Horse Country

A heroin epidemic runs wild in Bucks County.

by David S. Barry

"One was dead in a kneeling position, the other was sprawled, half falling off the bed," says Cummings. "They had been dead for some time when our officers arrived. They had lividity and rigor mortis."

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

The scene made Cummings suspect the boys had been killed by a drug cocktail that has been blamed for more than 100 deaths in the greater Philadelphia area this year. The blend is heroin laced with fentanyl, a painkiller 80 times more powerful than morphine.

"Two people dying of an overdose at the same time makes it reasonable to assume there's fentanyl involved," says Cummings, a 29-year police veteran who hears about the trips local high school students make to buy heroin in Philadelphia from talking to teenagers on the street.

"They've told me that kids pool their money and send one kid down to the Badlands to buy a bundle of heroin," Cummings says, referring to the street sale of 14 bags of heroin for the price of 10 — $100. "The one who makes the trip and the buy gets the extra four bags as a bonus, after giving out the 10 bags to the friends who each chipped in $10. Or, he may sell his bonus heroin to make a profit by charging more to kids who weren't part of the pool." It's this easy access along the Badlands-to-Bucks pipeline that has many worried the problem is destined to get worse before anybody can even figure out how to make it better. But if heroin is stately Bucks County's dirty little secret, the mounting deaths are ensuring that it becomes a poorly kept one.

That popularity made news Sept. 29 when Warren and Seger, who had been a class ahead of Elizabeth, overdosed. "Most parents don't think their kids are getting involved with drugs," she says during a series of phone interviews. "They just get dropped off at Starbucks and their parents think they're safe. But coke is very accessible and some kids will start with pot as young as 12. I'd say a good percentage of my senior class probably do pot. And some who take to drugs more often will do heroin. It's really a progression. One of my friends who just recently picked up heroin had been doing coke for about two years."

Buying heroin typically involves a drive to Philadelphia's Badlands, where it is freely sold on the street.

"One night, some friends and I got lost on our way to a music club and then we were in the Badlands," says Elizabeth, who doesn't use. "It was kind of scary. One of the boys in the car said, 'Hey, this is where I buy my cocaine.' And I said, 'Great, why don't we let you off here?'"

SUPPLY: After narcotics officers watched a 15-year-old allegedly sell heroin near Ninth and Somerset, they took him off for an appointment the next day in juvenile court.

The conversations with Elizabeth began in early September, several months removed from the last publicized heroin overdose in the nearby town of Newtown. Now, the drug is not new to either Doylestown or other nearby picture-book communities in Bucks County. But newcomers and old-timers alike are finally being forced to take notice.

Annual median household incomes in townships near Doylestown surpass the $100,000 mark. It is a county where less than 6 percent of the population live below the poverty line and some 92 percent are Caucasian. The near nonexistence of violent crime puts the entire county in the top one percentile of the nation's safest counties.

This should not be heroin country.

But even though Colombian heroin has been addicting and killing Bucks teenagers for more than a decade, overdose death and addiction rates are rising. The drug has never been so accessible, in such lethal form, as it is today.

If that's not enough, Capt. Chris Werner of the Narcotics Strike Force of the Philadelphia Police Department says he has noticed a major change in the buying habits. It's not just that the only kids he mentions doing this are from Bucks; it's that they're now going for volume.

"We're getting kids coming down from Bucks County now buying quantity, weight," says Werner. "They used to just come and make a street buy for themselves. Now the enterprising ones come to buy enough to go back and sell to their friends. They also tend to have phone numbers of dealers. They call up in advance to make an appointment and meet the dealer at a street corner. That way, they get their dope without ever getting out of the car."

That means fewer kids have to make the trek into one of Philly's rougher neighborhoods.

"You just go to the corner where kids gather at night," Elizabeth says. "Ask the right questions of the right person, and you get a bag of heroin. It's not expensive. For $40, you get enough to keep you happy for a week.

"Once kids start using it regularly, they usually take after-school jobs working minimum wage at fast-food places to pay for drugs. Nearly all my friends work after school, and not all of them are doing it to pay for drugs."

DEMAND: This Quakertown man allegedly came to town to score some smack. He ended up getting smacked with possession charges. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

That cocktail of rising popularity and accessibility has officials worried. "I've seen drugs come and go. Pot, speed, LSD, coke, mushrooms," Cummings said in an interview in his office. "But there never used to be heroin with this age group. Not with its prevalence, the low price, the popularity and the purity which allows it to be snorted."

"Before the Colombians took over the market," says Baranoski, "you couldn't get high from snorting heroin. You had to shoot it with a needle. And that made it unattractive to a lot of kids."

More than unattractive. It was deemed downright ugly, considering the potential transmission of diseases like hepatitis and AIDS. When snorted, heroin becomes just another drug in a drug-tolerant teen landscape. Today, says Elizabeth, girls use it because they think it will impress boys.

"We were talking about heroin Friday," she says. Some classmates "just kept going on about how it might up their status at school."

Baranoski has seen the popularity manifest itself through statistics.

