The Heroin, Opiate Problem On Long Island

The approximately 35 parents and local residents who attended the Nov. 30 presentation of "Not My Child", which was created by the Nassau County District Attorney's Office, were taken on the journey of two mothers who have lost their children in different ways to heroin.

The crowd was gathered by the Parent Education and Community Awareness group at . One of the first parts of the presentation was from a press conference featuring Natalie Ciappa's mother after her daughter had fatally overdosed on heroin.

"This new heroin tricks the parents," Ciappa said.

Nassau County Assistant District Attorney Kristen Fexas played this portion of the news conference to show that addicts are no longer people that can be easily picked out of a crowd. In Natalie Ciappa's case, she was an addict for 10 months who had overdosed once before she died from a lethal overdose. But as her mother described her at the news conference: "Our daughter was healthy. She was beautiful. She was smart."

The new heroin that Natalie's mom referred to is a version that can be snorted rather than injected, which means kids no longer have track marks as a visible sign that they're using drugs. And now that this drug doesn't have the stigma it had when it was more prevalently injected and seemed "like the drugs you buy in a back alley," according to Fexas, kids are first dabbling into someone's medicine cabinet with opiate-based pills and then graduating to heroin.

Fexas explained that this process starts because pills are readily accessible from someone's medicine cabinet and for a while easy to take until the bottle begins to look empty. When that happens, some kids will try to find that prescription drug on their own, but the cost of that pill is between $30 and $80 and the pill only provides one high. Then eventually kids who don't have a lot of disposable income will switch to heroin, which can provide a similar high for $5 to $10, Fexas said.

"And now you have a heroin addict," she said.

This year in Nassau County, there have been 12 heroin-caused deaths to date, Fexas said. Last year, there were 38 of these deaths and in2 008 there were 46.

"Between 2004 and 2008, there was more than a 50 percent increase," in these deaths, Fexas said. Fexas also noted that in 2008 five of the 46 deaths occurred between Thanksgiving and New Years.

The number of deaths from oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine and other substances this year to date is 39. Last year it was 90.

Nora Ammirata, a member of the Street Narcotics and Gang Bureau, who also has a 25-year-old son who is battling his addiction to heroin, read a letter she had written to her son in 2008 where she told him, "It's not just your disease." She also said in that letter, "I always thought if I loved you enough or said the right thing, you would stop."

Ammirata also told the crowd that, "Nobody's neighborhood is spared by this problem." After the lecture was completed, a woman in the crowd asked about the number of drug busts in the New Hyde Park area. Fexas replied that there hasn't been an area on Long Island that has not had a drug issue this year and said that the Third Precinct is "very busy."

Fexas and Ammirata encouraged parents to be vigilant and to get rid of their prescription pills. There are some pharmacies and police precincts that will take people's unused pills, Fexas said.

"Dealing with it at the family level is the best way to deal with this," she said.

For more information about preventing drug addictions, visit www.heroinprevention.com.