Part 1 Of 6

DRUG WARS

No Such Thing As Casual Users; Suburban Drug Use Underwrites Violent
Distribution Networks And Carries Risks Of Addiction And Death

Before the war on terrorism, there was the war on drugs. There are no flags
waving, but there are bodies -- people die every month on the South Shore
from drug overdoses - and barely anyone notices. Police say they stop maybe
5 percent of the illegal drug flow, cocaine and heroin have become suburban
realities and drug users are getting younger -- five juveniles arrested for
drugs in Duxbury, 12 in Rockland and 31 in Randolph. This other war is
closer to home, and by many standards we are not winning.

A team of Patriot Ledger reporters spent several months looking into the
trafficking and use of illegal drugs on the South Shore. They talked with
addicts and dealers, watched drug buys and busts, and went to court
hearings and treatment centers. Their reports address the why and how and
who of a deadly threat not in Afghanistan or Colombia, but in Canton and
Carver and Cohasset. What we do next in this war is an open question.
----------------------------------- The guests whispered that the late
September wedding would be one to remember. Sweet-smelling freesia and
white roses filled porcelain table vases. There was a large bridal party, a
six-piece band, a disc jockey and 250 guests.

After plates were whisked away, a slender woman in her 20s and a bridesmaid
disappeared into the bathroom. They came out shyly, acted as if they'd
never seen each other before, and quickly separated.

Then, a guest at the Weymouth wedding recalled, men began visiting the rest
room in pairs. They emerged licking their lips and gently rubbing their noses.

By the end of the night, the guest said, people had staggered in and out of
the bathrooms, many having consumed cocaine as exuberantly as champagne.

This type of drug use happens daily here on the South Shore and throughout
the United States. At first glance, it doesn't seem to hurt anybody.

A deeper look at "recreational" drug users - those who occasionally smoke a
joint after dinner or use cocaine at a party - reveals how pernicious and
precarious their drug use really is.

In many cases, these are people who have jobs and families and lead
otherwise legal lives. But their casual drug use fuels a
multimillion-dollar illegal drug industry that destroys families, drains
social services and spawns crime, often against people who don't use drugs.

In a monthslong examination of drug abuse and the war against it on the
South Shore, Patriot Ledger reporters found:

- --People are dying. On average, 11 people a year have died from drug
overdoses in Quincy in the last five years. In Cohasset, police say six
people died of apparent heroin overdoses in that same period. The deaths
are seldom made public, but far more people die of drug overdoses than in
plane crashes, house fires or homicides. There were 404 drug-related deaths
in Norfolk and Plymouth counties in 2000.

- --Drug users are getting younger. Ten years ago there were 20 juvenile drug
arrests on the South Shore. In 1999, there were 208. Seven people 17 or
younger were arrested on drug charges in Sharon, 18 in Weymouth and 28 in
Plymouth. Ecstasy, at $30 a pill, can be found at every high school on the
South Shore, according to Norfolk County District Attorney William Keating.

- --The financial cost of addiction is astounding. According to a Columbia
University study, Massachusetts spent $2.7 billion - 17 percent of the
state budget - to counter the ravages of substance abuse in 1998. The state
spent less - $2.3 billion - on aid to public schools that year, and every
person in Massachusetts shelled out $441 in taxes to lock up addicts,
counsel broken families and tend to substance abusers and their dependents.

- --Despite concerted efforts to eliminate the illegal drug trade, Americans
continue to use drugs. In February, President Bush outlined a national
drug-control policy calling for the expenditure of $19 billion, with 20
percent going to treatment programs and research, and 80 percent to
interdiction, police and courts. One goal of that policy is to make drugs
scarce and expensive. By comparison, Americans spend $20 billion a year on
the nationwide school lunch program that provides reduced-cost or free
meals of tens of million of children each school day.

Many drug policy reform organizations say throwing money at the problem
hasn't worked, won't work and may do more harm than good, but there are
strong political, economic and cultural forces keeping the war on drugs on
course. Any wavering can be instant political suicide for elected officials.

If people want to smoke a joint after work or do a line of cocaine on a
Saturday night, many reformers say, let them, or at least don't make them
criminals for doing it. These legalization advocates argue that
decriminalizing drug use would eliminate the culture of addiction and with
it a significant amount of crime. They say the nation's prison population
would decline and a regulated and taxable industry, like liquor, would be
created. These groups, however vocal, are still in the minority.

