On a beautiful Sunday last October, Detective Dan Douglas stood in a suburban Minnesota home and looked down at a lifeless 20-year-old – a needle mark in his arm, a syringe in his pocket. It didn’t take long for Douglas to realize that the man, fresh out of treatment, was his second heroin overdose that day.
“You just drive away and go, ‘Well, here we go again,’” says the veteran cop.
In Butler County, Ohio, heroin overdose calls are so common that the longtime EMS coordinator likens the situation to “coming in and eating breakfast – you just kind of expect it to occur.” A local rehab facility has a six-month wait. One school recently referred an 11-year-old boy who was shooting up intravenously.
Sheriff Richard Jones has seen crack, methamphetamine and pills plague his southwestern Ohio community but calls heroin a bigger scourge. Children have been forced into foster care because of addicted parents; shoplifting rings have formed to raise money to buy fixes.
“There are so many residual effects,” he says. “And we’re all paying for it.”
Heroin is spreading its misery across America. And communities everywhere indeed are paying.
The death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman spotlighted the reality that heroin no longer is limited to the back alleys of American life.
Once mainly a city phenomenon, the drug has spread – gripping postcard villages in Vermont, middle-class enclaves outside Chicago, the sleek urban core of Portland, Ore., and places in between and beyond.
In Colorado, death certificates filed with the Department of Health and Environment showed an increase in heroine-caused deaths from 22 in 2004 to 91 in 2012.
Cocaine, painkillers and tranquilizers are all used more than heroin, and the latest federal overdose statistics show that in 2010, the vast majority of drug overdose deaths involved pharmaceuticals, with heroin accounting for less than 10 percent.
But heroin’s escalation is troubling. Last month, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder called the 45 percent increase in heroin overdose deaths between 2006 and 2010 an “urgent and growing public health crisis.”
In 2007, there were an estimated 373,000 heroin users in the U.S. By 2012, the number was 669,000, with the greatest increases among those 18 to 25. First-time users nearly doubled in a six-year period ending in 2012, from 90,000 to 156,000.
Experts say that many users turned to heroin after a crackdown on prescription drug “pill mills” made painkillers such as OxyContin harder to find and more costly. It’s killing because it can be extremely pure or laced with other powerful narcotics.
That, coupled with a low tolerance once people start using again after treatment, is catching addicts off guard.
In hard-hit places, police, doctors, parents and former users are struggling to find solutions and save lives.
“I thought my suburban, middle-class family was immune to drugs such as this,” says Valerie Pap, who lost her son, Tanner, to heroin in 2012 in Anoka County, Minn., and speaks out to try and help others. “I’ve come to realize that we are not immune. ... Heroin will welcome anyone into its grasp.”
H H H
The night before Valentine’s Day, about 250 people filed into a church in Spring Lake Park, Minn. There were moms and dads of addicts, as well as children whose parents brought them in hopes of scaring them away from smack.
From the stage, Dan Douglas gripped a microphone as a photograph appeared overhead on a screen: A woman in the fetal position on a bathroom floor. Then another: A woman “on the nod” – passed out with drug paraphernalia and a shoe near her face.
“You just don’t win with heroin,” Douglas told the crowd. “You die, or you go to jail.”
It was the third such forum held during a two-week period in Anoka County, home to 335,000 people north of Minneapolis.
Since 1999, 55 Anoka County residents have died from heroin-related causes.
Only one other Minnesota county reported more heroin-related deaths – 58 – and it has a population 3½ times greater than Anoka’s.
Five years ago, county officials were focused on stamping out meth labs. Then investigators noticed a climb in pharmacy robberies and started finding Percocet and OxyContin during routine marijuana busts.
As prescription drug abuse rose, so, too, did crackdowns aimed at shutting down pill mills and increasing tracking of prescriptions and pharmacy-hopping pill seekers. Users turned to heroin.
“It hit us in the face in the form of dead bodies,” Douglas says.
Authorities are working to educate doctors about the dangers of overprescribing painkillers and are fighting to get heroin off the streets.
The idea for the forums came not from police but rather from Pap, a third-grade teacher whose youngest son died of a heroin overdose.
