Heroin continues to kill the young people of Averill Park, New York, and its surrounding communities at an alarming rate.

The death toll is approaching a dozen fatal overdoses over the last three years in Sand Lake, population 10,000. Averill Park is part of the town if Sand Lake.

There were two more deaths in September, strewing fresh grief and frustration, leaving residents groping for solutions in heroin's deadly contrails.

Alexandra Wilkins, 25, a 2008 graduate of Averill Park High School who had worked as a cook at Dinosaur Bar-B-Que in Troy, died Sept. 1.

"I don't want this to happen to any other families, so I'm speaking out about Alex," said her mother, Debra Wilkins, of East Poestenkill. "People think a fatal heroin overdose can't happen to their son or daughter. But it can happen to anybody. It's happened again and again in this town."

Sean Murdick, 22, a 2011 graduate of Averill Park High School and co-captain of the football team, died Sept. 28.

On a wall of the eCore Vape & Lounge along Main Avenue in neighboring Wynantskill, owner Eric Dyer, 25, hung a commemorative black T-shirt he printed with Murdick's portrait and the words: "Rest In Power. Finally Set Free."

Dyer is giving proceeds to Murdick's family in West Sand Lake.

"We're tired of going to funerals and fed up with heroin. It keeps hitting closer and closer to home. It's terrifying," said Dyer, whose brother, Dan, 30, is a recovering addict who used heroin.

"How many more T-shirts do I have to hang up on the wall before we do something?" Dyer asked.

"I've had my eyes opened up to what heroin can do to a person," said Casey Dessingue, 22, who works at a T-shirt screen-printing business and frequently drops by the vape shop. His 28-year-old sister has been clean for a year after battling heroin addiction. "When she was using, she was not the sister I knew. We confronted her and got her into treatment because I wasn't ready to bury my sister."

Dyer and his buddies in what they call "the vaping community" are working on addressing what they see as the biggest contributor to alcohol and drug addiction in the quasi-rural area: boredom.

"There's nothing to do out here," said Dyer, who defends vaping as a better alternative to smoking cigarettes. "It's either sit at home or go out at night and get drunk or high."

Their plan is to start a community center for twentysomethings who could come to their vape shop instead of abusing drugs. Young people could hang out, shoot pool, watch movies, play video games, hone their vaping smoke ring tricks and tinker with their vaping devices — which they discuss in minute technical detail in the manner of automotive gearheads.

They want to call their safe place No Idle Time. "Idle time is the devil's workshop," said Dyer, who has Scripture passages tattooed on his arms. He discusses the Bible with his business partner, Cameron Demers, 25, of East Greenbush, who's completing an online degree through Liberty University, a Christian school based in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Meanwhile, the level of frustration over the slow-motion calamity of heroin addiction keeps rising along the rolling farmland and scattered developments bisected by routes 43 and 150.

"Kids are still dying and it seems like we've reached a standstill. Nobody knows what the next step should be," said Linda Martino, a mother of six from West Sand Lake. She got involved with a grassroots Averill Park group, Rage Against Alcohol and Drugs, or RAAD.

What had been a shameful secret three years ago exploded in the community's consciousness one morning in July 2013. A 23-year-old local man, an Averill Park High School graduate, stumbled out of the bathroom of the Stewart's shop on Route 43 in West Sand Lake and asked a clerk to call 911. He said he had shot up some bad heroin. He collapsed outside the store and was pronounced dead at Samaritan Hospital in Troy.

An overflow crowd of residents packed a meeting at a local firehouse shortly after that shocking heroin death three summers ago. Averill Park became the first community in the Capital Region to go public with its anger, fear, and ignorance about the spike in heroin addiction that has swept across the Capital Region, New York state, and the country in what public health officials have labeled a heroin epidemic.

The death rate from heroin overdoses doubled in 28 states studied from 2010 to 2012, increasing from 1.0 to 2.1 per 100,000 population, reflecting an increase in the number of deaths from 1,779 to 3,635, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. That is the most recent large-scale national statistical study of heroin deaths.

In New York state, heroin overdoses surged from 215 in 2008 to 478 in 2012, the most recent year for which statewide statistics are available. Hospital admissions for heroin and prescription opioids skyrocketed 222 percent across upstate New York between 2004 and 2013. The most common entryway seemed to be prescription painkillers such as oxycodone that addicted young people to opiods. They switched to cheaper, available street heroin after a 2013 state law called New York's Internet System for Over-Prescribing Act, or I-STOP, shut off opioids.