Police are not winning the war on drugs - if that means stopping the flow.
Only 5 percent of the drugs brought to the South Shore are intercepted,
drug investigators say. As long as the demand is there, they say, cleaning
up one drug zone just moves the dealing somewhere else.

Prevailing attitudes about drug use don't help. Many suburbanites continue
to turn a blind eye to illegal drug use, separating their pills or their
marijuana from the destruction and the drug-related violence they encounter
almost daily in their newspapers and on television.

Interviews with multiple South Shore residents indicated a common attitude:
The joint I smoked after dinner didn't hurt anybody.

"They're living a sheltered life," said Vincent J. Mazzilli, former special
agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in New England.
"They don't know what they're doing is supporting a major problem."
Mazzilli has square shoulders and eyes that flicker and, until he retired
in December, carried a .40-caliber Glock in a holster on his left ankle. He
doesn't mince words when he talks about drugs.

Mazzilli said middle-class drug users, like all drug users, underwrite a
violent distribution network that fosters a culture of neglect and abuse.
And it's never clear, he added, when casual drug use will evolve from
something people do occasionally into an unmanageable addiction.

Many "recreational" drug users draw a distinction between themselves and
others who use drugs, saying there's nothing wrong with use that doesn't
get out of control.

Statistics, however, show drug use is a game of odds and those who get away
with it are luckier, not smarter, than those who overdose or become addicts.

Nine percent of people who try marijuana, 17 percent of those who use
cocaine and 23 percent of those who use heroin develop a dependence on
those drugs, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

More than 8,000 people who said they live on the South Shore entered drug
treatment programs in Massachusetts during 1999. Some may have been
admitted more than once, and some abused alcohol and no other drug. But
more than 2,300 of those who sought treatment said they had used heroin in
the 12 months prior to seeking help, 2,200 said they had used cocaine and
1,300 said they had smoked crack.

Experts say only one-third of drug and alcohol abusers seek help. So, the
majority of users in every community never set foot in a treatment facility.

One of the biggest problems locally is heroin. Nearly every community on
the South Shore has been touched by the drug. Four people died from heroin
overdoses in Weymouth last year.

Many people think of heroin as an inner-city drug that is someone else's
problem, but experts say that over the past decade, heroin has leaped out
of the cities and landed in the suburbs.

"We have an epidemic of heroin use in New England," Mazzilli, the DEA
agent,said, waving his hand as though he were clearing a foul smell out of
the air.

Heroin, not alcohol, is the No. 1 reason people check into detox programs
in Massachusetts, according to state figures.

Of the 54,379 Massachusetts residents who entered state-licensed
detoxification programs between July 1, 2000, and June 30, 2001, more than
51 percent sought treatment for heroin addictions while 41 percent were
there because of alcohol.

Because of the surge in heroin overdoses and deaths, the federal government
two years ago designated New England as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking
Area (HIDTA). Plymouth County got $2.8 million in federal funds under the
program, which aims to disrupt drug trafficking and money laundering. With
such a small budget, it's difficult to see how the HIDTA will be effective,
but proponents of the drug war say it's a start.

A heroin addiction can occur within weeks, and because the heroin sold
locally is so pure - as high as 90 percent pure in the greater Boston area
- - people can smoke and snort it, so those wary of injecting drugs are now
more likely to try it.

"More people are dying of drug overdoses than are dying of being homicide
victims," said George Festa, HIDTA director for New England. "I can't
stress the problem enough. All age groups, all economic levels - it's
devastating to this area."

Drugs seem like a distant problem in towns like Marshfield, Pembroke,
Cohasset or Canton. People think of Boston, Brockton and New Bedford as the
only places where drugs turn up, but they're wrong. Those cities are
distribution points on the New York City-to-Boston leg of the pipeline that
brings most illicit drugs into New England, but they are not the end of the
line.

"There is a canyon of deniability," said Norfolk County District Attorney
William Keating. "People don't understand the prevalence of drugs. You can
take those treatment numbers and multiply them by a high number. Then maybe
people would realize the scope of the problem."

Illegal drugs have not only made fresh inroads into suburbia, but the
people who use them are starting younger than ever before.

In Plymouth, the number of people 17 or younger arrested for drug-related
crimes went from one in 1990 to 28 in 1999. Most of the arrests were for
marijuana.