Tanner graduated from high school with honors. In fall 2012, he was pursuing a psychology degree at the University of Minnesota and dreamed of becoming a drug counselor.
He had not, to his mother’s knowledge, ever used drugs – and certainly not heroin.
Then one day Tanner’s roommates found the 21-year-old unconscious in his bedroom.
Amid her grief, Pap realized something needed to be done to educate others.
She met with county officials, and soon after, the community forums were developed. At each, Pap shared her family’s story.
“Our lives have been forever changed,” she told the crowd in Spring Lake Park. “Heroin took it all away.”
H H H
They smile down from photos: recovering addicts holding plates of food at a group picnic last year. From inside Central City Concern in downtown Portland, Ore., David Fitzgerald looks over the faces.
Are they all still sober? Are they all still alive?
“Most of them,” says Fitzgerald, a former addict who leads the mentor program at the rehab clinic. “Not all.”
Heroin cut a gash through the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s. Then prescription pills took over until prices rose. Now the percentage of those in treatment for heroin in Oregon is back up to levels not seen since the ’90s – nearly 8,000 people last year – and the addicts are getting younger.
Central City’s clients reflect that. In 2008, 25 percent of them were younger than 35. Last year, the number went to 40 percent.
The crop of younger addicts presents a new problem – finding appropriately aged mentors to match them with. But Fitzgerald has hope in 26-year-old Felecia Padgett. Before sobriety, Padgett found herself selling heroin to people younger than herself, suburban kids rolling up in their parents’ cars. Using heroin, she says, was like “getting to touch heaven.”
Fitzgerald doesn’t yet have money to pay her, and Padgett herself is still in recovery. But she, and others like her, may play a crucial role in confronting the problem as the face of Portland’s heroin addiction gets younger.
“A lot of them aren’t ready at a younger age,” Fitzgerald says. “The drug scene, it’s fast ... it’s different. It’s harder than it was.”
Associated Press National Writer Sharon Cohen contributed to this story. Forliti reported from Minnesota; Sewell from Ohio; Duara from Oregon.
Heroin abuse in Colorado
DENVER – Some states, including Colorado, are reporting a rise in heroin use as many addicts shift from more costly and harder-to-get prescription opiates to this cheaper alternative. A look at what’s happening in Colorado:
The problem
An estimated 5.1 percent of the state’s population abused painkillers in 2012, according to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. That puts Colorado among the top states for pill abuse. Patrick Fox, deputy director for clinical services of the Office of Behavioral Health in Colorado Department of Human Services, says the state’s heroin problem is part of a bigger problem of opiate abuse, including prescription drugs. Colorado is one of seven states participating in a National Governors Association initiative to fight prescription drug abuse and has enlisted the help of medical and nursing groups, hospitals, the University of Colorado’s pharmacy school and pharmaceutical chains. Fox acknowledges that the crackdown on pill abuse has contributed to a rise in heroin use.
The numbers
Heroin deaths more than doubled from 37 in 2000 to 91 in 2012, the latest statistics available. During the same time, cocaine deaths dropped from 84 to 62, after reaching a peak of 172 in 2006. The number of heroin deaths among people ages 20 to 34 more than tripled. The 25 to 34-year-old group accounted for about a third of the heroin deaths in 2012– 31.
In 2012, the problem also grew among 15 to 19-year-olds. While six teens died in the previous 12 years, five teen boys died of heroin overdoses alone in 2012.
White people accounted for 81 percent of heroin deaths in 2012.
Ramifications
The number of people seeking treatment for heroin nearly tripled in the last decade. The number of people admitted to state drug treatment programs primarily for heroin abuse rose from 1,643 in 1993 to 4,556 in 2013, the latest year statistics are available. The biggest growth came in the state’s northeastern corner, where admissions grew by more than 16 times from 32 to 524.
Solutions
A new law passed last year provides immunity to people who administer overdose drugs to anyone believed to be suffering an opiate-related overdose. The powerful drugs can stop an opiate overdose by “freezing” the brain’s receptors for opiates such as heroin or OxyContin.
Associated Press
