Painkiller Abusers Turn to Heroin as Easier Alternative

Sept. 23--Heroin is cheap, deadly -- and surging in popularity.

Long stereotyped as an inner-city scourge, Capital Region authorities say heroin is flourishing beyond its traditional boundaries and is now an alarming problem in places where its use was once rare. Officials in suburban areas, in particular, blame the drug for a growing number of arrests and overdoses.

It only took a couple months of use before heroin took the life of Jeremiah Lyman, a hulking 20-year-old who loved fishing and hunting. He'd started abusing painkillers soon after graduating from Averill Park High School, according to his mother, and that addiction eventually led him to heroin, which was easier to get and less expensive than the prescription pills.

Lyman, who planned to be an auto mechanic, overdosed last October in the bathroom of his parents' house. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

"The last time I saw him, we were arguing about drugs," said his mother, Brenda Auerbach.

A year before his death, Lyman had admitted his prescription-pill problem to her, but in the months before the overdose he insisted he was clean. "I was trying to make him go to rehab, and he kept saying 'I got this, mom. I don't do it anymore,'" she said. "It's still so surreal."

Reasons for heroin's new popularity are complex, but law enforcement officials say the drug has become cheaper and more available as government efforts have tightened the illicit supply of prescription painkillers. Lyman's experience is typical: Users of opiates such as Oxycontin are turning to heroin.

"To say it's on the rise is an understatement," Colonie Police Chief Steven Heider said.

Heroin is considered one of the most addictive drugs. It's absorbed more rapidly than other opiates, increasing the intensity of the high; continued use can change the brain's chemistry.

Users quickly develop a tolerance that leads them to use more -- and often results in overdoses. Heroin's potency can vary widely, but police say today's heroin is more concentrated than the drug that ravaged inner-city neighborhoods in the 1970s and 1980s. Because it's more concentrated, users can snort the drug and get similar effects to injecting it with a needle.

Not only has the drug gotten stronger; it's now cheaper, too. In the Capital Region, a bag containing about a tenth of a gram of heroin costs roughly $10 -- half the price of a few years ago.

In short, users are getting much more for their money.

"That's why you're seeing a lot of kids overdosing on this stuff," Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple said.

Apple and other authorities say there is an ample supply of heroin in the Capital Region, which has long served as a distribution point for drugs being carried north from New York City.

The drug is mostly purchased in city neighborhoods, said Apple. "You'll see high school kids with their Shaker or Shen or Colonie stickers on their cars, and you know they're not from the area, so we'll start to look at them a bit," he said.

But there are dealers in suburban areas, too, where there's ample money and demand for the drug. Dealers target younger buyers: Heroin bags are sometimes stamped with brands and logos that appeal to teens.

Erin Mulvey, Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman, said when "Twilight" novels and movies became popular with teens, the agency "started seeing heroin with 'Twilight' stamped on it."

In Colonie, there have been 38 heroin overdoses this year, resulting in two deaths, said Peter Berry of the town's Emergency Medical Services Department. Numbers for previous years weren't available. Police in town, meanwhile, have made 21 arrests for heroin possession so far this year, up from 12 for all of 2011.

Among those arrested was a 21-year-old from Loudonville who was caught with heroin and a needle during a traffic stop in May. The man, who is now being treated for addiction, told the Times Union he began crushing and snorting Oxycontin with friends shortly after graduating from Shaker High School.

Heroin provided an alternative when Oxycontin became rare.

"I keep getting word that close friends are passing away due to overdoses," he said in a letter to the Times Union, requesting anonymity. "I was lucky that I got to the hospital several times or I would have been dead."

Authorities continue to restrict the illicit trafficking of prescription drugs. Last month in New York, a new law took effect known as the Internet System for Tracking Over-Prescribing Act, or I-STOP, creating a tracking system for prescriptions to block addicts from stocking up on drugs by doctor or pharmacy shopping.

Treatment experts worry the law might inadvertently fuel heroin's ongoing rise.

"By taking away opiate pain pills, we are not necessarily reducing the demand for them," said Dr. Bruce Maslack, an addiction specialist at St. Mary's Hospital in Amsterdam. "Heroin is an attractive substitute to feed that addiction."

In the Capital Region, no regional agency tracks the number of overdose deaths caused by heroin. Yet when the Times Union asked three area hospitals about the drug, each reported a growing number of heroin-related visits to emergency rooms.

The region's treatment centers are also on the frontline of heroin's renewed popularity: In 2000, addiction to heroin and other opiates accounted for just five percent of admissions to treatment centers in Albany County. Last year, heroin and other opiates were responsible for 23 percent of admissions.

"This is a sea change in the drug culture and in the treatment world," said Mary Rozak, a county government spokeswoman.

Maslack from St. Mary's Hospital said medication-assisted treatments such as methadone and buprenorphine, which both combat opiate cravings, are an effective tool for treating addiction. But such programs are too scarce in the Capital Region.

"Most providers have waiting lists," he said.

At least one community is aggressively trying to combat heroin's rise. Averill Park school district officials became alarmed by overdose deaths and what seemed to be a growing acceptance of drug use among students, leading the Rensselaer County system to launch an ongoing community conversation about substance abuse.

In July, over 100 residents gathered in the Averill Park Firehouse in the wake of the deaths. Last week, about 30 attended a meeting of the group known as Rage Against Alcohol and Drugs to continue the discussion.

Among the attendees were Brenda Auerbach and others shattered by the death of Jeremiah Lyman.

"Do you know how much it hurts to see my 6-foot-5 brother in an urn?" said Jessica Lyman, his sister, to the group that had gathered in Averill Park's middle school library. His family remembers him as the amiable and generous young man who loved cars and basketball. He was just two months shy of graduating from Hudson Valley Community College when he died.

"He was functioning. He went to school every day. He was always out and about," said his mother, Auerbach, who can't stop wondering what she could have done differently.

"You just want to rewind time," she said.

Chris Churchill and Alysia Santo can be reached at cchurchill@timesunion.com and asanto@timesunion.com.

Copyright 2013 - Times Union, Albany, N.Y.