Heroin Moves to the Country
May 24 -- The mountains of Colorado and Vermont have long drawn skiers, hikers and nature lovers. Lately, an unwelcome guest has been showing up more and more in these pastoral settings: Heroin.
Colorado and Vermont, like rural and suburban areas from Wisconsin to Texas and New Jersey to Oregon, have seen a boom in heroin use, particularly among the young, over the last five years, catching communities unprepared for the scourge.
The impact of heroin addiction was brought home to Vermonters when police linked the death of a teenage girl in a New York City brothel to what they said was a prostitution ring running from Burlington, Vt., to the Bronx. Police said Vermont girls got hooked on heroin that was introduced to the area by dealers from New York and then were lured into prostitution with promises of money and drugs.
It's a pattern that has been observed all across the country.
"Heroin dealers are dealing and marketing to young people," said Gladys Zelman of Maple Leaf Farm, a substance abuse treatment center in Vermont. "There's no question it's here, it's damaging and kids are dying."
What has been observed over the last several years is a sharp reversal of the trend over the previous 15 years, when heroin use was on the decline and was virtually unknown in most rural areas of the country.
Bored to Death
The revival is blamed in part on the arrival of black tar heroin on the American market, which is often as much as 70 percent to 90 percent pure, allowing new users afraid of injecting the drug to get a powerful high by smoking or inhaling.
There's another, older force driving the boom, though. Boredom.
"I asked a young person what to do about it and she said, 'Well, we're bored. We need transportation to get to places, to do things. We need to have other things to do,'" Zelman said.
It hasn't helped that the price of heroin has tumbled, even as purity has soared.
"What we've noticed here is that there's definitely been an increase in heroin use among the kids we deal with," said Jamie VanLeeuwen, a program coordinator at Urban Peak, which runs the only licensed homeless and runaway youth shelters in Colorado. "A bag of heroin — good for a weekend high — goes for $20 to $40. That's not an expensive high."
