HEROIN USE ON RISE IN W.  MD.

Addiction: Teen overdoses, arrests and drug-related crimes bring the magnitude of the problem home to Cumberland.

CUMBERLAND - Heroin did not come quietly to the sleepy towns and dusty back roads of Allegany County.

Over two months last year, the drug took two of the Western Maryland county's young - a 19-year-old man found dead in a portable toilet at a construction site and a 17-year-old high school sophomore with enough heroin in her veins to stop her heart.

By year's end, at least six people would die from an overdose of heroin or methadone, a synthetic narcotic used to treat opiate addiction.  In the 1990s, the number of fatal overdoses yearly in this hardscrabble county rarely exceeded one.

"Five years ago, if somebody told me that we would have a heroin problem, I would have said, 'No, I don't believe that,'" says J.  Robert Dick, Cumberland's police chief, who heads the county's crime task force.  "All of a sudden, it's kind of hitting us right between the eyes."

The forces driving heroin into Allegany County are at work across rural America: lower prices and higher purity, which enables users to inhale the drug without the fear or stigma of hypodermic needles.

But the problem is magnified in Maryland's rural counties by the nearness of Baltimore, a city that federal officials have rated one of the country's most heroin-plagued, with an estimated 45,000 addicts.  Users buy heroin - a white or brown powder - for $6 to $10 a capsule in Baltimore, then resell it in Cumberland for three to five times as much.  To avoid the painful symptoms of withdrawal, hard-core addicts snort or inject the drug several times a day.

Federal and county law enforcement officials have found no evidence of an organized drug distribution network in Allegany County.  Instead, they say, teens and young adults are driving two hours to Baltimore's open-air drug markets and returning with just enough heroin to sell to friends to maintain their own habits.

"We'd be high before we got off Edmondson Avenue," recalls Jonathan D.  Hershiser, 29, of Cumberland.  Hershiser, a truck driver, had a $300-a-day habit before spending several months in prison last year for robbing a local convenience store to obtain money for drugs.

Baltimore street dealers called me "the crazy white boy," he said in his parents' living room the other day.  "But they would never rob me or anything because they knew the business I was bringing to that corner."

He says he is cold sober now and works for a moving company.  But he agonizes over how his casual heroin use spiraled within weeks into an all-consuming addiction that destroyed friendships and thrust him into a life of petty crime.

"I came from a good family, I had a good job," he says, his head drooping.  "There are still a lot of hard days when I think how bad I screwed my life up."

The daily struggle

Heroin came to Baltimore's suburbs in the 1990s.  But its spread to far Western Maryland has been more recent.  Overdose statistics suggest that Allegany County, population 74,000, recently surpassed more-populous Frederick and Washington counties as the region's heroin capital.

This rugged place of farms and pickup trucks has struggled since the decline of the once-booming textile, tire and railroad industries flattened its economy.  Allegany is one of two Maryland counties to lose population since 2000.  Its 8.6 percent unemployment rate this year is nearly double the statewide average, a fact teens blame in part for the appeal of heroin.

"There ain't no jobs down here, and the jobs down here all pay $5.15, and who wants to work for that," says Jordan Preston, 18, a high school dropout hanging out with friends on Cumberland's Maryland Avenue, a street of weathered double-decker houses that police say is a trouble spot for heroin.  "We all live in poverty."

His mother, Betty Jean Preston, a residential services director for United Cerebral Palsy of Central Maryland, led a comfortable middle-class life before a boyfriend introduced her to heroin, cocaine, morphine and other drugs, according to police reports and relatives.  In late December, Betty Preston, 43, who was once so strict that she barred smoking or drinking in the house, was found unconscious after what her children say was an overdose of prescription painkillers and heroin.

Jordan Preston says he tried in vain to revive her.  She was pronounced dead 40 minutes after arriving at the hospital, police reports show.

"My mom was the nicest person you could meet," says Danielle Preston, 17.  "She owned a house.  We had everything till she got on heroin."

Then their mother sold the family car and couches and chairs to maintain an increasingly expensive drug habit.  She turned into a different person, Danielle said, snapping at her children and occasionally leaving her daughter with black eyes.

Danielle said her mother's death scared her off recreational drugs.  But Jordan seems less likely to change.

"All of my friends that do heroin, they ain't going to get off it," he says.

Drug counselors here say that alcohol and marijuana are much more widely abused than heroin.  But they say that heroin use has caught up with cocaine and outstrips all three in its grip on addicts.

A changed picture

From 2000 to 2003, the number of Allegany residents checking into Maryland substance abuse programs for heroin treatment rose from 52 to 94, county health officials said.  Police arrested 45 people on heroin-related charges last year, up from none in 2000.  And they made 53 seizures of heroin, up from 15 in 2001.

Robert Cassidy, program director of the county's Joseph S.  Massie Unit, a 25-bed rehab program in Cumberland, says the heroin addicts he has seen in the past two years defy the stereotype of the down-and-out back-alley user.

