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Morphine seeped into Roger Drewiske's arm, dulling the pain in his shoulder as he lay in a hospital bed. He was 51 years old and the badly blocked artery could have killed him.

At least he had his teenage son, Phil, at his bedside, holding his hand.

The bond between the father and son could have been like it was in the old days when he spent hours with Phil outside in the yard in Hudson, playing make-believe baseball games until the sun went down. When he took Phil hunting and gave him a cigar to celebrate his first buck; when he passed on his love of hockey and World War II history.

But in the hospital that day, Roger noticed something about his son's hand. It was clammy. The boy looked as if he could have been the patient. Phil, a newly minted high school graduate, withdrew his hand. He began pacing the room, sweating heavily. Roger couldn't figure out what was wrong.

Only later did it dawn on him. It was the morphine. The boy coveted his dad's medication.

"It got me all riled up," Phil admitted later.

The son had started on prescription pain pills early in seventh grade and by that day in June 2009, he had progressed to heroin. And it was heroin he would go to that night after he left his father's bedside.

"I look back on it now," Roger would say, "everything was so damn obvious."

In truth, it was years before the father suspected anything. In middle school, an educator once explained the boy's wild temper and erratic behavior.

"It's got to be drugs."

"Oh no," Roger fired back. "Not my son."

Five years had passed since then. Roger was only beginning to understand the trouble his son was in. He was in good company in Hudson, where most of the adults had yet to realize what heroin was doing to their city of 13,000.

In his darkest moments, the father, an insurance agent, would think about the policy he'd purchased on Phil's life years ago.

And he would imagine having to file the claim.

A growing problem

The Drewiskes, an upper middle class family, had moved to Hudson from Inver Grove Heights, Minn., a suburb of the Twin Cities, when Phil was in fourth grade. Nestled on the St. Croix River about a 15 minute drive from St. Paul, Hudson won over Roger and Judy with its quieter lifestyle and, in their view, better schools. They bought a spacious ranch house on a secluded cul-de-sac.

Any time they wanted to go into the cities, there was Interstate 94, which passed through Hudson.

But the interstate, which runs from Port Huron, Mich., at the Canadian border, through Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and the Twin Cities, all the way west to Billings, Mont., also put Hudson on a major trafficking route for the drugs flowing from Mexican cartels. When heroin hit Wisconsin hard, Hudson became one of the state's worst victims.

The first of the city's recent heroin deaths occurred in 2008 and 2010.

The situation worsened in 2011, the most recent year for which there are national statistics. The U.S. saw 4,397 heroin deaths, a rate of about 1.4 deaths per 100,000 population.

Hudson had three heroin deaths that year, putting its rate at 23 deaths per 100,000, more than 15 times the national rate.

And that was before things really got bad. In an eight-month period between the summers of 2012 and 2013, the city had seven fatal heroin overdoses. None of the victims was older than 30. Phil Drewiske knew every one of them.

And there was a much harder truth the father and son would have to accept: Phil had introduced some of those casualties to the drug.

Hudson had a wider problem. Deals were taking place in parking lots at Target, convenience stores and fast food restaurants. Kids were shooting up in the bathrooms at city parks with needles purchased from Walmart. They were getting high in parked cars overlooking the St. Croix River and the Indian burial mounds.

"You can't turn a blind eye," said St. Croix County Sheriff John Shilts. "You can't take the approach that: 'My child would never do that.' We're all in this and it could happen to any of us. It's not an affliction of the poor, or an affliction of only people at risk. It crosses all boundaries."

And it wasn't simply the heroin that was coming north. Mexican cartels began sending their soldiers to the Twin Cities, a development reflected in a series of gruesome crimes.

In 2012, a St. Paul man was murdered with a screwdriver, bayonet and samurai sword; last April, three drug enforcers flew to Minnesota, kidnapped a teenage couple in St. Paul and tortured them in a basement for hours.

That kind of violence hasn't found its way to Hudson, where Shilts' department has 36 officers, eight of them assigned to investigating drugs. He's asking for three more drug officers for 2015.

What they do see in Hudson are the burglaries and property crimes that spring from a drug culture hiding in plain sight.

Life father, like son

Hockey is the big sport in Hudson and like many a father and son, Roger and Phil bonded over the game. They shared the bracing chill of ice rinks in the early morning, the father strapping on the son's gear for him.

