-- PHOTOGRAPH -- The brother of a heroin victim breaks down at a Lynn cemetery. (Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore)

Heroin invasion sweeps kids into grave
By Thomas Caywood / Boston Herald
Monday, April 5, 2004

That first hit of heroin didn't feel like a turning point to him.

The all-American-looking Lynn teen, a prescription drug abuser since junior high, didn't feel like he was slipping into a pit as he snorted heroin for the first time on a Friday evening last spring. Most of his buddies already had switched to smack to save money.

"I couldn't afford OxyContin anymore. A couple of friends had heroin. I did it with their father and them," recalled the 19-year-old recovering addict, who's been clean for three months, but didn't want his name used for fear of inflicting more pain on his family.

Thanks to a chillingly sophisticated marketing strategy devised by South American drug lords, heroin has moved from back alley shooting galleries to suburban schools -- from junkies to jocks.

Fatal opiate overdoses among teens and young adults have tripled in Massachusetts over a four-year period. Hospitalizations have doubled.

Today's heroin is dirt cheap, pure enough to snort and it's hooking kids barely into their teens across the state.

"It can happen to anyone's kids. Don't for one minute think I'm not worried about my kids getting hooked up on heroin," said Lowell police Capt. Robert DeMoura. Every day of the week, Project Rebound gets about 10 calls from parents and social workers trying to get a child a bed at the Boston rehab program for teens.

"We get a lot of calls for kids 15 to 17. We get some younger than that. The youngest was 13," said director Earl Dandy. "A drug dealer don't ask their age." In 2002, Massachusetts emergency rooms treated more than 2,000 people between the ages of 15 and 24 for opiate overdoses and withdrawal, state figures show.

DeMoura once caught red-handed a young man breaking into a minivan for drug money. The veteran cop was shocked to recognize the strung-out thief as a former member of a youth wrestling team he coached. "Talk about breaking your heart," DeMoura said. "He started crying. He said, 'Coach, I was using heroin in high school. I can't stop. It's killing me.'" Across the state, in affluent suburbs and hardscrabble cities, teens still in puberty are addicted to cheap, super-pure Colombian heroin. The body count is rising at a staggering rate.

Fatal opiate overdoses among Massachusetts residents 15 to 24 years of age tripled between 1998 and 2001, skyrocketing from 17 to 54 in just three years. Opiate-related hospitalizations, mostly from heroin and OxyContin, have more than doubled from 1,174 to 2,532 in the same age range, according to figures compiled by the state Department of Public Health.

The department closely monitors rehab admissions, emergency-room visits, overdoses and hospital discharge data.

"In all of those indicators we are seeing significant increased use of heroin and OxyContin, particularly among younger kids," said Michael Botticelli, assistant commissioner for substance abuse. "We're hearing that kids are moving very quickly from OxyContin to heroin."

Botticelli suspects the available statistics actually low-ball the problem because family and some emergency room doctors are reluctant to report heroin overdoses among kids.

It's not at all unusual for Lowell police Sgt. James Trudel to deal with heroin abusers as young as 14 and 15, many of them from middle-class families living outside the city, he said. Dr. Punyamurtula Kishore, an addiction medicine specialist and founder of the National Library of Addictions in Brookline, has treated half a dozen heroin addicts in their early teens over the last year.

"I'm very sad to report we've had a couple of incidents of young people who tried heroin for one and only one time and it was lethal," said Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett, who recently attended the funeral of a 19-year-old overdose victim from Peabody.

 

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