Heroin’s Hold on the Young

Correction Appended

POMPTON PLAINS

Mary Marcuccio, a founder of Parents 4 a Change, with Dave Dubois. His daughter, Alisha, in picture, died of an overdose.

HIS heart stopped, twice, but by then Jesse Morella had already choked on his own vomit. It was not until after Jesse was resuscitated a second time that the extent of the damage was known. He could not move his arms or legs. He could not speak. He could not even swallow. He was 16.

Jesse’s injuries horrified his family, but just as upsetting were what doctors said caused them: an overdose of heroin.

“What? Heroin? Just absolute shock,” Jesse’s mother, Maureen, said, recalling her reaction after her son’s heroin overdose in November 2004. “More shock than I can say. People used to say, ‘If you told me to pick 100 kids who would use heroin, I wouldn’t have had him as the 101st.’ ”

But at some point on the night he nearly died, Jesse — who helped teach catechism classes to children, coached a recreation league basketball team and loved few things more than riding his all-terrain vehicle — took what doctors believe was a “hot load,” a batch of heroin mixed with other chemicals, producing a toxic reaction.

For Ms. Morella, there were tears, anger and ultimately an idea. She would do what she could to help other parents avoid the same horrible shock she felt upon learning that heroin, a ghost that hollowed out whole city neighborhoods three decades ago, was materializing again in the suburbs.

Within months, she began organizing lectures at schools — sometimes for children as young as sixth graders — about the dangers of heroin. She would take a slide presentation of photographs of Jesse’s life before heroin. And Jesse — resting in a wheelchair alongside his mother as she lectured — would provide a living example of what came after.

“I hate to use my son as a visual aid,” Ms. Morella, 50, said during a recent interview. “But this is what heroin can do to you. It may not happen to you the first time you try it or the second time, but how much are you willing to risk to party?”

According to medical experts, law enforcement officials and crime statistics, that question has increasing relevance in New Jersey and the other suburbs of New York City, where the authorities say young adults are turning to heroin with alarming frequency.

Last year, the National Drug Intelligence Center, a component of the Justice Department, ranked heroin alongside cocaine as the most serious drug threats in the New York area. Over the last three years, heroin seizures in New York City — a prime entry point to the United States for suppliers from around the world — have more than doubled, to 233 kilograms in 2006 from 114 kilograms in 2004.

While use of illicit drugs over all by 8th, 10th and 12th graders is down in recent years, according to annual surveys by University of Michigan researchers, heroin use has remained steady with just under 1 percent of the students saying they had used it in the past year. And federal officials say heroin use is rising among one crucial demographic: young adults in suburban and rural communities, particularly those in the Northeast.

Other drugs are used by more 8th, 10th and 12th graders nationwide, although use of most drugs, like heroin, has remained fairly constant in recent years after declining early in this decade, according to the Michigan study. It said that of high school seniors surveyed in 2007, 31.7 percent said they used marijuana, 5.2 percent had tried cocaine and 5.2 percent had used OxyContin, one of the few drugs for which use had increased markedly.

Medical experts and law enforcement officials also say that as more young people in the Northeast turn to heroin, more are ending up in jail, hospital emergency rooms or the morgue.

In recent years, emergency room visits across the nation for treatment of those affected by heroin have risen sharply. In 2003, roughly 8 percent of emergency room visits related to illicit drugs involved heroin, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, a federal system that monitors drug-related hospital emergency department visits and drug-related deaths. In 2005, the most recent year for which comprehensive statistics are available, that figure was about 20 percent.

Federal officials say that over the last three years, roughly one of every six drug arrests in the New York area involved heroin. According to a Drug Abuse Warning Network survey, roughly one-fifth of all drug-related deaths in New York and New Jersey involve heroin.

“What you often see in emergency rooms or with the police is often the indication of what’s happening as far as new epidemics are concerned,” said Gilbert J. Botvin, a drug abuse expert at Weill Medical College at Cornell University. “I’ve heard much more concern in some circles about heroin use. The purity of the heroin is much higher than it was before.”

Correction: January 20, 2008

An article last Sunday about heroin use among young people misstated the cost of the drug on the street. Federal officials say it can be as little as for a tenth of a gram, not for 10 grams.