Heroin Hits the Suburbs Hard Amid Wave of Drug Abuse by Teens and 20-Somethings

Heroin Hits the Suburbs Hard Amid Wave of Drug Abuse by Teens and 20-Somethings

By Jessica Calefati
Posted December 5, 2008

When the vomiting, tremors, and chills she felt each morning became overwhelming, Jessica Polmann started selling her body to finance her heroin addiction and halt the debilitating physical symptoms of withdrawal. The petite, blond cheerleader, who made the honor roll before she started doing heroin at age 13, received $60 and some cigarettes each time she had sex with a man in his 50s who lived near her suburban New Jersey home. Jessica also traded sex for drugs with her dealers and male friends if they had extra bags of dope.

Addicted to Heroin at 13: Jessica Polmann
Drug Abuse's Young Face: Kristen, 18
Heroin Abuse's Young Face: Sean O'Conner, 19

She even introduced her friends and boyfriend to heroin to expand the pool of people she could call on to pick up more drugs. "I was," she says now, "really disgusting."
Polmann, now 18, is just one in a wave of teens and 20-somethings in suburbs across the Northeast who are becoming addicted to and dying from abuse of heroin and prescription opiates like OxyContin. Once prevalent mostly in big cities, heroin has been spreading out to smaller towns in New England and the mid-Atlantic as the drug is becoming more widely available in a highly pure, inexpensive form that can be snorted. Many of these young addicts get started on prescription drugs, move on to cheap heroin that can be snorted, and end up injecting it for a more potent high. Either way, the effects have been deadly. In Massachusetts, for example, the number of opiate-related deaths, which include overdoses and fatal drug interactions, among people ages 13 to 30 was five times as great in 2006 as it was in 1997. And according to drug intelligence, law enforcement, and treatment officials at both the federal and state level, the trend has not yet shown signs of reversing or slowing down.