"In 2005, for the first time, I made more arrests of people for selling heroin than for possession," he said. "I'm busting kids selling out of their parents' $600,000 houses."

A little more than a week before the deaths of Warren and Seger, the neighboring Buckingham Police Department had responded to a call of a heroin overdose. Detective John Lehnen said the victim was a 21-year-old girl who had overdosed on fentanyl-laced heroin that she had bought in Philadelphia.

"She was lucky it didn't kill her," said Lehnen, a 15-year veteran.

ESCAPE ROUTE: Buyers cop drugs on the streets and hop the El to get away clean. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

It was the girl's second overdose in less than a month.

So with a person-an-acre population density and median household income of $82,000, Buckingham Township would also seem like an unlikely place for drug deaths, though no more than nearby Wrightstown, a village settled in 1680 and still a community with more acres of farmland than residents. But it was there that Lehnen's colleague, Detective Robert McLeod, had his first experience with a heroin overdose in 1996.

The household and family seemed wrong for the 911 call that brought him there. The victim was a soccer star at nearby Council Rock North, a high school with such lofty academic standards that parents needn't consider private schools to get their children into college.

His name was Adam Kufta, and he looked near death when McLeod arrived.

"There's that ashen color that you know is not good," McLeod said. "His pulse was slow and weak and he was making those little sounds, when people are struggling a get a breath. I guess you call it a death rattle."

When the paramedics arrived, they immediately set up an intravenous drip of Narcan, a chemical that reverses the effect of heroin.

"It was amazing to watch the signs of life come back," McLeod says. "First, his color started to come back. Then his eyes opened. Within 10 minutes, they were able to help him sit up."

McLeod had no doubt, as soon as he saw Adam, that he was looking at a heroin overdose. Neither did the paramedics. But Adam's mother Mary Lou, a schoolteacher, didn't think so. She knew that her son, like most of his friends, had been smoking pot, but never imagined he might have been using heroin. When she learned the truth outside the hospital emergency room, it brought her to her knees.

THE CASUALTIES: Colletti and Kufta.

"The officer who told me caught me by the elbows," says Mary Lou. "I wasn't fainting. I was conscious. My knees just buckled at the word."

By year's end, another overdose proved fatal. The tears still flow from Mary Lou's eyes as she talks about it at a New Hope Starbucks, a box of tissues in her lap.

"I'll always regret that I didn't take it more seriously that Adam was using pot," she says, "but I never imagined he'd been doing harder drugs. He was just snorting it, and he overdosed the third time he did it. Kids think that because they're snorting instead of shooting heroin that it's safer. They think it doesn't really count as doing a hard drug."

A year later, he attended Tom's funeral.

The lack of a cause-of-death acknowledgement, emblematic of civic denial, evoked memories of an athlete killed by heroin three years earlier. Katie Kevlock was 16 when she died of a heroin overdose in the summer of 2003. Her field hockey coach would dedicate the next season to Katie without mentioning what killed her, either.

Her mother Sue Shields, like Mary Lou Kufta and a few other mothers of heroin overdose victims, sees the curtain of silence as a big part of the problem.

"There's a real head-in-the-sand attitude toward this drug problem,'' says Nancy Ennis, who lost a niece to heroin in 2002. "It's a nasty problem that people don't want to acknowledge because it's not the kind of thing people want to believe is happening here."

Ennis, Kufta and Shields want that to change. They all take part in a drug awareness program run by Detective Dan Baranoski, who functions as a county anti-heroin crusader. Baranoski began noticing fatal heroin overdoses in the mid 1990s and saw heroin use spread to become what he considers an epidemic. In 2002, he put together a drug warning program that he calls NAIVE. It begins with a video montage of smiling teenage faces underlined by their names, dates of birth, and years they fatally overdosed.

NEVER OVER IT: Sue Bartels thought the pain would subside in the years after her son Ian's 1997 death. It didn't. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

More than 150 faces killed since 1998 pass across the screen. He says they represent only part of the death total.

"Those are only the faces of kids whose parents would participate in the program," says Baranoski. "Some just didn't want their child's picture shown. Some are still in denial."

In August, Baranoski said there had been 20 heroin overdoses in Middletown Township alone. "Not all of them were fatal," he said, "and not all heroin deaths are from overdoses. There was a kid living near [Middletown] who couldn't stand it any more after being an addict five years. He blew his brains out a couple of weeks ago."

It's a trend that has left Republican state Rep. Eugene DiGirolamo angry, even if many elected officials don't often speak about the unpopular subject. That could be because his namesake son became addicted to heroin in 1998. (He has since recovered.)

"Where is the outrage over the number of heroin deaths and overdoses in this county?" asks the legislator from Bensalem. "A day does not go by that my office doesn't get a call from someone needing help with a heroin problem."

DiGirolamo has fought in the legislature on behalf of the state requirement that health insurance companies provide 30 days of inpatient recovery programs to heroin addicts. A group of health insurance companies has banded together to fight the law. Meanwhile, heroin treatment programs go underfunded while addiction rates rise.

