingles or illustrations drawn from white teen pop culture.

For the yuletide season, enterprising North Side peddlers mixed up batches
featuring holiday themes, including "Snowman," complete with a smiling
Frosty on the bag, one of which was offered for sale to a Trib reporter.

Pittsburgh's teenage brands are famous throughout the region, wooing kids
seeking their fix of "Scooby Doo," "Special Delivery," or "He Man" from as
far away as New Castle, Johnston and Morgantown, W.Va.

In August, for example, Johnstown's John Anthony Bartoli, 23, locked
himself in the toilet at a Squirrel Hill Starbucks with a syringe and a
packet of "Scooby Doo" - and never came out alive.

The "Buddy System"

White kids rarely do drugs in the city neighborhoods where they score.
They, their friends or low-level dealers serving a select teen clientele
make the run to pick up the packets. It's called the "buddy system," and
dealers showed the Trib that it's busiest on late Friday afternoons, just
after school but before the weekend parties.

The best-selling brands are those that kill people. Dope peddlers told the
Trib that nothing is better for business than the word-of-mouth advertising
following an overdose, which suggests to junkies a brand with higher heroin
purity. "He Man," named after a childhood cartoon, sold well. And it killed
two men last year, according to county death records.

One was Bethel Park's Stephen Patrick Kurty, 23, and investigators believe
it was the "buddy system" that delivered the lethal dose. But most of the
time, cops concede they usually can't catch up to this informal drug
traffic before youngsters like Kurty die. Last year, heroin killed nine
South Hills residents under the age of 25, including teens in Dormont,
Whitehall and South Park.

But sometimes, police get lucky. On Dec. 12, they were able to rush Drew
Monning, 23, to St. Clair Hospital. Bridgeville police found Monning and
another Upper St. Clair man, Andrew Fedorchak, 18, asleep in an idling car
along LaFayette Street with 108 stamped bags of heroin, 110 syringes, and a
bag of pills.

That sounds like a lot of dope, but to Bethel Park's Michelle Mullen, the
LaFayette Street cargo would have lasted barely a week. She's clean now
because she doesn't want to die, a fate shared by 50 western Pennsylvania
heroin abusers under the age of 30 last year.

For some South Hills teens, Mullen's fight to be drug-free has become an
inspiration. But the daily reality of fighting heroin cravings is tougher
than people think, she says. She's going to college, has landed a job, has
her own apartment and has patched up relations with her mother, who Mullen
now says saved her life by being tough when she needed it.

The road from heroin addiction to a clean live often involves years of
going on and off smack. And more are going to treatment than ever before.
According to the Pennsylvania Health Department, 4,714 residents of
Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Washington and Westmoreland counties entered
drug rehab programs last year - a 45 percent increase since 1999.

"I can't sit here and say, 'Hey, in two weeks I won't be on it.' Because I
don't know that," Mullen said. "I can't say that. What I can say is that
I'm trying hard, every day, to stay clean."

On the Air

Tune in to OnQ on WQED-TV 13 at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday for a feature story and
live panel discussion about heroin use in the Pittsburgh area. The show
will be re-aired Tuesday at 11:30 p.m. and Wednesday at 12:30 p.m.