The Drewiskes were local hockey legends; Hudson's rink was recently renamed for a relative.

Phil, athletic from an early age, had tried other sports. Nothing made the blood rush through his veins like hockey.

"I love the feeling when you get out on the ice. I love hearing the puck hit the stick. I thrive off that adrenaline," he said. "It's the rush of never knowing what's going to happen. You're taking a pass and risking that you're just going to get dropped. It's not all set in stone what you're going to do."

Roger and Judy Drewiske's older son, Matt, is developmentally disabled and took part in Special Olympics, but not in other sports. Phil was his father's hard-driving sportsman.

Still, the boy was a handful. Fearless on the ice, he couldn't face needles in the doctor's office.

Roger taught him to fish. Phil always wanted to stay out longer; just one more cast.

Roger taught him to hunt. Phil shot his first buck at 12, and by 16, he was insisting he could drag his deer from the woods without any help.

Even as the son rushed headlong into adolescence, a part of him stayed close to his father.

"Dad," he said, after shooting that first buck, "the deer did exactly what you said it would. The does came first; the buck was the last one."

Since he could not roughhouse with Matt, Phil looked to his dad. They played together like brothers.

Roger, the son of a World War II vet, liked history, and that turned out to be the only subject Phil enjoyed. Otherwise school went poorly. Phil disliked being told what to do and despised the routine of sitting in class.

He got caught swearing at Holy Trinity School. By third grade his school marks "had gone to crap," the father said.

Early in seventh grade, another boy brought some of his father's pain pills to school. Phil, the first to try anything, took one and swallowed. It was OxyContin. Fifteen minutes later Phil was vomiting in class. Still, the pill gave him the feeling that rules did not apply to him. From then on, he met the boy every morning before school. He started with half a pill a day and worked his way up to a full one.

Phil grew more volatile. When Roger asked him to clean the bathroom, the boy punched a hole in the living room wall. One day, the school called about Phil; when Roger arrived, there was his son, shouting into the face of the 6-foot-4-inch assistant principal. Phil was 5 feet tall.

Calls about Phil became frequent. The father soon tired of dropping work to drive 20 miles to school every time the kid broke the rules or mouthed off to a teacher.

"They were calling me, tattling on him," Roger said. "I was like, 'You guys handle it.' I wanted to do what dads are supposed to do and be the disciplinarian, and I tried to do that, but in middle school the wheels were coming off."

In eighth grade, Phil's poor grades got him held back a year. Roger waited to tell him until late in the summer, while the family was returning from watching horse races at Canterbury Park.

The boy wailed in the car. He couldn't bear to go back to school, to have the other kids see him.

That year, he stopped caring what happened to him.

In high school, Phil wound up in the office of his counselor, Kristin Nyquist, at least 100 times, according to both. Nyquist saw Roger many times too, enough to understand the father-son relationship.

"Phil was everything to his dad," Nyquist said, recalling how hard the father fought to make sure his son remained eligible for hockey. "I think Phil relied on his dad heavily. He didn't act like it because that wouldn't be cool. But he knew he could count on him."

In 2006, three weeks before his 16th birthday, Phil went to a party in St. Cloud, Minn. He had some pills, but a guy at the party offered him "something better." Phil had never seen the brownish powder. But he snorted it and it was like rushing from center ice. No fear.

"It felt like the most euphoric, relaxing, non-caring feeling I have ever felt," he said. "I melted into the couch. Nothing mattered to me. ... My knees buckled and I felt like I was on Cloud 9. I felt like God."

A new world of risk

About the time Phil was getting his first taste of heroin, the drug was on the verge of a rebirth nationwide.

The cost of OxyContin and other prescription pain medications was rising across the country. Doctors were more careful about prescribing the medications, and drug companies had changed the way they manufactured the pills, making them more difficult to abuse.

Addicts had crushed pain pills to bypass the time-release coating and proceed straight to the active ingredient. But companies now made the pills so they couldn't be crushed without releasing an agent that would block the drug's effect.

Heroin, chemically similar to medications like OxyContin, had become cheap, as little as $10 for one-tenth of a milligram, enough to get high once or twice. Hudson Police Sgt. Geoff Willems said the heroin appearing across the river in the Twin Cities was up to 80% pure, four times the purity of the 1970s version.

