Philly’s Next Heroin Epidemic

PART OF THE ANSWER CAN BE FOUND AT SERENITY LODGE, a halfway house in Nicholson, Pennsylvania, a town about 20 minutes outside of Scranton. A 19-year-old named Colin is telling me his story: how he struggled with pills, and what they eventually led him to.

Colin is from Kutztown, a town of 5,000 in Berks County. He has short blond hair and is about six feet tall. He barely fits into the small plastic chair he’s sitting in. “I was a spoiled kid,” he says of his childhood, though that’s hard to imagine: His mother died of a cocaine overdose when he was 12, and his father had a serious addiction to pills, something Colin discovered when he was 14.

“I found this duffel bag in his bedroom,” Colin says. “I opened it up and it was like pill heaven. It was just full of pills.” He looked up the names of the pills on the Internet—Oxycontin, Roxycontin, morphine­—and two days later, he took some.

He liked the feeling Oxycontin gave him: a warmth that enveloped him, a gradual deep relaxation. “I forgot about my mom’s death,” he says. “I forgot I don’t have a father at home. I was just happy.”

Colin kept taking them. And if his father noticed a good portion of his pills was missing, he didn’t say anything to his son about it. Over the next few months, Colin’s habit­ grew to five, sometimes 10 pills per day. Taking the pills orally wasn’t enough; he’d crush and snort them to speed and intensify their effect. He found friends to take them with—at his high school, there was a handful of other pill users.

He didn’t recognize the magnitude of his addiction till his father went away for a few days. With no pills and no connections to get new ones, Colin began to experience withdrawal. “It’s horrible,” he says. “You’re freezing, you’re hot, you’re cold, you’re shaking. You can’t move. … You don’t want to live, pretty much. You’re dying.”

A friend suggested heroin, just to tide them over till they could get more Oxycontin. “I thought of an older guy with a needle, a junkie in the back alley,” Colin says. “But then my friend was with me, he was withdrawing, and he’s like, ‘You know, we just will get one bag of heroin, and we’ll feel so much better, we’ll be done with our withdrawals and we’ll never do it again.’”

The two bags cost 20 dollars. Colin inhaled the powder.

“It surprised me,” he says. “I did only two bags of dope for 20 bucks and I felt so much better. I felt high.”

It was fleeting: The tolerance to heroin builds quickly, meaning that if you can’t afford to buy more and you want to get high, you’re left with one option.

“I could get way higher if I had a needle involved,” Colin says. A friend showed him how to inject.

Some users never progress from snorting heroin to shooting; others do so rapidly. Few return to snorting. Beth, a 29-year-old recovering addict from Philadelphia, told me it took her three months to transition from snorting to injecting. “The first time I did it,” she said, “I was in love.”