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Posted by: PBC FL Cop

Monday, March 26, 2007
OxyContin use leading to heroin addictions

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

BROCKTON— A growing number of young adults experimenting with the powerful painkiller OxyContin are getting hooked on heroin, triggering a spike in drug overdoses, broken lives and pressure on emergency services south of Boston.

“It is alarming,” Abington Police Chief David Majenski told The Enterprise newspaper. “We have made a tremendous amount of heroin arrests and it is not slowing down at all.”

The link between OxyContin abuse by teens and addiction to heroin is tenacious. Several recovering addicts said they got “high” on OxyContin while in high school, got hooked, then turned to heroin when buying the painkiller on the street got too expensive, the newspaper reported yesterday.

At least 2,682 people were treated in emergency rooms for opioid-related abuse, dependency or poisoning between 2003 and 2005 in the region, according to the Massachusetts Division of Health Care Finance and Policy.

An examination of death certificates filed in 28 communities shows that 74 people have died of opiate-related overdoses, including heroin, between Jan. 1, 2004, and Aug. 31, 2006, the newspaper said, citing its examination of death certificates filed in 28 local communities.

Those numbers translate to devastating tragedies for relatives of the victims.

“These people are not dirtbags,” said Hanover’s Theresa Cairo, whose daughter, Jill, died of an overdose at age 24. “They are intelligent, beautiful people. It is someone who looks like your daughter. It is someone who could be your daughter.”

The problem adds a burden to taxpayers and saps resources from emergency services.

In Whitman, Fire Department emergency medical technicians responded to 20 overdoses from September to November. One person died.

The narcotic-antidote Narcan was administered in nearly half of the overdose calls.As heroin — once considered a problem of the urban streets — moves up and out, desperate families are turning to the courts, pleading with judges to order the arrest and committal of their children to treatment programs for up to 30 days.

The problem “has no psychological profile, it has no socioeconomic profile,” said Dr. Michael L. Dern, a Brockton physician who has treated young heroin addicts.

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Posted by: lofu

Uh, No Shit! Who would guess that the addiction to one expensive opiate would lead to the use of another FAR CHEAPER opiate.

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Posted by: SinePari

File this under NO SHIT, SHERLOCK. Up to $40 a hit for Oxy, or $5-$10 for a hit of the real thing. Next thing you know, they're in the rest areas, trying supplement their income...

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Posted by: justanotherparatrooper

Talk bout stating the obvious!

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Posted by: SOT

what they said

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Posted by: Delta784

The Patriot Ledger/Brockton Enterprise is doing an excellent ongoing series on opiate abuse on the South Shore;

http://www.southofboston.net/entrepo...oin/index.html

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Posted by: 94c

This problem has been around for a very long time. Now that it's affecting the little rich kids, everyone is taking notice.

When Oxycontin first came out everyone was in an uproar at it's immediate potency. The answer? "We'll coat it and make it time release."

So then everyone started crushing it instead.

No matter how you look at it, it is nothing but legalized drug dealing by the pharmaceutical companies and crooked doctors. Except it now affects little Johnny and Suzie.

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Posted by: PBC FL Cop

Agencies have to go after the doctors!!!

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Posted by: SinePari

Quote:

Originally Posted by 94c No matter how you look at it, it is nothing but legalized drug dealing by the pharmaceutical companies and crooked doctors. Except it now affects little Johnny and Suzie.

Yeap. If it says Pfizer or Merck on the package, apparently it's OK to abuse.

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Posted by: kwflatbed

Articles Bruce Mentioned:

WASTED YOUTH - Constant fear of relapsing:Heroin addiction is a chronic disease, experts say


By MAUREEN BOYLE
The Enterprise
Dennis walked out of a Brockton detox center after four days.

The first thing he did was buy heroin.

‘‘I can’t get away from it,’’ the 25-year-old Stoughton man said as he walked down North Main Street in Brockton. ‘‘I like it still. It is still good.’’

He began drinking at age 12, began using drugs at age 17 and, by age 20, was a heroin addict.

He overdosed once in a Brockton park and was rushed to Brockton Hospital.
http://ledger.southofboston.com/arti...ews/news06.txt


WASTED YOUTH - Parents recall ‘perfect summer’; Spent it with pregnant daughter, by the pool, before OD death

Jill Cairo
By MAUREEN BOYLE
The Enterprise
HANOVER - Two summers before Jill Cairo died, the summer she was carrying the boy that would be named Liam, was a season in the sun.

‘‘It was the perfect summer,’’ her mother, Theresa Cairo, said. ‘‘We would just hang out by the pool, day after day.’’

It was, her father would later say, Jill’s gift to them.

Two years later, Jill would be dead of a heroin overdose at age 24.

Her son, now 3, is being raised by her parents.

‘‘She left a piece of herself,’’ Mrs. Cairo said. ‘‘Thank God for him.’’
http://ledger.southofboston.com/arti...ews/news05.txt




LOCAL NEWS
WASTED YOUTH - Desperate measures: Parents, scared and frustrated, increasingly have their drug-addicted children locked up

As the heroin problem grows, more parents are having their children locked up for 30 days in hopes of breaking the addiction. (CRAIG MURRAY photo illustration/The Enterprise)
By MAUREEN BOYLE
The Enterprise
Second of a three-part series

One hour earlier, she had filled out paperwork at Quincy District Court, asking that her 21-year-old son be committed to Bridgewater State Hospital for treatment of heroin addiction.

It was a last-ditch effort, she said, to save his life.

‘‘I was full of anxiety,’’ she recalled. ‘‘I didn’t know what was going to happen. You feel so deceitful because you are doing it behind their backs. You’re asking the court to arrest them.’’
http://ledger.southofboston.com/arti...ews/news04.txt

Related Story:

RISING TOLL - Yet another young person dies of overdose of drugs


By MAUREEN BOYLE
The Enterprise
BROCKTON - The heroin overdose of a former Weymouth High School honors student this weekend was just the latest in a string of local drug deaths.

Kelly Molloy, 23, of Rockland, was found dead Sunday night in Brockton. She died after a two-year battle with heroin addiction.

Molloy was found unconscious on the floor at 678 N. Main St. on Sunday and was pronounced dead at Caritas Good Samaritan Hospital.

Police found fresh track marks on her arm, said Brockton Lt. John Crowley, chief of detectives. He said a preliminary toxicology test showed heroin in her system.

Molloy had been living in Rockland for the past four years and graduated from Weymouth High School in 2002. She was on the school’s high honor roll her last term senior year.
http://ledger.southofboston.com/arti...ews/news07.txt

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Posted by: wgciv

Quote:

Originally Posted by Delta784 The Patriot Ledger/Brockton Enterprise is doing an excellent ongoing series on opiate abuse on the South Shore; http://www.southofboston.net/entrepo...oin/index.html

Dito... It is stating the obvious but it is an ongoing series that they began working on a year and a half ago.

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