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HOWLAND – For 18-year-old Brandon Soucier and 17-year-old Audrey Porter, it was the close-up look at the arms of the 44-year-old man that made them catch their breath.
The limbs bore bloody, gaping wounds, as if the man’s arms were rotting away.
“This man still stabs needles into those wounds every day because that is where the veins are,” explained the police officer narrating the video being watched Wednesday by students at Penobscot Valley High School.
For a tall blonde in the second row, it was police photographs of a 4-year-old boy lying dead in the middle of the street that made her bow her head to shield her eyes.
And for 19-year-old Noah McPike, it was the black-and-white photograph of a pretty young brunette taken as she lay on a hard metal table in the coroner’s office that struck him.
“That’s the last picture I have of Erin,” her mother said quietly in the video, sipping water from a Styrofoam cup to gain her composure.
The images quickly quieted a group of young men in the back row of the PVHS auditorium who started the hour with sarcastic and perhaps nervous grins and private jokes.
Off to the side, sitting in a folding metal chair, U.S. Attorney Jay McCloskey watched. A teacher dashed from her seat to check on the emotional well-being of a teen-age girl who appeared visibly shaken.
With his days as U.S. attorney numbered, McCloskey and Bangor police Lt. Peter Arno are pushing through Maine high schools in an effort to convince kids to avoid the state’s fastest growing drug abuse trend – heroin and prescription opiates.
“About 100 percent of the efforts of our drug agents in the Bangor area are going toward the opiate problem and I don’t think this problem has crested yet, ” said Arno.
During the last several months as law enforcement has watched the use of heroin and illicit opiate use spread into every corner of the state, McCloskey and Arno have stood before parents, teachers and high school students to present an hourlong heroin and opiate abuse prevention program.
Penobscot Valley Regional High School was their 46th presentation. Juniors and seniors watched in one group, freshmen and sophomores in another. Next week McCloskey and Arno are headed to Aroostook County.
Afterward, a small group of PVHS students reflected on the presentation. Heroin, they said, was not really a problem in Howland.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone doing heroin around here,” said Porter.
“I think that’s more a problem in the Bangor area,” agreed McPike, who lives in Bangor but is a senior at PVHS, where his father is the assistant principal.
What about prescription opiates, such as the popular OxyContin, that is being seized in huge quantities from young adults and teen-agers across the state?
Oh yes, the group concurred quickly, you can get those easily enough.
And therein lies part of the problem, according to McCloskey, who stressed over and over to the students that heroin and prescription opiates are “the same drug and have the same harmful effects when used illegally and incorrectly.”
“We are not discouraging the use of these drugs for legitimate pain control under a doctor’s care,” McCloskey said. “But doctors don’t tell you to crush these pills and snort them up your nose or melt them down and inject the liquid into your veins.”
Heroin and opiates are equally addictive and are used interchangeably, he said.
After brief presentations by McCloskey and Arno, students were shown the graphic and powerful video produced by a police department in Delaware that has also experienced a huge heroin surge.
“This isn’t just a problem for certain kids,” McCloskey told the students seated in the auditorium. “Let’s talk about the B plus student and star hockey player.”
And then he played the video that starts with the tearful pleas of a mother screaming for help on a 911 line for her 17-year-old son who has overdosed on heroin.
Tough-talking Delaware cops tossed body bags and toe tags around a stage as they relayed their message to a group of Delaware high school students.
“First thing we do is put one of these toe tags on ya. You got a toe tag, you’re legally dead,” said the cop on the video tape as the students viewed a police photograph of a dead addict lying in a garage with a tag hanging from his toe.
“Then we stuff your body in one of these,” he shouted as he spread a body bag across the stage.
The students see the ravaged arms of addicts lying dead in motel rooms, garages and bedrooms. It is not reality TV. The video consists of actual police and medical photographs.
“This stuff kills ’em so quickly that they die with the needle still in their hands,” said the narrator. “See this couple. They both died in this motel room. That’s her lying on the floor and him on the bed. They couldn’t even save each other. He died with the phone in his hand trying to call for help.”
Students hear the story of a young mother. She was broke and addicted to heroin and went to a nearby mall where she snatched a woman’s purse.
“She took off in her car at a high rate of speed and was involved in a fatal accident fleeing the scene,” said the officer.
The video showed pictures of the broken body of a small child lying in the road.
“That was her son. He was 4 years old,” the officer explained.
Then Pink Floyd’s haunting song “Wish you were here” filled the auditorium as photographs of a bright-eyed toddler filled the video screen.
A conservative-looking middle-aged woman came on and began a detailed description of her child’s plunge into substance abuse and heroin addiction. She wept often as she talked about her daughter’s desire to get off the drug and her periods of sobriety.
She then spoke of the phone call from the coroner’s office and the picture that was put up on a screen so that she and her husband could identify their daughter’s body.
Pink Floyd sang and the kids from Penobscot Valley High School sat quiet and still.
“That was very emotional and powerful,” said McPike when the movie ended.
Porter agreed.
“It is a graphic video, but I think it needed to be,” said Porter.
“Before this presentation I never thought about prescription drugs and heroin being in the same category,” said Soucier.
Did it have an impact? Would it make them think twice?
Absolutely, the local students agreed.
It’s graphic and will not soon be forgotten, they said.
And that’s what McCloskey and Arno are counting on.
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