The two young women see themselves in Rue, the stumbling, manipulative teenage drug addict that Zendaya plays in "Euphoria," the new HBO show. They see themselves in Rue when she coughs and flushes the toilet so her mom won't hear her rummaging through the medicine cabinet for Xanax. They see themselves when Rue cops clean urine from a high school friend to pass a drug test. They see themselves when Rue convinces a new friend that getting high first thing in the morning is a good idea; when she threatens her mother with a piece of broken glass; when she aspirates her own vomit after overdosing. They see themselves in Rue's pain, her messiness, her unslakable need to obliterate all the bad feelings, no matter the cost. [continues 1290 words]
COXSACKIE, N.Y. -- With his swollen legs and a throaty rasp that whistles like a kettle through his broken teeth, Eddie Jones is an unlikely man to make history. He is 89 and dying, a former loan shark who, at 69, shot another man dead on a Harlem street in what he claimed was self-defense. Now he is serving a sentence of 25 years to life in a prison hospital bed in this upstate town, riddled with heart disease and probably cancer, though his doctors are not certain about the cancer because Mr. Jones has refused most every medical test. [continues 1185 words]
When Lawrence W. Mulvey became Nassau County's police commissioner in 2007, he was struck by the number of young people being arrested for heroin possession. In his earlier police experience, heroin addicts were usually decades older. But the mean age for those being arrested on heroin-related offenses was 24, with some as young as 14. "These kids aren't able to reference the heroin plagues of the '60s, '70s and early '80s, the skid-row type of alleyways and discarded needles," Commissioner Mulvey said. Their entry into heroin use, he added, was often through medicine cabinets -- belonging to their parents or parents of their friends -- or opiate-based prescription painkillers that, like heroin, induced euphoria. [continues 132 words]
Only 22 of Connecticut's 169 towns have not had at least one reported fatal overdose from heroin or pharmaceutical narcotic painkillers between 1997 and 2007, according to a study recently released by the Yale School of Public Health. The study, culled from data from the state's medical examiner's office, found that more than 2,200 people in Connecticut fatally overdosed on pharmaceutical narcotic painkillers, heroin or methadone during that time. Robert Heimer, the study's lead investigator, found that the number of fatal heroin overdoses has decreased to 111 annually in recent years, from an average of 131 a year from 1997 to 2000. But deaths from prescription narcotic painkillers and methadone have more than doubled, to 113 a year from 2005 to 2007 from 43 a year in the late 1990s. The researchers also found a shift in narcotic painkillers abuse and addiction from the state's cities to its suburbs, with deadly results. [continues 100 words]
New Jersey has the ignominious distinction of having street heroin that is among the purest in the nation, according to Special Agent Douglas S. Collier, a spokesman for the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, with purity levels reaching as high as 72 percent. This is largely because the state is home to large ports and a major airport, making it a direct entry point for drugs smuggled from South America. Federal agents seized 300 pounds of heroin in the state in 2007 -- the most recent year for which data was available -- compared with 139 pounds in 2006. In 2008, the D.E.A. also found that the rate of heroin use among the state's 18- to 25-year-olds was more than twice the national average. [continues 124 words]
In Westchester County, the percentage of teenagers entering state-licensed treatment programs for abuse of heroin and pharmaceutical narcotics has stayed relatively low in recent years, according to Dahlia Austin, the county's director of drug and alcohol abuse services in the Department of Community Mental Health. But the number of teenagers reporting prescription and over-the-counter drug abuse is on the rise, which, based on anecdotal evidence in other areas, could forecast future heroin abuse. Ellen Morehouse, executive director of Student Assistance Services, a nonprofit substance abuse prevention agency based in Tarrytown, began offering school nurses in Westchester and nearby counties training in the signs and symptoms of pharmaceutical drug abuse about five years ago. [continues 121 words]
In New York City, heroin is being packaged in covert locations and distributed at levels not seen since the heroin crisis of the 1970s. The evidence, according to the city's special narcotics prosecutor, Bridget G. Brennan, is the enormous number of tiny glassine bags, containing single doses of heroin, seized during recent drug raids, which suggest heavy local distribution and use. In recent months, drug agents have discovered unusually productive heroin mills, Ms. Brennan said, where the drug is often cut with lactose, baby laxatives or vitamin B in coffee bean grinders that are bought in bulk because their motors burn out from overuse. The mills are operated around the clock by as many as eight workers at a time in quasi-assembly lines. [continues 139 words]
THE kids weren't all right. They lived in the same comfortable Long Island town and were barely in their teens when they took their first hit of marijuana or sip of alcohol, propelling them on dark journeys they couldn't seem to escape. Within a couple of years, they were in heroin's grip. "My parents had no idea," said one of them, a 17-year-old girl who, like other formerly addicted youths interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of her past drug use. "My mom thought I was smoking a lot of weed and taking diet pills, because who would've thought that such a bad drug could be so easily accessible to me?" [continues 1175 words]
Working as an undercover narcotics officer is among the most dangerous jobs on the police force. You have to pretend to be an addict and win the trust of dealers. But if you must do the job, it would seem, a good place to land would be the area designated by the Police Department as Brooklyn South. For as large as it is, covering the vast territory that is lower Brooklyn, Brooklyn South is far from the most crime-ridden patrol borough in the city. It is home to stretches of middle-class homes in neighborhoods like Midwood, Ocean Parkway and Sheepshead Bay, and includes the boutique-filled byways of Park Slope, the boardwalks of Coney Island and the cobblestone streets of Red Hook. [continues 1299 words]
It was a critical moment in the deadly sequence of events that unfolded outside a Queens strip club early Saturday: in a crowd in front of Club Kalua, Joseph Guzman, according to the police, shouted, "Yo, get my gun." An undercover officer working at the club trailed Mr. Guzman and his friends to their car a couple of blocks away -- giving up his undercover role and inserting himself into a potential arrest. The officer, according to the account a colleague said he gave, confronted the group with his own gun drawn. A moment later, 50 shots had been fired, killing one of Mr. Guzman's companions, Sean Bell, who was to be married later that day, and wounding Mr. Guzman and a third man, Trent Benefield. [continues 843 words]
The undercover police officer who fired the first shots at a carload of men in Queens early Saturday, setting off a storm of police bullets that killed a bridegroom and injured two of his friends, suspected at least one of the men had a gun and was intent on returning with it to a nearby strip club, according to a person briefed on the officers' version of events. In all, five plainclothes officers -- two of them detectives working under cover -- fired 50 bullets at a silver Nissan Altima, killing Sean Bell, 23, who was to be married Saturday, and injuring Joseph Guzman, 31, and Trent Benefield, 23. Moments earlier, just after 4 a.m., the three had left a bachelor party at Club Kalua, a strip club under surveillance on 94th Avenue in Jamaica. [continues 1479 words]