"The picture has changed," he says.  "The difference is, we're seeing younger people, who were out in the community, going to school, working, probably doing well for themselves, if they hadn't gotten into drug use, whereas before we'd be getting a lot of criminal justice referrals."

In a 2002 survey by the state Department of Education, 3.4 percent of Allegany County eighth-graders said they had tried heroin, well over double the statewide average of 1.3 percent.

It was the death of 17-year-old Ashley Autumn Wilburn in February last year that jolted Allegany County into a recognition of its heroin problem.

The photograph in the Beall High School yearbook shows a dark-haired girl with a soft, pretty smile.  But relatives say Ashley was a loner, prone to depression.

Her mother, a hotel maid, shot herself to death when Ashley was 3, relatives said.  Ashley and her father lived at her grandfather's house, which sits along a dirt road in Barrelville, a short drive northeast of Frostburg.

Ashley's father, who loads soft drinks onto trucks on an evening shift, declined to be interviewed, but her grandfather, Donald Wilburn, says there had been warning signs.  She started going out with a 27-year-old man with a criminal record.  Thousands of dollars were disappearing from a hiding place in the house.  And, according to officials at Beall High in Frostburg, she often skipped school.

Donald Wilburn says he and her father felt they couldn't control her.  "We'd say, 'Where are you going?'" he recalls.  "She'd say, 'None of your business,' and walk out, and there was nothing you could do."

In February last year, a police officer came to Wilburn's door with the news.  Ashley had been found beside a puddle of vomit on the floor of her boyfriend's bedroom, a syringe and spoon next to her foot.

"I knew something was going to happen," says Wilburn, a retired mechanic, "but I didn't think it would be this."

Her boyfriend, James T.  Ahern, who records show did not call an ambulance for fear of arrest, was sentenced to two years in prison for heroin possession.

There is a still a sense of surprise - some say denial - that heroin would travel this far up the interstates, to a place where people had long equated substance abuse with little more than hard drinking.

"People used to say Cumberland is just Mayberry," said Sgt.  Brian Lepley, 33, as he patrolled the city's narrow streets in his police cruiser one night.  "Well, it used to be, but not anymore."

Cumberland, the county seat, is home to about 70 percent of the county's heroin users, police say.  In a city of 22,000, the police seem to know every sad story.

Three high school wrestlers that Lepley once coached are now heroin addicts.  A popular high school cheerleader - "the little rich girl who's got everything," as Lepley put it - now dances at a strip club to support her habit.

The county's drug task force has launched a series of stings over the past year that have snared 80 dealers of heroin and other illegal drugs.  And the Cumberland police have increased evening foot patrols in the city's troubled north and south ends.

But the absence of a single major supplier has complicated the crackdown.

"It's hard to seize a large amount of heroin because it's sold and used so rapidly," says state police Detective Sgt.  James R.  Pyles, who as the narcotics chief of the Allegany County Combined Criminal Investigation task force is often asked to speak to schools and civic groups.  "It's going to be a process to get rid of this problem."

Cumberland has seen a spike in robberies, break-ins, and fraudulent checks that police attribute in large part to addicts desperate to obtain money for a fix.  Last October, according to police reports, two heroin addicts, one brandishing a needle, carjacked a 71-year-old Frostburg woman in daylight in the parking lot of Memorial Hospital in Cumberland.

Dick, the Cumberland police chief, says he is particularly troubled by the discovery over the past six months of syringes on neighborhood streets, a sign that the problem is spilling out of homes and into the open.

"Obviously that's a concern," he says.  "The last thing we want is open-air markets."

Taking action

Michael O.  Twigg, the state's attorney for Allegany County, has seen heroin prosecutions grow from perhaps one a month to several a week at times.  Despite tight budgets, he persuaded the county board of commissioners recently to hire another prosecutor to handle the growing caseload.

Last summer, he adopted a policy of asking for jail time as the penalty for heroin possession.

Public school officials say they have found no heroin in school buildings, despite periodic sweeps by drug-sniffing dogs.  But they have trained guidance counselors to recognize signs of addiction.  This year, middle and high schools started showing Heroin Kills, a video based on the story of a Carroll County teen who died of a heroin overdose, which is meant to scare students straight.

Treatment options remain limited.  The nearest methadone clinic is in Hagerstown, about 60 miles away in neighboring Washington County.  Some recovering addicts drive an hour each way for their daily dose.  But drug counselors worry that users inclined to get help might be put off by the long drive.

Allegany health officials are studying the idea of building a methadone clinic in the county, a move likely to incite disputes.

Last year, a group of health counselors, recovering addicts and families of overdose victims formed Citizens Addressing Unhealthy Substance Epidemic ( CAUSE ).  About 150 people attended the group's first major event - a community forum last month on the dangers of heroin.

The group's leader, Helen F.  Miller, has seen the problem firsthand as director of emergency mental health services at Sacred Heart Hospital.  Walk-ins sick from heroin withdrawal - nauseated, their stomachs cramping - have more than doubled since 2002, she says.

"What we're trying to head off," she says, "is losing any more of our very valuable young people."