"Prescription drugs were harder to acquire. At the same time, the cartels were flooding the market with heroin at a low price," said John Mantsch, a Marquette University neuroscientist who specializes in addiction research.

While the pain pills carried an air of legitimacy — they were prescribed by doctors, after all — heroin was still viewed as a dirty drug. The reputation helped hide the age and demographic groups who were falling prey to the drug in places like Hudson.

"I grew up in Green Bay. I always thought the heroin addict was the alley-sleeping, Dumpster-diving junkie in the city," Willems said.

When the Hudson officer began to see heroin spread through his city a few years ago, he found addicts across the age spectrum. Some were teenagers in high school.

"They were student athletes. They were getting straight A's. They were in the marching band," Willems said. "They were kids from upper middle class families, intact families. Dabble in marijuana, sure. Prescription pills, sure. Ecstasy, meth maybe. But heroin? That never really crossed our minds."

Addicts who switched from pills to heroin entered a new world of risk. Often they were unaware of the substances mixed in with the heroin: anything from methamphetamine to fentanyl, a powerful opioid used for cancer patients.

Mixing substances has led to some of the overdoses, said Sheriff Shilts. Overdoses can also occur when recovering addicts suffer a relapse, and consume a large dose after they've lost their tolerance for the drug.

"Heroin is one of the most physically demanding addictions," Willems said. During withdrawal, "you feel like you are going to die."

Slipping away

Phil's childhood fear of needles kept him from injecting heroin at first. But when fellow users told him that the high from injecting was the best he would ever experience, he had them guide the needle into his arm.

In school, he often snorted. He would pull the ink cartridge out of a Bic pen, sprinkle heroin into it and then snort in class or in the school bathroom.

Within a few weeks, he got so hooked on heroin that he stopped caring about the needle. He began injecting daily.

Roger noticed changes in his son.

In the summer before his senior year, Phil vanished for weeks at a time, rarely telling his parents where he was. He'd take off to Chicago or Milwaukee or Minneapolis and binge on heroin. The drug untethered him from routine, allowing him to drive to places and see things on the spur of the moment.

He met prostitutes and meth makers and Mexican dealers. He visited a store in the Twin Cities that sold the strangest things, hazardous material suits and other curiosities. No two days were the same.

Even when Phil stayed home, his father felt him slipping away, becoming someone he barely recognized.

In hockey games, Phil could play like a rock star one night, then be floaty and flat-footed the next, as if his mind were elsewhere. Parents of the other players kept asking Roger: What's wrong with Phil?

Roger didn't know. He was afraid to know. He gave Phil his debit card to get pizza with friends. Days later the father learned his account was overdrawn.

"I couldn't give him money," Roger said. "It wasn't going to get spent on what it was supposed to."

If Phil asked for gas money, Roger took the car and filled it himself. He imagined excuses for Phil's behavior — maybe he's drinking too much with friends, maybe he's smoking pot. Bad, but not the end of the world.

One night that summer, Roger got a call from a number he didn't know and heard a voice he didn't recognize: "Come get Phil." He found his son on a street corner, some kid holding him up. On the ride home, Phil didn't talk. He would laugh for a few minutes, then cry, laugh, then cry.

Roger figured the boy was drunk. It puzzled him, though. He didn't smell booze.

The father began searching his son's room for answers. He found about 100 empty cans of chewing tobacco under the bed. Pens, all pulled apart. Little baggies, all empty.

Phil began placing pieces of tape around the room, at the top of his dresser, over his door. When he came home, he'd find the tape broken — a telltale sign of his father's curiosity. Phil went to greater lengths to avoid detection, stashing drugs inside vents and other hiding places. This is what they'd come to — the father and son who'd once played together like brothers had settled into a kind of Cold War.

Even some of Phil's closest friends could no longer trust him. While high, he began breaking into nearby houses to steal. Roger noticed once that Phil had eight GPSs in his car; the father considered trying to find the real owners to return them.

In May 2009, a drug buddy encouraged Phil to break into his best friend's house, just a few minutes from the Drewiske home. Phil was so high that he agreed. He remembered a side door that had never worked and the two walked right in. Phil took a $50 bill and a bottle of Jose Cuervo. His accomplice took considerably more — jewelry, computer equipment, golf clubs.

Whatever you do, Phil told him, do not pawn this.

