Troubling Heroin Addiction Trend Grips Southeast Michigan

June 13--At the 99-bed St. John Providence Brighton Center for Recovery, more clients are coming in these days addicted to opiates, including heroin.

"Our 18- to 25-year population has exploded" in recent years, said outreach and referral specialist Scott Masi, 48. "The prescription medication problem is pushing this heroin problem. Anybody who tells you anything different doesn't know what they're talking about. I could poll every kid who comes in our clinic, and it's a broken record. It's the Vicodin and Oxycontin, and then it goes to the heroin."

Authorities say a particularly toxic heroin mix known by some on the street as "black shadow" appears to be circulating in southeast Michigan communities, causing a rise in overdoses and at least one death this month.

During a two-day period last week, eight people overdosed in Washtenaw County alone, including one person who died. Officials there are trying to determine whether the incidents are related.

Calls to the Poison Control Center have nearly doubled so far this year, with 27 heroin-related calls in May compared with 15 during the same time period in 2012. Poison-control officials have alerted southeast Michigan doctors to report heroin-related hospitalizations due to the rise in overdoses.

"This stuff is rapid and it's lethal," said Dr. Cythian Aaron, medical director at the Michigan Poison Control Center at the Children's Hospital of Michigan in Detroit.

Investigators suspect acetyl fentanyl, a particularly toxic opiate derivative that may be mixed with heroin, Aaron said.

Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an independent testing laboratory identified acetyl fentanyl, a synthetic opiate with properties similar to morphine. It is also being blamed for deaths elsewhere, including nearly a dozen in Rhode Island between early March and mid-May.

The apparent rise in the lethal drug comes eight years after fentanyl, a synthetic drug described as heroin times 50, became a national epidemic. It killed more than 1,000 across the country, and more than 300 in metro Detroit.

The latest wave of overdoses has health officials putting out a desperate plea to users: "If you're going to shoot up, you need to have a rescue plan," Aaron said.

The drug depresses the respiratory system, slowing a user's breathing, Macomb County Medical Examiner Daniel Spitz said. If the dose is high enough, the user becomes comatose and stops breathing altogether.

"People don't notice because you're sitting on the couch (or) in bed, and people think you're sleeping. By the time they check you out, you're blue," said Dr. Thomas McKeown, who heads the emergency department at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital.

McKeown said his hospital is noticing a recent surge of patients in the emergency room. He said emergency medical personnel have been told the drug is called "black shadow" on the streets.

"You used to have one every other day or so, but now two or three a day either dying or coming in -- and that's just our hospital," McKeown said.

One man who was admitted there with an overdose forced his family into an excruciating decision: With his brain activity gone, life support was withdrawn and he died, McKeown said.

Several deaths outside the hospital are suspected to be drug-related, but experts are still developing testing tools to specifically screen for acetyl fentanyl, McKeown said.

Investigators in Washtenaw County met Tuesday after a 27-year-old Saline man died and seven others overdosed from suspected heroin use between 1:08 a.m. Thursday and 2:35 p.m. Friday in Saline, Ypsilanti, Ypsilanti and Pittsfield townships and Ann Arbor.

Huron Valley Ambulance spokeswoman Joyce Williams said rescuers were called to the 27-year-old man's home at 11:04 p.m. Thursday after he was rumored to be using heroin, according to dispatch notes. His grandparents found him unconscious in the bathroom, and paramedics declared him dead at the scene, Saline Police Det. Don Lupi said.

The other overdose runs included men, women, two people from the same address in Pittsfield Township and one person found unconscious in an alley at William and State streets in the middle of the afternoon.

"Heroin is pretty prevalent in society right now," Washtenaw County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Geoffrey Fox said. "You still have a significant amount of crack use. Meth is starting to creep in the area. But I think heroin is making a comeback."

Wayne County health department spokeswoman Mary Mazur said there doesn't appear to be an increase overall in Wayne and Monroe counties.

Spitz said the recent cases there have been a continuation of a trend that began several years ago. In the office's annual report in 2011, Spitz noted that drug-related deaths "have been at an all time high for the past few years." The 2012 report is being finalized and shows the trend continued, led in part by heroin use, he said.

The fatal overdoes in recent years often involve young men and women -- some just teenagers -- who are working and going to school "and who get caught up in it. You see heroin use in a population that most people don't think of as users," Spitz said.

Masi said they include addicts from successful and intact families. Athletes. Top students in school, he said.

"These parents are coming in looking like deer in headlights. They're saying 'This isn't happening to me. This isn't happening to my kid,'" he said.

Pittsfield Township Fire Chief Sean Gleason, whose department responded to two overdoses at the same spot last week, agreed.

"Most of the people that we respond on look like a normal person," he said. "I think heroin has no boundaries. Poor to rich people, religious to not religious. It doesn't matter what kind of home you come from or what kind of person you are. It's sad."

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