A drug epidemic has hit the North Shore and the victims are not the usual suspects. They are middle-class kids from the suburbs who start experimenting with prescription drugs for fun, but before long are opiate addicts, desperate for the next fix. Heroin and its legal sister drug OxyContin are destroying families, and police predict the area is on the brink of a major crime wave. The price of heroin is at a record low, sometimes costing less than a six-pack of beer. But when the price goes up as expected, so will the number of crimes in every Essex County community, as addicts steal to pay for their addictions. "It's not a Lynn problem and a Lawrence problem," said Peabody police Chief Robert Champagne. "It's a Peabody, Salem, Marblehead and Danvers problem. It's everywhere. It's just that nobody knows. It's taboo — one of those things no one talks about."
But Essex County District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett is talking. Some could say he's screaming. He has called heroin and OxyContin abuse "the greatest threat facing our youth today."
"I'm scared," he said. "The kids who are getting involved in it and hooked on it are getting younger and younger."

A Salem News investigation into heroin and OxyContin abuse in Essex County has found the following:
The number of deaths from opiate overdoses in Essex County over the last 10 years has increased 300 percent - from 19 people in 1991 to 58 in 2001.
Every one of the 34 cities and towns in Essex County has had at least one heroin-related incident in the last year.

The purity of heroin seized by the Essex County Drug Task Force over the last three years has become so potent it can now be sniffed, which eliminates the need for needles that had kept many from trying the drug.
Law enforcement is overwhelmed by the amount of heroin and opiate abuse among teens and people in their 20s. Police and prosecutors are looking to the schools to step in, but most have been slow to react and some appear reluctant to acknowledge the problem at all.

In the last two years, drug treatment offices in Danvers and Salem had to start support groups for parents of opiate addicts. Many who attend are white, middle class, and come from the suburbs.
The spotlight is now on the North Shore, and Peabody specifically, after former Peabody High baseball player Jeff Allison, 20, publicly blamed OxyContin for derailing his professional baseball dreams. One of his best friends at Peabody High, 19-year-old Joel Levine, the son of Salem's school superintendent, and Brad Nizwantowski, 24, the son of the longtime Peabody High football coach, also have admitted addictions to OxyContin.

Alarmed at the scope of the problem, Blodgett and Essex County Sheriff Frank Cousins have organized a full-day seminar for next week, the first of its kind, to bring North of Boston police, counselors and educators together to confront the opiate epidemic.

They want people to walk away knowing that today's heroin and OxyContin addicts are not inner-city people in back alleys with needles in their arms. They are regular kids. They are our children.
Cousins knows it's true. Two of his former paper boys, kids he watched grow up in Newburyport, were recently sent to his jail in Middleton. Both are heroin addicts. They are 19 and 20. Even people who are not directly affected by the epidemic should be concerned, police say.

Once addicts have pawned their own property for drug money, they turn to stealing from others. They shoplift. They grab purses. A rash of burglaries in sleepy Topsfield this past summer and fall were linked to drug addicts, and Blodgett predicts the number of crimes is going to skyrocket.
"We feel the breeze, " he said, "but we know the hurricane is coming."

Heroin is here
Heroin has had a home on the North Shore for decades. But in the past five years, the number of addicts has increased dramatically. The reason is now clear: OxyContin.
OxyContin is a synthetic opiate — essentially heroin made in a pharmaceutical lab instead of a Colombian jungle. The prescription pill has been a godsend for cancer patients and those who suffer with chronic pain.
But people who abuse OxyContin do not take the pill with food and a glass of water every 12 hours as prescribed. Typically they chew it, which gives them an instant, euphoric rush and leaves a greenish-blue stain on their lips and tongue.

More experienced users crush the pill to circumvent the time-release coating and snort it like cocaine. It also can be broken, dissolved in water and shot into the bloodstream intravenously.
"OxyContin has all the same addictive properties and the same withdrawal consequences as heroin," said Steve Chisholm, clinical supervisor at CAB Addiction Services in Danvers.
OxyContin and other prescription drugs often are obtained by "doctor shopping" — receiving prescriptions from several different doctors. Users also forge prescriptions, steal prescription pads, and rob homes, drug stores or individual patients who use the drug for legitimate medical reasons. The drugs also can be purchased illegally over the Internet.

Thanks to a rash of pharmacy robberies that began in early 2000, most people have heard of OxyContin.
Still, many parents know little about the drug. Even the most aware can miss the warning signs because they closely resemble the moodiness and estrangement typical of adolescence. "You can be intoxicated on heroin, and as long as you are not very heavily intoxicated, you can look relatively normal," said Dr. Poule LaPlante, director of Addison Gilbert Hospital's methadone clinic in Gloucester. "My patients who are on OxyContin say to me that you can go to school on it."

