Originally posted by: justint
washingtonpost.com
Drug Is Making Deadly Inroads In New England
Once Rare, Heroin Hits Rural Areas Hard
By Pamela Ferdinand
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, February 8, 2003; Page A03
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."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
