CHARLESTOWN UNITES TO COMBAT HEROIN

Overdoses, Deaths, and Crime Decline

At first, there were only whispers. Mourners would gather in
Charlestown's churches for funerals of the young, nodding solemnly -
and knowingly - when told the family had a history of heart problems.

In truth, it was another death by heroin. As the drug seeped across
the neighborhood, it caused dozens of overdoses, devastating hundreds
of families. Starting in 2003, the signs of crisis were everywhere -
the neighborhood parks that addicts colonized, the fast-food
restaurants that locked their bathroom doors after finding discarded
needles, and on one raw afternoon, the pizza parlor where Michael
Charbonnier took his children. As the family settled into a booth,
two men at another table pulled out a stash of heroin and prepared to shoot up.

"This wasn't a seedy bar," said Charbonnier, a Charlestown native and
Boston police officer who tossed the men out. "This was a family
restaurant at 2 o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday. And I said:
'What has it come to here?' "

That same question was being asked in homes all across Charlestown, a
1-square-mile neighborhood where the newly- and near-wealthy dwell
next to generational poverty. The response represented an
unprecedented call to action - and showed that one of America's
oldest neighborhoods still had the mettle to confront a deadly threat.

Amid a massive effort that began in 2004, drug overdoses in
Charlestown have plummeted by two-thirds this year compared with
2003. There has not been a single death attributed to drugs so far in
2007. And a crime wave that peaked as heroin grabbed hold of
Charlestown subsided.

Over the past four years, grand gestures and small measures have
united Charlestown like never before. Residents who once observed a
legendary code of silence started calling one another, as well as the
police, to report suspected drug dealing - part of 51 block-by-block
campaigns created to thwart the spread of heroin. Neighbors scattered
their children's plastic toys across a park, symbolic proof that they
had reclaimed the land from drug users. Opposition to a treatment
house melted away.

Massachusetts General Hospital and Partners HealthCare, already a
major presence in Charlestown through a clinic and research complex,
committed more than $3.5 million to the cause, while government
agencies pumped in fresh resources, too - including $12 million from
the city for a new police substation.

"It used to be every time I turned around, there was somebody getting
high," said Shannon Lundin, a 28-year-old mother who survived a
heroin overdose and has been sober for nearly four years. "Now, every
time I turn around, there's somebody getting sober."

To appreciate where Charlestown is now, it is important to consider
where it had recently been. At least 123 drug overdoses and 13 deaths
were reported from 2003 through 2006, most attributed to heroin or
OxyContin, a prescription painkiller, according to Police Department
figures. A map of Charlestown propped against an office wall in the
Boys & Girls Club shows a tide of red dots, one for each overdose,
washing from the Navy Yard with its downtown vista to the edge of
Sullivan Square - an epidemic unbounded by class or race. At its
worst in 2003, overdoses in Charlestown happened at a rate three
times the citywide average.

The crisis landed inside the warm home of Carol Powers-Morrissey,
where the walls hang heavy with portraits chronicling the growth of
her family. In many ways, her house became a microcosm of Charlestown itself.

"The hardest thing to do is to come to the realization that your son
or daughter is an addict," said Powers-Morrissey, a nurse with an air
of keen determination.

For her, that realization dawned the day she looked at a family
portrait and all her unspoken suspicions about her 19-year-old son
came to fruition. She realized his entire face had changed. "I
noticed the weight loss and the eyes looked funny," she said.

Seeing that picture convinced her she had to do more - and not just
for her family. She joined the Charlestown Substance Abuse Coalition,
created in 2004 to bring together disparate efforts around the town.
She distributed magnets and fliers about substance abuse to places
like the Knights of Columbus hall.

"This isn't a secret," she would tell people. "I know who's doing it;
you know who's doing it. Say it out loud, let's just say it out loud."

The campaign to educate parents and youths about heroin and other
narcotics became part of the fabric of life in Charlestown, but in
ways that were intentionally understated. "If you say, 'Come down to
the Knights of Columbus next week, we're going to talk about drugs,'
no one's going to show up," Charbonnier said.

