Heroin use in region at highest level ever
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Their smiling photos conveyed youth's bright hope. Accompanying newspaper stories blared addiction's blind hopelessness.
One of them, a 24-year-old full-time substitute teacher at the city's Creative and Performing Arts high school, was charged late last month in a bank heist with her boyfriend and with stealing more than $22,500 in laptop computers from CAPA to feed the couple's $100-a-day heroin habit.
The other, a 20-year-old student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, was killed early last Sunday in McKees Rocks when a deal to trade his iPad for $200 worth of heroin went bad, police said.
Aberrations?
Hardly, say police and addiction treatment specialists. They view the tragedies of those two young lives -- one now seeking reclamation, the other lost -- as vivid examples of heroin's vice grip on far too many in the region. Philicia Barbieri of Shadyside, the former teacher, and Malachi Urbini, the Art Institute student, make clear the nature of the drug's power, indiscriminate of race, socio-economic status or age, with users ranging from teens to late middle age.
"For the media, those were high-profile cases, but we see it every day," said Pittsburgh police Lt. Bill Mathias, head of the bureau's narcotics and vice unit. "Heroin is our biggest problem. We see heroin all day, all the time."
"Right now there is more heroin being used in the Pittsburgh area than at any time in our history," said Neil A. Capretto, Gateway Rehabilitation Center's medical director. "It's a major problem. The scary thing is, I see it getting worse before it gets better. More and more people are getting into it and less are getting out of it."
Dr. Capretto estimated treatment for heroin addiction at Gateway has increased about 600 percent since 1998.
And, he noted, "the faces of heroin have changed."
No longer are heroin addicts mostly poor African-Americans in an economically deprived inner city neighborhood, he said. Now, they are Caucasians, primarily well-educated professionals and students from well-heeled city neighborhoods and suburbs, whose powerful addictions make them jeopardize careers, families and friends in search of the next fix.
First Published May 15, 2011 12:00 am