When Peabody's first methadone clinic opened two years ago to treat opiate addicts, company officials expected a maximum of 180 clients. Today the Route 1 clinic is filled with 350 patients per day.
"There is no community that is untouched," said Matt Davis, director of the Peabody clinic. "And the clients just get younger and younger."

A new pattern
Medical professionals now see a new "classic" pathway to heroin abuse among young people.
"They are starting with stealing pills, including Percocets and codeines," LaPlante said. "In some cases they don't know exactly what they are taking. It is this kind of garbage-pail mentality."
Some of the young people experimenting assume the drugs are safe because they are legal. But then they try OxyContin a few times, and quickly become so addicted they feel sick without it. Many eventually switch to sniffing heroin because it's easier to get and costs as little as $4 a bag, compared with as much as $80 for a single OxyContin pill.

The needles come next because eventually addicts build up a tolerance, and shooting heroin is the most effective way to get the drug into the system.
Treatment specialists agree it is young people's willingness to try new these highly addictive prescription painkillers in the first place that is causing the new wave of heroin addicts.
But convincing adults of this phenomenon is no simple task.
About two years ago, Chisholm, of CAB in Danvers, was asked to speak at the Beverly Rotary Club about employees with substance abuse problems. Chisholm mentioned the growing heroin and OxyContin problem among young people here.
He said he was met with blank stares.
"I was a bit stunned," Chisholm said. "I didn't know exactly what to say in the moment. I see this day-in-and-day-out here, and now I am one town away and people do not seem to recognize the problem."

Communities in crisis
Law enforcement officials and clinicians say that addicts rarely seek treatment unless they are forced to by the courts or family. So it is impossible to accurately gauge how many young addicts are living in the area.
But when overdoses are compiled for a particular community, the result is a chilling portrait.
The Salem News identified 39 fatal drug overdoses in Essex County in 2003 by using the Freedom of Information Act to request numbers from every Essex County police department.
The number of deaths is likely higher, however.
Some departments did not respond to the request or repeated follow-up phone calls. Others said older computer systems prevented them from providing the information.
Only a handful of communities approached the request with a sense of urgency. In Peabody, Blodgett's hometown, the police chief assigned an officer to review all heroin-related incidents in 2003. That review showed that heroin abuse is prevalent throughout the entire city: in the affluent neighborhoods of West Peabody, the blue collar areas in South Peabody, and inside the somewhat seedy motels on Route 1.
Four people died of heroin overdoses in Peabody that year:
- A white 30-year-old on Sherman Street in South Peabody who sniffed the drug.
- A 19-year-old West Peabody man who was an OxyContin user trying heroin for the first time.
- Two people in Route 1 motel rooms — a 29-year-old with a stolen car, and a 40-year-old with a history of drug abuse.

The other 20 heroin overdose calls in that city were for people of all ages — 16, 18, 19, 20 and up.
In 2004, three people under 21 died of opiate overdoses in Peabody alone, Blodgett said. All four were graduates of Peabody High School, and all played on sports teams there. Why take the risk?
Statistics for some communities are better than others, but a quick review of daily police logs reveals the everyday existence of OxyContin and heroin among young people throughout the area.
During a one-week period last year, for example, a 20-year-old Peabody man and an 18-year-old Salem woman were arrested at Kohl's in Danvers for shoplifting and OxyContin possession. A 21-year-old man was arrested for having a hypodermic needle following a disturbance on Summit Street in Peabody. And a 19-year-old Beverly man and his 20-year-old female companion were arrested on Route 128 after police found more than 55 OxyContin tablets, a drug scale and a pill cutter in their car.
"When you're looking at all of the break-ins that occur to motor vehicles and houses where there are easily fenced goods — televisions, radios, car speakers, coin collections — that's the kind of stuff that is indicative of a drug problem," said Champagne, the Peabody police chief.
The examples seem endless, and each raises the same question: Why are so many teens trying opiates?
The reason, says Donna Harrington of CAB, is no different from why kids sneak into their parents' liquor cabinet or steal from their older brother's pot stash.
"C'mon, do you remember being an adolescent? You want to rebel," she said. "You wanted to do anything your parents didn't want you to do. You want to try things. It is the perfect age to try this kind of stuff. At my age it was pot and beer — that is what we would experiment or try. But now they are doing it with opiates.
"Kids are kids, adolescents are adolescents. That doesn't change," she said. "What has changed is the drugs out there."
Most everyone agrees today's drugs of choice are to blame for this new generation of addicts who will do whatever it takes to get their next high.
"The community order is at stake here, and the preservation of the way of life people have come to expect in their communities," Blodgett said. "It is time for people to wake up to that."

Article from the Salem Evening News

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