Heroin hits home, your own home

Not so very long ago in Maine, in what now seems a more innocent time, one of the biggest obligations of parents was to make sure their teen-agers understood the dangers of drinking and driving and the risks of using recreational drugs such as marijuana and cocaine.

Heroin simply was not part of the conversation. The drug had long been associated with big-city life, after all, where its victims were thought to be down-and-out junkies who died in alleyways with needles in their arms. Even as heroin began to show up in southern Maine a decade or so ago, it was easy for most parents to believe the problem could never touch their families. Users tended to be young people on the fringe, problem kids from troubled homes for whom heroin use was but the newest of many factors in a pattern of self-destructiveness.

Not our kids, in other words.

“Unfortunately, any parent who thinks that way now is dead wrong,” said Bangor Deputy Police Chief Peter Arno on Monday, as front-page headlines in the morning’s paper announced that heroin use was increasing dramatically among Maine teens. “People need to understand that it is indeed a problem here – not just with heroin, but OxyContin and prescription drugs – and that they do have to think about it in relation to their own kids.”

Arno, who has spent the last 11 years involved in state and federal drug-enforcement efforts, said the problem of heroin has escalated northward faster than even he had anticipated. As recently as 1994, while supervising the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency in Bangor, a report he wrote on heroin suggested that while it had made its way onto Portland’s streets at the time, there was still reason to hope it wouldn’t extend to Maine’s more rural communities.

“Over the last 10 or so years, I’ve seen how drugs have cycled in an out of communities, moving through certain age groups,” Arno said. “But in the last three or four years, I’ve never seen anything like this problem we have today.”

Arno has spent much of those last few years trying to convince people that the drug traditionally associated with inner-city street life could very well show up these days at a teenage gathering right in their own home towns.

“I’ve spoken in the high schools, and I’ve spoken with physicians, pharmacists and civic groups like the Elks and Kiwanis,” Arno said. “The message is that law enforcement doesn’t have the answers, and that education desperately needs to be at the forefront. As a community, we’re not educated on this problem. The whole dynamic around drugs, what kids know and don’t know, has changed dramatically. They don’t understand what addiction is, and how pronounced the problem is with opiates. It’s like Russian roulette.”

And whether you choose to believe it or not, Arno is talking about your kids, too.

“If parents think their honor-roll kids would never get involved with something like this, they’re making a very big mistake,” he said. “I don’t know how many high school kids I’ve spoken with who by all measures were successful – good grades, no problems at home, even some good athletes – who’ve experimented with opiates. Yes, the big-city problem has come to rural Maine. Kids in grades K through 12 need to hear about it consistently and truthfully, and they need to hear it first from their parents.”