Smack Epidemic: How Pain Killers are turning youth athletes into heroin addicts

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Heroin is not new or chic, but its use and abuse are spiking. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Center for Health Statistics, heroin-overdose deaths rose gradually from 2000 to '10 but then almost tripled in the following three years to 2.7 deaths per 100,000 people. Heroin use cuts across demographics. Young, old. Male, female. Wealthy, indigent. Urban, rural and, most of all, suburban. But public authorities devoted to prevention and law enforcement, from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), have been struck by a growing concentration in an unlikely subset of users: young athletes.

About a decade ago Jack Riley, the DEA's chief of operations, recognized that high school athletes were becoming "unwitting customers of the cartels," which target people susceptible to prescription-drug abuse. The number of addicts and overdose victims has grown substantially since then. "In the athletic arena, if anything can be likened to a weapon of mass destruction, it's heroin," Riley says. "It is that pervasive now."

While hard data for heroin use among young athletes are difficult to come by, the anecdotal evidence is abundant and alarming. A seven-month SI investigation found overdose victims in baseball, basketball, football, golf, gymnastics, hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis, volleyball and wrestling—from coast to coast. Riley saw this as a volunteer in a youth basketball league in St. Louis. He coached a player who, years after suffering an injury, succumbed to a heroin overdose. The cartels, Riley says, "have developed a strategy, with the help of street gangs, to put heroin in every walk of life. They recognize how vulnerable young athletes are."

??To understand the increasingly busy intersection of heroin and sports, it's essential first to understand the general path to the drug. According to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a full 80% of all users arrive at heroin after abusing opioid painkillers such as OxyContin, Percocet and Vicodin. And according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, one in 15 people who take nonmedical prescription painkillers will try heroin within the next 10 years. While opioid painkillers can cost up to $30 per pill on the black market, heroin, which is molecularly similar, can be purchased for $5 a bag and provides a more potent high. "It's an easy jump," says Harris Stratyner, a New York City addiction specialist.

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