Five years ago, this paper sounded the alarm that heroin and OxyContin abuse was spreading across the state at a startling rate.

It caused a tidal wave of action. Task forces were formed, prevention programs were developed, drug courts were established and methadone clinics were opened.

It was the type of story with the kind of response that makes a reporter feel worthy. I suppose it’s like when a doctor can temper a patient’s pain, or a teacher has a breakthrough with a struggling student. This is why we do this job, we tell ourselves.

But like doctors who watch some of their patients die, or teachers who see some students fail, there are a frustratingly large number of problems that no amount of ink and front-page exposure can solve.

This week I’m feeling that way about the continuing scourge of opiate abuse across this state.

Two weeks ago today, one of my closest friends in the world received that dreaded 1 a.m. phone call. The upset young man on the other end told her that her son was on the way to the hospital.

Not breathing, he said. There was a needle, he said.

An hour later, she was led into a hospital emergency room at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor to see her only child, just pronounced dead, with the needle tracks still fresh in his arm.

There weren’t many, she noticed. No healed-over scars lining the underside of his arm. Shooting up, apparently, was a relatively new venture for him.

“Younger users are more at risk of overdosing and dying,” explained Lynn Madden, vice president and chief operating officer at Acadia Hospital, which operates a methadone treatment program. “They don’t know their own bodies or what their bodies’ reaction is going to be.”

Despite the publicity and the awareness of this area’s opiate problem, the number of addicts seeking help at Acadia’s methadone clinic continues to grow. Of all of the patients that Acadia treats for substance abuse, 80 percent of them are addicted to opiates. Eighty percent of all of them are under the age of 30, and the fastest growing age group seeking treatment is under the age of 25.

“I truly don’t think we as a society have realized just how big of an issue this really is in our state,” Madden said this week.

When the methadone clinic first opened, the plan was to serve 250 people. Today there are 450 patients enrolled, and another 120 in the hospital’s intensive outpatient program. Thirty others are being treated for opiate addiction with buprenorphine.

Eighty percent of those being treated for opiate addiction are infected with hepatitis C, Madden said.

About 25 new addicts enter the hospital’s methadone treatment program each month.

During the month of January, 75 percent of the drug arrests made by Maine Drug Enforcement agents in Hancock County were for heroin.

Fifty percent of the drug cases investigated by MDEA in Washington, Hancock, Piscataquis and Penobscot counties during 2004 were opiate cases.

Lee was an experimenter, and no doubt experimented with other drugs. What Lee didn’t know, or chose to ignore, was that OxyContin, heroin and any other opiates are not experimental drugs.

“We get young people from all walks of life and all socioeconomic classes. Most of them truly don’t realize what track they’re moving down when they do these drugs for the first time,” Madden said.

Lee’s path ended in a packed funeral home last week, with his downhill skies propped nearby the wooden urn that contained his ashes. Pictures of him skiing, mowing the lawn, hugging his grandmother on a boat ride, graduating from high school and hamming it up with his cousins on Christmas morning lined the hallways.

The path his parents must now journey will be painful.

“Write about it,” she said. “Write whatever you want. People need to know how he died.”

His name was Lee Rowell. He was 22.