"The police have to take the gloves off and go in and arrest the heroin dealers," said Jim Hannan, 74, of Eagle Mills, landlord of the vape lounge and owner of a trash bin rental company. "We need to stop glossing over the problem, nail the punks dealing this stuff and run them out of town."

He wants to see cash rewards for information leading to the arrest of heroin dealers, along with additional treatment options.

"It's heartbreaking and devastating. There's still too much shame and stigma over heroin addiction. We need to remove that," Martino said. She stopped going to monthly meetings of RAAD at Algonquin Middle School as attendance dwindled. She is lobbying state legislators for more treatment funds.

Betty Thomas of Averill Park whose second husband died of a cocaine overdose, is an organizer of The Living Room, a faith-based support group with two dozen members. It started in a person's living room and now meets weekly at Trinity Lutheran Church in West Sand Lake.

"We're spinning our wheels around here without any real solutions. Our group is trying to help recovering addicts with sustainable, long-term recovery," Thomas said. Their method is to build relationships to keep recovering addicts from feeling isolated and hopeless.

In addition to their support group meetings, The Living Room members hope to start a program patterned after a national group called Drugs Over Dinner that provides a toolkit to plan, host and moderate a conversation during a meal about drugs and addiction.

"I'm not going to sugarcoat it. We absolutely have a problem with heroin in this community," said James Hoffman, superintendent of the Averill Park Central School District for the past four years. "But it's bigger than our schools and Averill Park. It's a national problem."

Hoffman said high school administrators are doing their part with several unannounced drug sweeps of the school and school grounds by local law enforcement. "The last three times we found absolutely no drugs," Hoffman said. If drugs are found, school rules dictate a minimum five-day suspension for offending students and Hoffman says he'd like to make the penalties even tougher. But there is parental resistance.

"Parents fought against tougher penalties and if we do catch drugs on a kid, some parents come to us and said they don't want the school disciplining their child and they'll take care of it and they become uncooperative," Hoffman said. "We don't have our heads in the sand, but we need parents to support us too."

In a recent anonymous survey about drug use in Averill Park High School, just 1 percent of students said they believed there was heroin in the school, Hoffman said.

He placed blame on physicians whom he believes cavalierly prescribe opioid painkillers.

"They're handing out synthetic heroin and it's still way too easy to get it. Kids are still raiding their parents' medicine cabinets too," Hoffman said.

He is attacking the heroin problem in the schools with awareness and education programs. "Kids think because painkillers come from doctors they're OK. We're teaching them the dangers of experimenting with prescription pills," Hoffman said.

Hoffman speaks frequently with police investigators. They told him a hardcore group of about 20 heroin addicts are causing the bulk of the problems with the drug in the Averill Park area and the users are under surveillance in the hope of snaring dealers.

"Our investigators are aggressively pursuing arrests in that area," said Pat Russo, Rensselaer County Undersheriff. "We're working on it every day, trying to stop the flow of heroin from the cities out to the rural areas. I wouldn't say we've made much of a dent yet."

Russo's investigators collaborate with local police, State Police and federal drug investigators with small victories. In May, a 31-year-old Schodack man was arrested and charged with multiple drug offenses after he was busted at his mother's house in Schodack with 1,550 bags of heroin and $7,000 in cash. The heroin, with an estimated street value of $15,000, was intended for buyers in Schodack, Averill Park, and Albany County, authorities said. The drug bust was a joint investigation between the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, sheriff's office and Watervliet and Schodack police.

"It's not just a law enforcement problem, it's a societal problem," Russo said. "We can only beat heroin through education, prevention and enforcement."

Such talk comes too late for Wilkins, who described a harrowing two weeks from the time her daughter told her parents she was addicted to heroin and needed help to the time she died of a fatal overdose at her apartment in Troy.

Wilkins's voice choked with emotion as she described a frustrating cycle of her daughter's failed attempts at detoxification at local hospitals and an inability to get her admitted to local treatment programs because there were no openings.

"We didn't know anything about heroin addiction," said Wilkins, 56, who works as a technical analyst for Key Bank. She and her husband, Timothy, could not save their daughter from her fatal overdose after less than a year using the drug.

At her funeral, the pastor spoke openly about the young woman's heroin addiction and encouraged young people in attendance to get help for their addictions.

"We didn't tell anybody at first because we thought it was a passing phase and our daughter would get through it," Wilkins said. "We have to keep talking about this."

From: Times Union

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