OXYCOTIN IS THE GATEWAY DRUG TO HEROIN ADDICTION SOUTH OF BOSTON

BROCKTON, Mass.-- A growing number of young adults experimenting with
the powerful painkiller OxyContin are getting hooked on heroin,
triggering a spike in drug overdoses, broken lives and pressure on
emergency services south of Boston.

"It is alarming," Abington Police Chief David Majenski told The
Enterprise newspaper. "We have made a tremendous amount of heroin
arrests and it is not slowing down at all."

The link between OxyContin abuse by teens and addiction to heroin is
tenacious. Several recovering addicts said they got "high" on
OxyContin while in high school, got hooked, then turned to heroin
when buying the painkiller on the street got too expensive, the
newspaper reported Sunday.

At least 2,682 people were treated in emergency rooms for
opioid-related abuse, dependency or poisoning between 2003 and 2005
in the region, according to the Massachusetts Division of Health Care
Finance and Policy.

An examination of death certificates filed in 28 communities shows
that 74 people have died of opiate-related overdoses, including
heroin, between Jan. 1, 2004 and Aug. 31, 2006, the newspaper said,
citing its examination of death certificates filed in 28 local communities.

Those numbers translate to devastating tragedies to relatives of the victims.

"These people are not dirt bags," said Hanover's Theresa Cairo, whose
daughter, Jill, died of an overdose at age 24. "They are intelligent,
beautiful people. It is someone who looks like your daughter. It is
someone who could be your daughter."

The problem adds a burden to taxpayers and saps resources from
emergency services.

In Whitman, fire department emergency medical technicians responded
to 20 overdoses from September to November. One person died.

The narcotic-antidote Narcan was administered in nearly half of the
overdose calls attended to by fire department's emergency medical
staff last year in Easton, fire chief Thomas F. Stone said.

As heroin - once considered as a problem of the urban streets - moves
up and out, desperate families are turning to the courts, pleading
with judges to order the arrest and committal of their children to
treatment programs for up to 30 days.

The problem "has no psychological profile, it has no socio-economic
profile," said Dr. Michael L. Dern, a Brockton physician who has
treated young heroin addicts.