Among the drugs embraced by young people is ecstasy, a psychedelic
amphetamine that users say relaxes them, heightens their sense of awareness
and facilitates intimacy.

Ecstasy can permanently damage the brain, causing depression, anxiety and
other disorders. When used, the drug cuts off the body's temperature
signals to the brain, and users can dehydrate or overheat during the high
of four to six hours that it typically produces.

In 1990, police on the South Shore made not one seizure of ecstasy. Last
year they made 27 seizures of the drug.

"We have ecstasy in every high school, without exception, on the South
Shore," Keating said. "It's frightening. One of our biggest concerns is the
perception among students that it's safe." Mazzilli, the former regional
DEA official, spoke harshly of parents who let their kids go to raves -
dance parties that sometimes double as drug parties.

"We should not be educating just kids, but some of those parents," he said.
"We had so-called soccer moms dropping kids off at rave clubs so they could
overdose on ecstasy.

"Anybody who tells you nothing is wrong (with drug use) is ignorant to the
effects of drugs on drug users - lawyers, doctors, candlestick makers or a
soccer mom," Mazzilli said.

The warnings haven't stopped people who think of themselves as
"recreational" users. A Hanover mother said getting cocaine takes less time
than some of her errands.

"It's easier to meet a dealer and get cocaine than to get your dry cleaning
- - one phone call, and they'll meet you in a lot in five minutes," she said.

She said cocaine use has dropped off among her friends, but marijuana
continues as a mainstay among the 40-plus set and, at least in her circle,
"isn't considered a drug anymore."

Mazzilli has some tough words of advice for people who use drugs. He said
they're in over their heads and added that every drug purchase could end
with an arrest, an overdose or a body bag.

"I've talked to people who have dealt with the same guy for years and then
one day he put a gun to their face," Mazzilli said. "The next person they
make a buy from could be the last person to see them alive. Or it could be
an undercover agent who will not only take their car, but every asset they
have."

While "recreational" users are often below the radar of police and the
courts, addicts and the crimes addiction generates are not.

In 1999, almost 40 percent of the people sent to prison in Massachusetts
were convicted of a drug offense, according to the Office of National Drug
Control Policy. At the Plymouth County jail, 44 percent of the inmates
serving sentences last year said they were using drugs at the time they
were arrested. Fifty-eight percent said substance abuse led to their
arrest, according to jail officials.

Casual users and addicts lubricate the pipelines that bring drugs to the
South Shore. Without demand, police say, the pipelines would dry up, and
there would be a reduction in crime.

"The people buying drugs and using them need money to purchase them," said
State Police Detective Lt. Bruce Gordon, who has spent much of his career
fighting drugs. "It's related to other crimes - robberies, assaults and all
the crimes associated with narcotics. It doesn't affect other people until
someone comes into their houses to take their TV or snatch their purses on
the street."

Michael Sullivan, U.S. attorney in Boston and a former Plymouth County
district attorney, shared one of the cases that has stuck with him, the
1995 murder of 85-year-old Sophie Petrowsky, an Abington grandmother who
was stabbed 30 times in her own home by a crack addict who wanted money to
buy drugs. Her killer, Michael Rosa, was convicted.

"The only thing on his mind was his next hit of crack - out of Sophie
Petrowsky's pocketbook," Sullivan said bitterly.

The violence that took Petrowsky's life seems light years away from a tony
dinner party on a quiet back street in Hanover, where guests listened to
Gershwin and dined on Cornish game hens.

The Hanover mother and hostess described a typical dinner party at her
place. She dismissed the violent distribution network that brought the
drugs to her home.

"It's people in a library-like setting with classical music and fine wine,"
she said, describing a past dinner party. "We're not in jeans, not
listening to Bob Marley, and it's very lovely. And they're passing a joint.

"If you're 40, and you're only having one glass of wine, and you choose to
have a few puffs off a joint, so what?"

NUMBERS

50% - High school students in Massachusetts who say they have used
marijuana at least once

404 - Number of drug-related deaths in Norfolk and Plymouth counties in 2000

6 - Apparent drug overdose deaths in Cohasset in five years.

150 - Braintree residents treated in one year for abusing heroin.

208 - Children younger than 15 in Massachusetts who entered substance abuse
programs in 2000

87,000,000 - Number of Americans who have used an illicit drug at least once