Afterward, the best friend asked Phil if he'd heard anything about the burglary. Each time Phil gave the same cold reply: "I'll keep my ears open."

Another crisis loomed. As high school drew to a close, Roger was desperate to see his son graduate. Somehow, Phil still had a chance to get his diploma. He would need at least a B on an English final exam. He scored a B+.

"That was the happiest day of my life," Roger recalled, "when I found out he graduated."

Phil received about $1,000 in the graduation cards from family and friends.

He bought his first half-ounce of heroin.

Searching for answers

The day after Phil's graduation party, Roger had to be rushed to the hospital with a 90% blockage in an artery. He spent three nights in the hospital. Phil spent much of the time on heroin; it was the way he shut out the world. The truth was he feared his dad would die.

"It's like I despised my parents," Phil said, "but when it came down to it, I felt like I could turn to my dad because I could talk to him like a friend."

He kept in touch with Nyquist, his guidance counselor, grabbing coffee every few weeks. He didn't even try covering up his heroin use.

"It wasn't like an elephant in the room," Nyquist said. "He always talked about it. I would tell him that he didn't look good and he'd say, 'Aw, Nyquist.'"

Phil had lost about 20 pounds. His hair was dry, his face pockmarked. He couldn't look her in the eye or hold a train of thought.

By then his veins were collapsing. Some nights, in his basement, he jabbed himself in the arm, again and again, looking for a vein. The sink filled with blood and he stayed up for hours, talking to Lucifer.

Roger kept searching for benign explanations — the blood in the sink came from nosebleeds, the late night talk was just insomnia. But it was getting harder to believe.

"I found my faith really shaken by this," said Roger, a Catholic.

Unable to sleep, the father paced the living room at night. Twice he saw a gray apparition that appeared to walk into Phil's room. He thought it was a demon.

Roger put his rosary in Phil's room. Phil removed it.

He put a crucifix on the wall. Phil took it down.

Finally, he sprinkled holy water in the boy's room.

Hitting bottom

His accomplice in the burglary of his best friend's house eventually got caught pawning items at the Mall of America. He told authorities about Phil.

Police talked to Roger first. They had him call his son and persuade him to come to the station. The father and son hadn't spoken in three weeks.

Roger was still there when his son arrived. The boy "looked like hell," he said. Phil was gaunt and pasty. He was wearing a long-sleeve shirt in the middle of July. Phil admitted the burglary. He thought he would get probation.

Phil was given 90 days in the county jail and told that if he got into trouble again, he'd serve time in prison.

Before starting the jail sentence, he went to rehab at a Hazelden clinic in Minnesota, where he experienced the worst withdrawals of his life. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't speak. He threw up until there was nothing left and he was dry heaving. His body was a wretched contradiction — sweating, yet cold.

Phil did not make it through the 90-day program. He broke the rules and got kicked out after 31 days. The clinic helped find a place for him at a facility in South Dakota where he continued drug treatment.

At Hazelden, he met a girl who lived in Minnesota and was going through withdrawals too. Men and women are separated at Hazelden, but Phil and the girl passed secret notes during his time there.

Once both got out of treatment, they began dating and a year later the young woman gave birth to their son, Blake. Phil got his first view of the baby while in county jail; during a visit his girlfriend pressed a copy of the baby's sonogram up to the glass.

After drug treatment, he returned home changed, or so it seemed. He took his father around the house pointing out all of the places where he'd stashed drugs.

A few days later, he was back on heroin. It felt as good as the first time.

When Roger and Judy found out, they packed his clothes in a duffel bag and threw it outside. Within a week Phil was sleeping on a park bench in St. Paul. His girlfriend called and Roger drove to pick up his son. He didn't know what else to do.

Phil found trouble again and again. He blew off meetings with his probation officer. He failed drug tests.

He started using so much methamphetamine that his skin peeled. After injecting a speedball, a mix of cocaine and heroin, "my eyes shut off like a TV screen," he said. The blindness lasted several minutes.

Phil wound up in drug court, where he argued with the judge. He got sent back to the county jail six more times, mostly for failing drug tests or violating court rules.

Finally, authorities had enough. Phil would begin serving a three-year sentence for the burglary.

He got his prison number: 556485.

Adjusting to the surroundings

The bus ride to prison took eight hours.