"Our department had run through its funds for the year 2006 in April," says Marge Hanna, executive director of the Bucks County Drug and Alcohol Commission. "There isn't nearly enough money to deal with the people who need treatment. It's not a sexy issue to ask for funding."

Hanna and others agree that heroin's stigma presents hurdles.

"Heroin is a dirty word," says Jane Glenhurst, a mother of two, one an honor student, the other a heroin addict recently released from prison.

Worse for her than the lying, cheating and stealing that often accompanies such an addiction was the dread of the phone call that a Gardenville resident named Suzan Bartels got about her son Ian nine years ago, the call informing her that her son was dead.

Her son, like Mary Lou Kufta's, had gone to Council Rock North. Like Adam, he was a gifted musician. And, like Adam, he had gotten addicted to heroin.

"I keep hoping and expecting it will get a little better,'' Bartels says, "but it never does."

We cruise down the street past families gathered on stoops. Kids ride bikes in the street. Cell phones are everywhere. Three slender, short-haired young men sit in a doorway.

"These guys on our left, on the steps, sell from there. They keep their stash on the abandoned property right there," Fagan says, pointing to a spot farther down the block. "That guy there with the cell phone is running the corner, making sure the business is going right. That kid on the bike in front of us, he's the lookout."

He points to a vacant, derelict house next to a weed-covered lot.

"The sellers would let you go inside, if they know you, and let you shoot up," he says.

This house, on this block, would not even figure in a Bucks County parent's nightmare. Unless that parent knows his or her child is a heroin addict.

WHERE THEY LEAST EXPECTED IT: The Kufta house couldn't be further from homes in the Badlands. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

We pass the corner of Mutter Avenue and Cambria.

"This used to be so bad because of all the Bucks County people comin' down and drivin' through that they had cops stationed here who wouldn't let anybody drive down the block," says Fagan, who explains that different organizations control different blocks, selling their own cut in sealed glassine envelopes stamped with a brand name and often a logo. "On the block we just passed, the heroin is called Bart Simpson."

A day later, in conversation at the Buckingham Township Police Department, detective Robert McLeod recalls that the heroin that killed Adam Kufta was brand-named Batman. He mentions that such branding is important for dealers. Users will seek out a brand of heroin known to have killed people, including the heroin-fentanyl mix known this year as "killer heroin."

"Fatal overdoses mean that the heroin is really strong, which is great advertising for addicts," McLeod says. "Everybody thinks that even though it killed someone else, it won't kill them."

Lehnen recounts stories of emergency workers being sworn at or even attacked by users they have revived from coma.

"They say the overdose victim comes back from death," Lehnen marvels, "and they're angry at the emergency workers for spoiling the best high they ever had."

Liz Raffin understands that seemingly unbelievable dynamic. Another Council Rock North graduate, she has been a heroin addict.

"You're always chasing that best high," she tells me. "Even when you're sitting there nodding, almost going unconscious, you're still saying to yourself, 'I could get higher.'"

Liz graduated from Council Rock North in 1999. Her older brother, also a Council Rock North grad, died of heroin overdose in 2003. She says that when her brother began using at 17, she hated him for what he was doing to their family. Then, in college, she started doing it herself.

"The first time I snorted it and I was sick as a dog — puking, nauseous," she says. "But it still felt good even though I was sick."

So she did it again.

"It's very inexpensive to try out,'' she says, "and you don't ever believe you're gonna become a junkie. And then all of a sudden you're there. It's like its claws dig into you and won't let go, and you don't realize it until it's too late. And then you have to do it, or else you're sick.

"There's this idea that if a kid's doing heroin they had a bad childhood or something, but many kids who use it grow up with wonderful parents and a wonderful upbringing. I certainly did. There's no rhyme or reason; it just happened. I was [an] ... honor student, German honor society, varsity soccer since ninth grade. I was a good kid. Probably one of the last kids you would think would get into it."

It bothers Larry that there seems to be so little acknowledgment at the county level — in the school system, or even in the justice system — of a local crisis. All the police officers interviewed for this article, as well as NAIVE executive Nancy Ennis, agreed.

"Dan Baranoski puts on the NAIVE program at high schools and gets a big turnout from students. At Pennsbury High, I think there was a turnout of over 300 students," Ennis says. "And then the follow-up showing and discussion for parents, which is what really counts, only got about 35 people."

One approach to addressing the problem has law enforcement going after dealers.

Chris Abruzzo is head of the Narcotics Strike Force for the state Bureau of Narcotic Investigation in Harrisburg. Early in 2006, a long-range undercover project aimed at top level heroin distributors in the Badlands took down eight men described as "kingpins." How long would it take for them to be replaced?

"A week or two,'' Abruzzo acknowledged. "I can't say we made much of a dent in the heroin supply."

Conceding that there's really no way to stem the flow of heroin into the region, Abruzzo considers the theory that police would have to go after users to reduce the demand. But when asked for a solution, Mike Cummings, who's seen the bodies of young victims in a county that doesn't want to acknowledge an epidemic, remains at a loss.

"I have no idea," the veteran police lieutenant concedes. "It takes a smarter mind than mine to figure that one out."

(d_barry@citypaper.net)