Word: heroines
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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RALPH DE JESUS is twelve years old, a 60-lb. wisp of a boy barely four feet tall, with gentle eyes and pale arms so thin that it is almost impossible to believe that they could take a needle. But Ralphie is a junkie. He has not only used heroin, but he has also taken part in muggings and sold drugs to his friends in order to support his habit. Last week Ralphie was in Manhattan's Odyssey House, in a group therapy session with a psychiatrist and a dozen ex-addicts aged 14 to 18. Ralphie wanted...
Ralphie got to Odyssey House from a hospital, where he had been seriously ill with hepatitis, contracted from a dirty needle he used to mainline heroin by injecting it into a vein in his arm. He is probably the youngest addict to surface for treatment in a terrifying wave of heroin use among youth, which has caught up teen-agers and even preadolescent children from city ghettos to fashionable suburbs, from New York ?where the problem is still most severe ?to the West Coast. One 17-year-old at Odyssey House knew Walter Vandermeer, 12, who died...
...Synanon, where success with adult addicts who stay within the supportive framework of the house is high but sadly lower with those who leave completely, Synanon Official Bill Ullman contends: "There is no cure for heroin." Dr. Densen-Gerber believes that teen-agers will be easier to help than adult addicts, if only because they are more resilient physically and emotionally and highly responsive to peer group influence inside a treatment center. But she is at a loss to deal with the Ralphies, the pre-teen junkies who are unable to comprehend that the alternatives to treatment are jail...
...gathering tragedy is that Ralphie is not special. Heroin, long considered the affliction of the criminal, the derelict, the debauched, is increasingly attacking America's children. Part of the dread and the danger of the problem is that it spreads all too invisibly. No one knows how many heroin addicts of any age there are in the U.S. But in New York City alone, where most experts think roughly half the heroin users in the U.S. live, 224 teenagers died from overdoses or heroin-related infections last year, about a quarter of the city's 900 deaths from...
...heroin epidemic has hit us. We must face that fact," says Dr. Donald Louria, president of the New York State Council on Drug Addiction and author of Drug Scene. Dr. Elliot Luby, associate director of Detroit's addict-treating Lafayette Clinic, concurs: "Addiction is really reaching epidemic proportions. You have to look at it as an infectious disease." Epidemic, of course, is a relative term, but as a Chicago psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Schwarz, says: "Now we're seeing it clinically, whereas before we weren't. The kids on heroin all have long histories of drug use." At the California-based...