DRUG IS MAKING DEADLY INROADS IN NEW ENGLAND

Once Rare, Heroin Hits Rural Areas Hard

PORTLAND, Maine -- A chef, 26, clean and sober for several months, fatally
overdosed on heroin sold to her by a close friend here in January 2002.
Then a financial adviser, 27, a heroin addict, was found dead from a
methadone overdose. Three days later, a heroin user in his forties
collapsed after overdosing and died on a step leading into his apartment
building.

They were only the beginning of a deadly spiral. Last year ended with
Portland setting a record for itself, with 28 drug-related deaths,
two-thirds of them involving known heroin users. Meanwhile, 80 miles away
in the rural community of Farmington, the drug also had made its potent
presence felt with three deaths last spring, including two men in their
thirties who overdosed together one night.

"Throughout the state, heroin is an epidemic. No question," said Portland
Detective Sgt. Scott Pelletier, a supervisory special agent with the Maine
Drug Enforcement Agency.

Maine is not alone. All across northern New England, heroin is addicting
younger users, increasing other crime, and killing addicts at an
unprecedented pace, according to law enforcement and public health agencies.

While not creating the number of addicts of larger metropolitan areas such
as Boston and New York, heroin is especially devastating in a mostly rural
and geographically isolated region. Communities in these small states lack
extensive drug treatment centers, and drug-related deaths and crimes are
straining the resources not only of police but also of medical examiners
conducting more autopsies.

"It's a scary time for us," said George Festa, who directs the New England
High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a coalition of law enforcement agencies.

The fears once associated with big cities are unsettling teachers and
parents, who say the new wave of heroin use is felt more directly in small
towns.

"What's going on here has been going in urban areas for a long time," said
Dale Conoscenti, a restaurant owner in Montpelier, the Vermont capital. His
son, 25, a longtime heroin addict, was recently sentenced to six years in
federal prison on drug and gun charges. "It's an epidemic in Vermont
because you look at the population and the isolation, and it's a big deal
when you have only a certain amount of kids and a certain percentage of
those kids are involved in heroin."

Most heroin arrives in northern New England along Interstates 91 and 95
from New York and the Massachusetts drug-trafficking centers of
Springfield, Holyoke, Lawrence and Lowell. Dose bags in the Bay State sell
for as little as $4 each, getting more expensive further north, police
said, but still remaining cheaper and more available than other illicit
drugs or prescription opiates such as OxyContin. What's more, purity levels
exceeding 80 percent are attracting a new generation of drug users who
don't inject but snort or smoke it.

In Maine in 2001, admissions to heroin treatment programs outpaced
cocaine-related admissions by 90 percent, and heroin abuse contributed to
nearly three-quarters of the more than 80 drug-related deaths that year,
authorities said. Heroin-related arrests by the Maine Drug Enforcement
Agency rose by 50 percent, along with increased federal convictions for
offenses involving heroin, a trend police and prosecutors said is continuing.

A second methadone clinic opened in the Portland area, and firetrucks as
well as ambulances now carry naloxone, which blocks the effects of opiates
to help prevent fatal overdoses.

Only a decade ago, heroin was rare in this region. Police knew local
addicts by name, and prosecutors considered heroin-trafficking cases a
novelty. All that has changed, to the extent that drug overdose deaths --
many of them involving heroin -- have equaled or exceeded the number of
homicides in recent years; the number of heroin addicts regionwide is
estimated in the thousands.

In Farmington, the rural college town of 7,700 where three people died last
spring, heroin was almost unheard of when Lt. Jack Peck became a full-time
police officer 18 years ago. Yet heroin-related investigations have become
fairly common.

"Years ago, you pretty much knew who the users or dealers were, or at least
you had information. Now we don't know who the players are at times," Peck
said. "We had two people die of heroin overdoses [recently], and we never
knew them until that day."

In Vermont, where 13 people died from heroin and morphine overdoses last
year, the number of people ages 18 to 24 seeking treatment for heroin
addiction increased roughly sixfold between 1997 and 2000, authorities
said. Heroin makes up nearly half the cases investigated by the state drug
task force, and heroin cases at the state forensic laboratory have risen
400 percent over the past year.

Last fall, a woman taking out the garbage one morning discovered her son,
20, had fatally overdosed in a junk car in the back yard of a house where
another addict had died, and a female heroin user, 23, suffered a suspected
fatal drug overdose in late December. In addition, three dozen pregnant
women in Vermont have sought treatment over the past six months for heroin
addiction, eight times the number reported during all of 1998.

So dire is the situation that Vermont paid $1.5 million last year to send
heroin addicts to a detoxification program in Upstate New York because it
lacked treatment services at home, said state Sen. James Leddy (D), who is
chairman of the Health and Welfare Committee.

"Our jails are filled, our courts are closed, our emergency rooms are
dealing with overdoses," said Leddy, who pushed for the opening of the
state's first methadone clinic in October. "There's not a community of any
size in this state that isn't experiencing a serious heroin problem."

Across the border, New Hampshire heroin treatment admissions statewide
increased more than 100 percent from 1996 to 2000, and nearly half of the
31 drug-related deaths two years ago involved heroin and morphine, with
victims as young as 18, authorities said. A Merrimack Valley heroin
distribution ring involved an elementary school principal and a grandmother
who stashed the drug under a sink for her son. Last year, a man, 44, died
in the public restroom of a hospital after snorting heroin marked with a
picture of a red devil.

A statewide heroin task force is being formed because of an increase in the
number of teenage users, said Riley Regan, director of the New Hampshire
Division of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Prevention and Recovery and a former
heroin addict.

"I'm beginning to find an openness to people willing to recognize the
heroin problem," he said. "It's affecting the kids who are closer to home."