Instead, parents were invited to lectures on how to be better a
parent, with messages about the dangers of prescription-drug abuse
woven in. Similarly, at Pop Warner football practices, coaches
skipped tackling practices some nights, and youngsters instead
learned about making smart choices in life.

When Peter Looney founded the coalition Charlestown Against Drugs two
decades ago, the drugs of choice were cocaine, angel dust, and
alcohol. In its early days, the group pushed to reduce public
drinking during Bunker Hill Day festivities.

"I stopped drinking in '84 or '85, and people used to say to me,
'Christ, just because you stopped drinking doesn't mean the whole
world has to. Why are you ruining our good time?' " Looney said.

In 1995, OxyContin began appearing in medicine cabinets nationwide.
Soon enough, it made its way, illegally, onto the streets of
Charlestown, foreshadowing the heroin epidemic.

"The problem with OxyContin," said police Captain Bernard O'Rourke,
who for eight years has presided over the district that includes
Charlestown, "is that people are falsely led to believe that it's
safe because it's a pharmaceutical product."

In fact, the pills are highly addictive and steeply expensive. Users
quickly develop a tolerance, requiring stronger doses to achieve the
same high - and a daily habit easily becomes a $500-a-week
proposition. Unable to afford such a pricey high, addicts in
Charlestown turned to the drug they vowed they would never use:
heroin, a drug plentiful and cheap, with a small baggy costing not
much more than a six pack of beer.

There is a hierarchy in the world of drug addicts. Heroin is viewed
as the narcotic of the desperate. It's bad enough to snort it. But to
inject it is something else entirely, an act associated with dark
alleys and sinister figures, as well as the spread of viruses that
cause hepatitis C and AIDS.

For Lundin and a second recovering drug addict interviewed by the
Globe, the descent from alcohol to OxyContin to heroin was swift and
all-consuming. They stole and lied to support their habits, cycling
in and out of detox programs, doing "horrible things," as the
22-year-old woman put it, speaking anonymously as she tries to
rebuild her life.

"I didn't know how to do anything else but get high," Lundin said.

The one thing Lundin didn't have time for: her daughter. Sometimes,
she would put the toddler in a bedroom, turn on a videotape, and
party with her boyfriend.

"Thinking about that now, my stomach turns," Lundin said, her big,
expressive eyes widening at the memory.

There's no single reason Charlestown was so hard-hit.

John Auerbach, the state's public health commissioner, who led
Boston's health agency when the heroin epidemic was at its worst,
suggested that in Charlestown, as in some other neighborhoods,
insularity might have contributed. Perhaps, he said, youngsters
growing up in a place accessible only by bridge fail to recognize the
range of services available if they become dependent on drugs.

Poverty is also cited as a potential cause. Charlestown has three
residential complexes for low-income families, including the
low-slung brick buildings on Bunker Hill Street that form the largest
government housing complex in New England. O'Rourke, the police
captain, called that complex the "epicenter of the drug activity."

The Police Department decided not to arrest its way out of
Charlestown's problem. Making drug arrests is difficult, O'Rourke
said, and, more crucially, does little to ameliorate the underlying
problem. Addicts are still addicts after their court appearance, said
the captain.

At the same time, the community embraced an ethos of treatment over
punishment. "It was not a 'Just say no' campaign,' " said Beth
Rosenshein, whose salary as coordinator of the Charlestown Substance
Abuse Coalition is paid for by Mass. General.

The hospital's single-biggest donation, $2 million, is underwriting
the construction of a halfway house for recovering addicts.

The need became evident one gray afternoon last month as two young
women greeted each other on Bunker Hill Street. Much as old friends
might lament not getting into the college of their choice, one of
them complained about how tough it was to get into drug rehab. "See,"
said Jack Kelly, liaison in Charlestown for Mayor Thomas M. Menino,
"that's normal now as we sit here in 2007, to walk by and hear a
conversation like that."

Lundin sees evidence of change, too, in the faces of old friends,
clear-eyed rather than dazed. As for Lundin, she still spends her
nights with people suffering from addictions - except now, she's
helping them, as a substance abuse counselor.