On a chilly evening in January 2012, Phil looked out the window and saw his destination, ringed with fences and aglow with spotlights: the Dodge Correctional Institution at Waupun, central receiving area for inmates in the state prison system.

Inside Dodge, his eyes scanned the three levels of steel-doored cells, and his ears adjusted to the din of men screaming and hollering. The first few days, Phil kept quiet, shaken by his surroundings, compliant with the new routine. Every morning he woke at 5:30. At 6, he stood by his bed for inspection.

The place was a shock to Roger and Judy Drewiske, too. The one time they visited, Roger saw the guards with high-powered rifles peering down from the towers and it hit him: "We're in a prison. We're actually in a prison. My son's in a prison."

When the visit ended and they walked outside, Roger cried.

In Dodge, Phil met one prisoner who shot his wife while high and another who'd killed his children. All around him he saw men he did not want to become. He thought of his son outside, and the father he hoped to be someday.

"You sit in a cell," Phil said, "and you find out things about yourself."

He brushed his teeth every day. He made his bed. He kept his cell clean.

He spent much of the time writing long letters. Writing comforted him. He made sure his handwriting was neat and checked his grammar, the kinds of things the teachers in school had insisted on.

He wrote to his father virtuallyevery day. On the back of one letter, he wrote: "To the world you are one person, to one person you are the world."

As soon as the father got a letter, he sat down to write a reply. Roger sent photocopies of old family photographs. He talked about his grandfather, how he'd lost his farm in the Depression, how the family moved to Laona in Forest County and lived in a tarpaper shack.

A moment of true love

At 4 a.m. one morning in March, Phil boarded a bus for the trip to Prairie du Chien, a medium-security prison within sight of the Mississippi River. Other prisoners there knew about Hudson and its problem; one said he went there to get his dope.

Even in prison, Phil learned, it was hard to escape drugs. Inmates offered him methamphetamine and marijuana. "I said, 'No.' I had to say it a few times."

The Department of Corrections said it conducts random inspections and investigates all allegations of drug use or possession, but admitted, "contraband does occasionally make it into our institutions."

In Prairie du Chien, Phil began going to the prison library, reading books and articles on finances and the brain. He took classes in subjects like workplace communication and parenting, earning six college credits. He even took an anger management course, though he admitted the class itself angered him.

Phil learned not to act on emotion, to be patient.

On July 25, 2012, Phil turned 22. He’d broken up with Blake’s mother, so his parents brought the boy to see him at Prairie du Chien. At first, the 21-month-old was shy, hiding behind Roger. He warmed up to Phil, though.

"You could feel your heart melting," Phil said. "It was one of the first moments of true love that I felt."

One prison program allowed fathers to read to their children by making DVD recordings of themselves. Phil dressed like the Cat in the Hat and read "Green Eggs and Ham" and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" to Blake. He spent two weeks designing a pop-up card for the boy.

Roger liked what fatherhood was doing to his son. Phil kept taking classes. He was on course to qualify for early release, news that made Roger proud.

The two men kept exchanging letters, sometimes attempting to explain the erosion of their relationship during the heroin years.

"Dear Phil: I got your letter...Made me shake, shiver," Roger wrote on March 7, 2013. "I can certainly understand why you couldn't sleep. I am glad to hear you don't ever want to be in that hell hole again...

"You ask if I was afraid of you. At the time I wasn't, didn't think you would hit me or hurt me. ...Mom and Matt were terrified of you. It took a while to figure out how bad this was. Those devil eyes shook me to the bone. ...It wasn't you...

"We now have hope for you."

The community comes together

Phil was transferred to the minimum security prison in Chippewa Falls to await early release. On April 22, 2013, guards opened two sets of electric gates and Phil walked out. Roger had parked the family's white Mountaineer right in front of the last gate.

Phil was scared of returning to society and to Hudson. At Walmart, he froze up trying to choose which deodorant to buy. He felt eyes staring at him. Roger read the fear on his son's face.

"Phil," the father said, "they don't know where you've been."

In July 2013, after a string of heroin overdoses in Hudson, a local group organized a public forum at First Presbyterian Church. It was called "Heroin in Hudson: A Community Crisis." It featured law enforcement, Hazelden officials and Phil and Roger. The forum drew almost 500 people.

