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ANTI-DRUG VIGILANCE URGED

BRANCHVILLE -- Four or five years ago, local authorities would have been shocked if a seventh-grader brought marijuana or pills into school.

These days, there have been instances of Sussex County children that age using heroin, Tim Cooney, a detective with the county Narcotics Task Force, told an audience of about 200 Friday at an anti-drug summit.

Also, a 13-year-old girl in Hardyston was recently found to be addicted to OxyContin -- which she obtained from her parents' medicine cabinet -- and a boy the same age in Sparta was caught growing marijuana plants in his bedroom, Cooney said.

That enterprising boy's parents swore they did not know their son was up to anything illegal.

"They said they had no idea," the detective said with incredulity.  "That's a big part of the problem we have -- parents are trying too hard to be their kid's best friend than to be their parent."

To combat prescription drug abuse -- another growing trend among young people -- both Cooney and Dr.  David Mattes, Newton Memorial Hospital's chief of emergency services, offered parents a piece of simple advice:

"Go home, check your medicine cabinets and clean them out," Mattes said.  Cutting off potential users' access to drugs will solve much of the problem, he said.

Mattes, who presides over the hospital's emergency room, shared a story of parental ignorance involving a teenager who was brought in "practically brain-dead" from a drug overdose.  The boy's mother had come home to find him passed out on a couch, thought he was sleeping, and did not realize anything was wrong until she tried to wake him the next morning.

"I'll never forget the look on that woman's face when I suggested her son may have overdosed," Mattes said.  "She immediately said, 'Oh, no, that's impossible.  Not my son.'"

When the doctor pressed the mother a little further, she became indignant, he said.

The boy survived, but only in a sense: "He can't walk or speak or think like we can," Mattes said.

Cooney and Mattes were two of the speakers at a day-long event called "Smack Down on Heroin," a countywide anti-drug summit held at Selective Insurance's corporate headquarters in Branchville.

Earlier, the audience -- about one-third of which was made up of teens and young adults -- sat rapt as the keynote speaker, James Hall, gave an hour-and-45-minute PowerPoint presentation on nationwide drug trends.

Among the pieces of information that were probably news to most of the audience: One effect of the Sept.  11 attacks has been a decline in Ecstasy and other party drugs in the United States.  Another effect has been a rise in the presence of heroin in less-populated areas like Sussex County.

Much of the Ecstasy in the United States, where the drug surged in popularity in the late 1990s before falling off dramatically after 2001, was smuggled in by airline passengers from Europe, Hall said.  That changed after the terrorist attacks led to much tighter airport security measures.

The same increase in security, however, prevented drug gangs from bringing as many large stashes of illegal substances into Manhattan, he said.  This led to more drugs in the outer boroughs and smaller urban areas like Newark.

Newark, Hall said, is a leader in the national drug market in two important ways: The city's heroin is the purest ( about 60 percent ) and the cheapest ( 33 cents per milligram ) in the country.

The price, dramatically lower than Newark's four competitors in the purity department, elicited a collective gasp from the audience.

Hall also alluded to what Cooney would later confirm -- that heroin use is being seen among younger and younger teens.

"In the past, heroin was usually at the end of a long list in a drug-taking career," he said.  "Now, it's like a gateway drug.  Adolescents are doing it."

As director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Substance Abuse at Nova Southeastern University in Davie, Fla., Hall has monitored national trends by collecting data on drug-related deaths, medical emergencies and arrest patterns for nearly 25 years.

Although not all of his statistics are grim, the positive ones come with qualifiers.

Drug use as a whole, for example, has seen a significant decline among adolescents over the past several years.  But at the same, the types of drugs kids are abusing have grown more dangerous.

The summit was sponsored jointly by Selective, the hospital, Sussex County Community College, the county Narcotics Task Force, the county department of education, the Center for Prevention and Counseling and The New Jersey Herald.