BANGOR – Kate Garceau never planned on being a junkie. At 14, she was a “normal kid,” she told an attentive audience Friday at a daylong conference on opiate addiction. She’d grown up in an upper middle-class family in southern Maine with plenty of support and supervision.

She was popular and doing well in school, and when she started experimenting with drugs, she said, “I understood there were risks, but I didn’t think they were bad enough that I was going to fall over and die from them.”

Garceau, now an attractive, well-spoken 20-year-old described her descent into opiate addiction – how she stole from her family in order to support her habit, how she became a dealer, how she was kicked out of her father’s house and moved in with a group of “friends” who used and sold drugs. She was suspended from school and eventually was arrested, spending Christmas and New Year’s in jail awaiting a hearing.

She wound up in court-mandated drug treatment, living with her mother in the Bangor area and attending a day program at Acadia Hospital. “I’ve been clean now for almost two years,” she said. “But it’s something I have to think about every day.”

Garceau’s account sounded a tentatively hopeful note in an otherwise sobering program on opiate abuse by Maine youth, sponsored by Acadia Hospital and other area organizations. The conference included presentations from treatment providers, law enforcement officials and a human development specialist whose daughter abused the prescription drug OxyContin.

Their message was the same: Opiate abuse is on the rise in Maine and the drugs are relatively cheap and easy to come by. They are falling into the hands of an ever-younger population of users, and, importantly, most users don’t realize how easily they can become addicted.

A survey conducted last year by the Maine Office of Substance Abuse indicates that a quarter of the state’s high school seniors have used opiates. Statistically, said Lynn Madden, chief operating officer at the Acadia Hospital, half of them will experience some level of physical dependence.

Heroin and related drugs have become more socially acceptable since they no longer need to be injected, she said, and the purity of the products now available on the street gives an illusion of safety. A one-hit bag of heroin costs between $5 and $15 and a starter dose of OxyContin runs about $10.

Children as young as 14 are using opiates, girls as well as boys, regardless of social class. “This stuff is in our high schools all over the state of Maine,” Madden said. “‘Just Say No’ doesn’t seem to be working – kids say ‘no’ to almost nothing.”

Until 1998, said Peter Arno, deputy chief of the Bangor Police Department, there was no overwhelming presence of heroin or prescription opiates on the street. The sudden problem has taken law enforcement by surprise, he said.

Arno said more – and more graphic – education is needed about the risks of using opiates, “a sustained consistent, truthful educational effort in all our communities.”

Madden said the public is divided about drug abuse education. Some parents want their children to be informed about drugs, she said, but others fear detailed information will only make kids bolder.

Garceau said school-based programs like D.A.R.E. – Drug Abuse Resistance Education – and the substance abuse curriculum in health classes fail to reach most students.

More effective, she said, are presentations by addicts such as herself, who have more credibility than teachers or other officials. “If I’d really known about the potential for disease and death,” Garceau said, “it might have made a difference.”

About 100 educators, counselors, and health care providers attended the conference, coming from as far away as Westbrook, Houlton and Calais.