Agencies, communities fight against cheaper, purer New England heroin
Thursday, July 1, 2004
By HELENA PAYNE
Associated Press Writer
BOSTON- Over the past two decades, Charlestown's Peter Looney has watched his neighborhood change from a close-knit, working-class Irish enclave to a place where public housing sits nearly side-by-side with million-dollar luxury condos.
The transition has brought its share of problems. But to Looney, head of Charlestown Against Drugs, none is more troubling than the recent availability of cheap, pure heroin, and the emergence of the prescription painkiller OxyContin as a "gateway" to heroin.
The unease in Charlestown is hitting hundreds of other urban and suburban communities in Massachusetts, state officials say.
The reason: the heroin supply is potent, cheap and readily available - and drug treatment programs across the state are being cut because of budget constraints.
"Five to six years ago, heroin was barely a blip as far as courts, police and detoxes were concerned," said Jack Leary, assistant chief probation officer at South Boston District Court. Now, heroin use is "just a mountain" on the charts, a trend echoed in courts up and down the East Coast.
The crisis hit home in Charlestown in April, when two neighborhood teens took a mixture of OxyContin and the sedative Klonopin. Seventeen-year-old high school hockey goalie John Woods died from the overdose. His girlfriend, 16-year-old Kaylee O'Brien, also a high school athlete, was hospitalized for almost three months.
"It made the front page, so people paid attention," said Looney, wearing a green ribbon reading "Kaylee" - a show of support for O'Brien during her ongoing rehabilitation. "My concern is that we forget too quickly."
OxyContin was hailed as a breakthrough in the treatment of severe chronic pain when it was introduced in 1996. But the drug soon became a problem after users discovered that crushing the time-release tablets and snorting or injecting the powder yields an immediate, heroin-like high.
While abuse of the painkiller can sometimes be fatal on its own, experts say it becomes most dangerous when users turn to heroin as a cheaper alternative.
OxyContin is expensive - $20 to $80 per pill - while heroin costs as little as $4 per bag in New England for a similar high, according to Anthony Pettigrew, a spokesman Drug Enforcement Agency. Nationally, heroin averages about $6 a bag.
Worse, the level of purity for the heroin available locally is much higher than the norm. New England heroin can be up to 90 percent pure, while the national average is 57 percent, Pettigrew said.
Massachusetts' proximity to New York, a major import center for South American heroin, explains the low prices, Pettigrew said. The drug passes through fewer hands, keeping costs down and purity high.
"This is probably about the lowest it's been," said Lt. Paul Hayes of the Massachusetts State Police. "It's just a flood of it,"
DEA arrests in Massachusetts jumped more than 15 percent between 2002 and 2003, Pettigrew said. At the same time, the agency's arrests nationally were dropping nearly 25 percent.
State police recorded a 20 percent rise in cases involving possession, distribution and trafficking of heroin in 2002, the most recent year for which statistics were available.
Leary cautions that arresting drug users is more expensive than treating them. Keeping one person in custody for a year costs $40,000, and 80 percent of all prison inmates nationwide are there for some drug-related crime.
But treatment programs have been the focus of state cuts in recent years, he says.
In 2003, the state cut the number of detox beds in hospitals by more than half - to about 400 beds from nearly 1,000 the previous year.
Providence Hospital in Holyoke is the only facility in all of western Massachusetts that provides methadone, which is considered an effective treatment for heroin addiction.
Robert Azeez, clinical supervisor of the Carlson Recovery Center at Springfield's Baystate Medical Center, said the cuts have created an immediate fallout.
Workers at Carlson have seen a high recidivism rate as drug users enter the facility but can't stay drug-free once they're released because they've spent so little time in detox, he said. Others never get into a program at all.
"On any given day, an unknown number of patients may get turned away due to lack of funding and lack of availability," he said.
That means some heroin addicts will go to emergency rooms instead of detox, Azeez said, burdening ERs with patients who are experiencing less than life-threatening conditions such as withdrawal.
Some prospects for additional funding remain. Gov. Mitt Romney earmarked $11.9 million for substance abuse programs as part of a $457 million supplemental budget he proposed in early June that is still awaiting legislative action.
But more money isn't the only answer, experts say.
"For any preventative program to be successful, it can't just be about public health," said Michael Botticelli, assistant commissioner for the state Department of Public Health's Bureau of Substance Abuse Services. "It's got to be about schools and parents."
