Pubdate: Wed, 20 May 2009
Source: Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber (WA)
Copyright: 2009 Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber
Contact:  http://www.vashonbeachcomber.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2606
Author: Leslie Brown
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

TROUBLING RISE IN HEROIN USE SEEN ON THE ISLAND

Some who keep a close eye on the drug scene on Vashon say that black
tar heroin, for the first time in recent memory, is being sold on the
Island.

Stephen Bogan, a therapist who specializes in drug and alcohol
counseling, said he has six or seven young people in his practice who
report smoking or injecting heroin - a substance they got from a
pusher on Vashon. Bogan, a veteran in the field of substance abuse
counseling, said he's not seen this level of use on Vashon before, nor
has he known of an active dealer on the Island.

Sgt. Ted Boe, the King County Sheriff's Office sergeant who oversees
Vashon, said he, too, has gotten "a bit of intelligence from various
sources that there's some distribution occurring on the Island." "I
don't know if it's new," he added. "I know it's the first time it's
come to my attention that heroin's being distributed on the Island."

Particularly alarming to Bogan is the apparent availability of the
substance.

"It's as cheap as pot and easier to get on the Island. I've heard that
from a couple of kids," Bogan said.

The news comes at a time when Vashon educators, therapists, parents
and others involved in the lives of teens are working hard to address
the Island's ongoing problems with substance abuse. Many say they've
seen signs of progress on Vashon.

Yvonne Zick, who has led parenting groups and taught classes focused
on helping young people develop "refusal skills," said she has been
encouraged by the heightened awareness she sees among educators,
parents and teens about the impact drug and alcohol use can have on a
young person and his or her developing brain. But she too, she added,
has heard about heroin use on the Island - a drug she finds
frightening.

"I think of heroin as the mother of all bad drugs," she said. "It's a
lifelong addiction. It's a sentence you have to deal with every day."

In a lengthy interview, one mother - who asked that her name not be
used - told The Beachcomber about her son's addiction to heroin, a
slow descent that she now realizes started with his use of marijuana
and alcohol when he was 15.

The boy, who's now living out of state with relatives, grew up on
Vashon and graduated from the high school not long ago. He started
developing more serious addictions, she said, in the summer of his
junior year, when he and his friends began using oxycodone, a narcotic
painkiller considered highly addictive.

The drug was making the rounds after one teen stole his father's
prescription, she said. Another boy kept the pipeline open by stealing
it from a pharmacy where he worked, she said. Her son, a client of
Bogan's, went to treatment after he told his older brother that he was
struggling with his addiction to oxycodone, an opiate. After he came
out of treatment, he was doing fairly well, his mother said, until
last September, when he got exposed to heroin, a drug she believes was
pushed on him in payment for some work he did for some men on the Island.

He went to treatment again, she said. After he returned home last
winter, the pusher was soon on the phone to him, trying to get him
hooked again. Her son, she said, has told her he's "prayed and prayed"
that his pusher would get caught and put in jail. She now believes her
son, who again is clean, can't return to the Island; it's no longer
safe for him.

The odyssey, she added, has been the most painful experience of her
life.

"It's unbearable to watch the devastation in his face," she said.
"He's so smart and capable and well-liked. To see him ashamed of
himself and so diminished is just the most heartbreaking thing in the
world."

Islanders, she said, dismiss Vashon's drug problem as one relegated to
"bad kids."

"There aren't bad kids," she said. "There are kids who make bad
decisions."

Bogan, who knows the boy well, said his path to heroin addiction is a
kind of classic story, "illustrative of what happens if there's easy
access to opiates." It also underscores the role that adults play in
this issue; parents often have opiates in their medicine cabinets -
Vicodin or Percocet, for instance, both of which are commonly
prescribed as a post-surgery painkiller - despite advertising
campaigns attempting to educate parents about the dangers of these
drugs.

Heroin is particularly frightening, he added, because of the power of
the addiction and the possibility of overdosing. A few months ago, one
young person from Vashon was taken to Harborview because of a heroin
overdose, he added. The young person had stopped breathing and nearly
died.

It's alarming because it also requires what Bogan called "a different
kind of exposure." The pusher has to be actively involved, he noted,
"teaching someone how to stick a needle in their arm."

"For me as a human being and as an addiction specialist, when you
start sticking a needle in your arm, it's a different connection with
the drug and a different level of severity," Bogan added. "Kids
sticking needles in their arms is far more serious than kids getting
stoned. ... I don't want to downplay the use of marijuana. But with
heroin, the route of administration has risks of its own."

Dan Kaufman, a coach and mental health counselor who also knows the
boy who is now out of state because of his struggle with heroin, said
he, too, has heard anecdotal reports about heroin use and mounting
concern about what appears to be its increased presence on Vashon.

"More and more, it's been a part of the story," Kaufman said of
heroin. "I don't know if that means it's increasing or we're just
talking about it more and it's rising to the surface. ... It's hard to
nail down." Either way, he said, he, too, is deeply concerned about
the use of a drug that can be so devastating. The real issue, he
added, is the community's response to the problem of youth drug and
alcohol use - a problem Islanders have been discussing openly for
nearly a decade and in an organized fashion for about six years.

"The good news has always been for me that people are talking. ... The
good news is that people are reaching out and getting help for their
kids," he said.

At the same time, he added, "Kids don't do drugs in a vacuum. As a
community, as a culture, we have to take some responsibility for what
kids get involved with or don't as they move through that period of
their lives. .. I think families have to take more and more
responsibility for how they lead their lives."

Islanders, like people elsewhere, he added, live in a "drug
culture."

"I think we're in a community that asks a lot of their kids; there's a
lot of pressure, a lot of parenting in absentia," he added. "I think
there's some deeper soul-searching we need to do."

Boe, the sergeant with the sheriff's office, said he, too, is alarmed
by the apparent presence of a heroin dealer on the Island.

"It's a huge deal," he said. "We don't want heroin used in any
fashion. I think it's different when it's on the Island as opposed to
people going to Seattle to get it."

But even if law enforcement is able to end the on-Island distribution
of heroin, if demand continues to exist, others will find a way to
fill it, he said. There's a natural progression, he added, from
prescription opiates, which are expensive, to heroin, which is
considerably cheaper.

"The more we can prevent the initial addiction, the better. ... You
need to get to that point where people aren't wanting the drug," he
said. 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D