Heroin Hits the Suburbs Hard Amid Wave of Drug Abuse by Teens and 20-Somethings

When the vomiting, tremors, and chills she felt each morning became overwhelming, Jessica Polmann started selling her body to finance her heroin addiction and halt the debilitating physical symptoms of withdrawal. The petite, blond cheerleader, who made the honor roll before she started doing heroin at age 13, received $60 and some cigarettes each time she had sex with a man in his 50s who lived near her suburban New Jersey home. Jessica also traded sex for drugs with her dealers and male friends if they had extra bags of dope.

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She even introduced her friends and boyfriend to heroin to expand the pool of people she could call on to pick up more drugs. "I was," she says now, "really disgusting."

Polmann, now 18, is just one in a wave of teens and 20-somethings in suburbs across the Northeast who are becoming addicted to and dying from abuse of heroin and prescription opiates like OxyContin. Once prevalent mostly in big cities, heroin has been spreading out to smaller towns in New England and the mid-Atlantic as the drug is becoming more widely available in a highly pure, inexpensive form that can be snorted. Many of these young addicts get started on prescription drugs, move on to cheap heroin that can be snorted, and end up injecting it for a more potent high. Either way, the effects have been deadly. In Massachusetts, for example, the number of opiate-related deaths, which include overdoses and fatal drug interactions, among people ages 13 to 30 was five times as great in 2006 as it was in 1997. And according to drug intelligence, law enforcement, and treatment officials at both the federal and state level, the trend has not yet shown signs of reversing or slowing down.

New markets. Heroin has been available in the Northeast's inner cities for a long time, in part because much of it is funneled through well-worn trafficking routes like New York's busy airports. Five years ago, the National Drug Intelligence Center noted in its annual report that heroin was just beginning to move into the suburbs, but it concluded that the drug's popularity was stable or even declining. By 2008, the NDIC's National Drug Threat Assessment, which is based on interviews with local law enforcement and public-health officials across the country, struck a very different tone, warning that heroin abuse "is increasing among young adults in a number of suburban and rural areas." Low-level dealers had found the suburbs could be quite lucrative because they could more easily monopolize the local heroin market.

The 2009 report has not yet been released, but Allison Stombaugh, an intelligence analyst for the NDIC, says it will cover the growing threat of prescription opiates. She adds that prescription drug abusers often graduate to heroin within a few years, suggesting that heroin abuse could rise even more in the near future. "Prescription opiates are seen as acceptable because they are doctor prescribed. But abusing them to get high frequently leads users to try heroin," Stombaugh says.

Douglas Collier, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in New Jersey, has seen the risks firsthand. He worries that parents in these suburban areas don't realize how frequently prescription opiate abuse is leading to heroin. An annual survey by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that 2.1 million people ages 12 or older who tried an illicit drug for the first time in 2007 chose prescription pain relievers, 57,000 more than the number who tried marijuana. Collier frequently meets with groups of parents to discuss these risks. When he asks audience members whether they lock their liquor cabinets before leaving the house, Collier sees a sea of raised hands. But when he asks how many lock their medicine cabinets, he often sees just a single hand.

"A mother approached me after one of these presentations, weeping," Collier says. "She said, 'I couldn't figure out why my kids were visiting my mom, who had been diagnosed with stage three cancer and prescribed Fentanyl and OxyContin for her pain. But then a bell starting ringing in my head during your presentation, and I connected the dots. I realized my kids were visiting their grandma every day to steal her medication and get high,' " Collier says. The mother later told him that her teenage daughter had overdosed on the stolen prescription opiates but that she survived.

David L'Esperance, the police chief of Salisbury, a coastal Massachusetts town where heroin and prescription opiate abuse is extensive, endured an even more painful trauma. His son died of a methadone overdose a year and a half ago. For L'Esperance, who spent most of his career working on a drug task force, the loss was particularly painful. "Salisbury is a hardworking, middle-class community with an excellent school system and great people, but we also have a problem with painkillers and heroin, and we recognize it," L'Esperance says. "Kids are into this stuff, and hell, if it can happen to the police chief, it can happen to anyone."