Phil spoke of the addiction years with sadness, but also with humor. He joked about how it was nice to finally be in the same room as a police officer without getting questioned. But looking back, he said, heroin made him "a monster." Shame burned his face and choked his voice as he described the burglary at his best friend's house.

Roger described the boy he almost lost, but said he was finally optimistic about his son's sobriety. He recounted something his older son, Matt, had said.

"Phil is nice now, and that makes me happy."

More parents helping

Since that forum, there have been no heroin fatalities reported in Hudson, according to St. Croix County medical examiner Patty Schachtner. She said the forum was a turning point for the city: Heroin was finally brought into the open, and more parents and teachers knew what to look for.

"No one else was going to talk about it beforehand," Schachtner said.

She suspects the drop in heroin deaths is also due to Narcan, a drug that counteracts heroin overdoses. Gov. Scott Walker signed a bill earlier this year making Narcan more widely available for first responders.

But Schachtner isn't satisfied that the heroin problem has been solved. Since September 2013, she said, the county has recorded 38 non-natural deaths; 23 thus far were connected to drugs, mostly prescription pills, the most prominent precursor to heroin. One victim had 24 drugs in her system.

"It's been one step forward, two steps back," Schachtner said. "Whenever you think you've fixed the problem, you just have another problem that comes up."

She thinks the home is the best place to catch heroin problems before they start. And now there are more parents helping on that front.

One is Karen Hale, whose 21-year-old daughter, Alysa Ivy, overdosed and died in a Super 8 motel in May 2013. Since then, Hale started working with recovered addicts and their families to ensure a full recovery. She said she's helped more than 20 young people in Hudson who have overcome heroin addiction.

She still meets parents who think heroin is a drug from ghettos and large cities, not one that visits towns like Hudson. Not enough people, she said, understand what Phil, or her daughter, went through.

"Your child is always being called back to that world," she said. "As a parent, all you have is one word, and that's hope."

Seeking a quiet life

Phil, now 24, doesn't find it helpful to think of his recovery as day-to-day. Focusing on the day and the moment was what got him hooked on the heroin lifestyle. He prefers looking far into the future, not fearing the unknown that lies ahead.

Roger is still amazed that his son has stayed clean, but he also thinks the boy can be immature sometimes — "like he's 16." Little things, like stress from work, still overwhelm him.

Phil realizes this too. At times, the thought of throwing away his worries and escaping into a heroin haze comes back to him like a reflex.

Remaining in Hudson at times makes it harder. He lives with his parents, and when he drives around the city, it seems as if every place reminds him of a nightmare: the park bathroom where he shot up and passed out for hours, the parking lots where he used to buy drugs, the mansion where his friend overdosed.

Still, he has found a new girlfriend, and a job as a carpenter's apprentice, which he's held for several months. The work gives him structure, routine. He sees Blake every few weeks; he is teaching him to play hockey.

Strolling along the St. Croix River, Phil watches other families walk and chat with one another, seemingly content to live without the thrills he used to chase. Their quieter life is what he now aspires to, for himself and especially for Blake.

"I don't want my son to be me," Phil said. "I don't know what the hell I would do if I walked in and saw him shooting heroin up. That would blow me apart."

***

Where to get help

Narcotics Anonymous holds meetings seven days a week in Milwaukee and Waukesha counties. A list of meetings can be found at namilwaukee.org. Residents of Milwaukee and Waukesha counties can call (866) 913-3837 for more information on meetings or to report a drug crisis. Residents in other parts of Wisconsin can call (800) 240-0276. A schedule for Narcotics Anonymous meetings in other parts of Wisconsin can be found at wisconsinna.org.

Several websites list drug treatment centers in Milwaukee and around Wisconsin, including:

■ local.soberrecovery.com

■ heroin.net

■ addiction-treatment.com

■ alltreatment.com

■ samhsa.gov/treatment

The National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence lists these signs of prescription drug abuse, the most common gateway to heroin addiction:

■ Stealing, forging or appearing to "lose" prescriptions

■ Getting prescriptions from more than one doctor

■ Excessive mood swings and changes in sleep habits

■ Taking doses higher than what is prescribed

■ Appearing either extremely energetic or sedated

***

Signs of addiction

The Drug Enforcement Administration lists these signs of heroin addiction:

■ Drowsiness

■ Slow breathing

■ Small pupils

■ Warm flushing of skin

■ Sluggish appearance

■ Nausea