Heroin: Small cities, even rural towns face growing problems

For years, heroin was considered an affliction mainly of poor urban neighborhoods. But these days, the drug is becoming popular in affluent suburbs, small cities, and even rural towns – especially among young people.

From Arizona to New Jersey, many communities that never imagined they would have a heroin problem now face a rising toll of addiction, overdoses, and even deaths.

“You would have to go pretty remote to find a place that didn’t have this,” says Kathleen Kane-Willis, a researcher at Roosevelt University in Chicago who has tracked heroin use since 2004. “It’s just everywhere.”

But for communities and in particular parents, the problem can come as a total surprise.

Take Tamara Olt and her husband, who were vacationing in Mexico last April when they got the call that every parent dreads. One of their sons was lying unconscious in his basement room at the family’s home in Dunlap, a small town in central Illinois.

Joshua Olt died in the emergency room that evening. He was 16.

“Heroin was the biggest shock of my life,” says Dr. Olt, an obstetrician and gynecologist. “The drug had never crossed my mind.”

Yet as more communities realize they have a problem, efforts to confront it are slowly gaining ground. Concerned parents, school administrators, and law-enforcement officials are holding town-hall meetings, forming support groups, and starting campaigns to discourage heroin use.

“We recognize that this is an emerging problem,” says Dianne McDonald, a curriculum director at two Joliet, Ill., high schools. “We want to be proactive.”

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, heroin use in the United States rose 66 percent between 2007 and 2011. The US Drug Enforcement Administration says seizures of heroin have doubled since 2008, and arrests have risen by a third. Most heroin comes from Asia, but more and more is arriving from South America and Mexico.

Although heroin use has been expanding for a decade or more, many communities are just beginning to understand the extent of their own heroin problem. The Dane County Narcotics and Gangs Task Force, which includes personnel in Madison, Wis., reported last year that drug overdoses had risen from 31 in 2007 to 175 in 2011, most due to heroin. In Will County, Ill., just outside Chicago, heroin-related deaths rose from five in 2000 to 53 last year. In Missouri, heroin deaths increased from 69 in 2007 to 244 in 2011 – more than half of them in the age group 15 to 35.

The National Council on Alcoholism & Drug Abuse – St. Louis Area (NCADA), which offers emergency counseling and other services, has seen a dramatic shift in heroin-related calls. Until recently, most came from middle-aged people in poor urban areas. But four or five years ago, that changed. “They were mostly from youth, which was shocking to us,” says Dan Duncan, director of community services. “And they were coming from the suburbs. In 2010, it just seemed to explode.”

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