Recovering addict: N.H. has big heroin problem

KINGSTON, N.H. – Robin Butruccio has been clean for more than a month after spending more than a year addicted to heroin.

Butruccio, 48, goes to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting twice daily. Her former boyfriend, Theodore Gagalis, may be going to prison on four felony drug charges.

“My life the last year and a half? It sucks,” Butruccio told The Eagle-Tribune.

She’s not alone, and residents of Kingston and other nearby towns need to wake up to the problem, she said.

“There’s a heroin epidemic in this community,” she said. “It needs to be addressed. … It’s the worst, dirtiest drug in the world.”

Local, state and federal authorities say heroin and other opiates have been a serious problem in southern New Hampshire for a decade or more. Butruccio said it’s easily available both in New Hampshire and across the border in Massachusetts.

A report by the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies found that in 2003, 3 percent of teenagers in the state had tried heroin. Last year, six people died of heroin overdoses, and more than 50 died after overdosing on other opiates, according to state statistics.

Butruccio said she moved to Kingston about five years ago from Haverhill, Mass., hoping to leave behind a cocaine addiction.

“When I moved to New Hampshire, it’s like nobody’s heard of coke before. It’s all opiates, OxyContin,” she said.

Butruccio, who broke her neck in a 1994 car accident, had gotten prescriptions for pain medications such as Oxycontin, and a new acquaintance showed her how to crush the pills and snort them to get high.

The next thing she knew, she was snorting heroin with a friend.

“They tell you that, ‘It’ll relax you, Robin, it’ll take your pain away,'” she said. “It really does.”

Anthony Pettigrew, spokesman for the Boston bureau of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said it’s common for people to graduate from abusing prescription painkillers to abusing heroin.

Heroin gives the same high for less money and is so pure nowadays that it can be snorted instead of injected, he said.

“Instead of buying a $40 pill, you’re going to buy a $10 bag of heroin,” Pettigrew said.

Butruccio said it’s much easier to get heroin than to get addiction treatment. Eventually, she couldn’t function without being high. After Gagalis was arrested and she had a harder time getting the drug, she found out how hard it was to quit.

“The worst pain in the world is coming off heroin,” she said. “Every bone, every muscle in your body hurts.”

After Kingston teenager Caitlyn Brady died in March of a heroin overdose, local authorities have arrested a large number of dealers. Dante Silva, 21, of Newton is charged with providing 18-year-old Brady with the drug.

Police Chief Donald Briggs, said he has about three officers doing undercover drug buys at any given time, but it isn’t enough.

“I would say that it’s not only a law enforcement issue, but a social issue,” he said. “You need to have a comprehensive treatment program for these people that you arrest.”