Addicted to Drugs on Staten Island
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
New York Times FEB. 14, 2014
Late last month, Corey Epstein, a peripheral cast member on the reality television series “Jerseylicious,” was arrested along with 20 others in a drug sweep on Staten Island that grew out of a 16-month investigation called Operation Silent Hill. Mr. Epstein was charged with selling three oxycodone pills to an undercover officer, in front of his house on Nehring Avenue in New Springville, an area that had been largely rural until the 1970s, when malls and what has since become the vernacular architectural style of Staten Island — the deep-backed, two-family split level with a high, occasionally baroque stoop — imbued it and so much of Staten Island with a sense of inanimate prosperity.
Across the country, one of the most significant social shifts of the 21st century has been the migration of drug use from centers of urban poverty to places that are suburban, white and middle- or marginally middle-class. In New York, in recent years, these changes have made Staten Island a particular nexus of affliction. Its death rate from heroin overdose, and from the broader category of opioids, including oxycodone and other painkillers, is the highest of any borough in the city. From 2005 to 2011, according to city health statistics, as fatalities from overdosing on drugs decreased citywide, the death rate from opioid overdose on Staten Island nearly quadrupled, leaving it more than three times that of the Bronx.
What these new patterns of drug usage so readily remind us is that it is not marijuana that ought to be feared as a pathway to more insidious forms of addiction, it is those substances that remain perfectly legal. Jacqueline Fiore, the executive director of the Staten Island Y.M.C.A. Counseling Service, a highly respected drug treatment facility, said she and her colleagues in the recovery world had anticipated and worried about a heroin problem for several years because of the soaring rates of painkiller addiction they were seeing. Prescription painkillers had been notoriously easy to get on Staten Island until a state initiative implemented more rigorous monitoring two years ago.
Enforcement drove up the black-market price of pills like OxyContin, to about $25 each, on Staten Island, at a time when the cost of heroin was coming down. In 2010, 6 percent of patients going to the Y.M.C.A. Service — which has one branch on Staten Island’s North Shore and another on the comparatively affluent South Shore — entered the program addicted to heroin. Last year, that figure rose to 20 percent.
One morning last week at the South Shore facility in Eltingville, I met two of these patients, one of them a 27-year-old woman, Rebecca Ann Wolfson, who has been sober for 11 months, after more than 15 unsuccessful attempts at rehabilitation. Ms. Wolfson grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with a mother who was an OxyContin addict until Ms. Wolfson was 10. As a child she would accompany her mother on drug runs, she told me. Later, as a young teenager, Ms. Wolfson developed a drinking problem so severe that she wound up in the hospital with pancreatitis. Eventually, she had her gall bladder removed. After her surgery she was given a prescription for Percocet. From there she fell easily into heroin use, and a boyfriend became addicted as well, she told me."
continued http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/nyregion/addicted-to-drugs-on-staten-island.html?_r=0
By GINIA BELLAFANTE
New York Times FEB. 14, 2014
Late last month, Corey Epstein, a peripheral cast member on the reality television series “Jerseylicious,” was arrested along with 20 others in a drug sweep on Staten Island that grew out of a 16-month investigation called Operation Silent Hill. Mr. Epstein was charged with selling three oxycodone pills to an undercover officer, in front of his house on Nehring Avenue in New Springville, an area that had been largely rural until the 1970s, when malls and what has since become the vernacular architectural style of Staten Island — the deep-backed, two-family split level with a high, occasionally baroque stoop — imbued it and so much of Staten Island with a sense of inanimate prosperity.
Across the country, one of the most significant social shifts of the 21st century has been the migration of drug use from centers of urban poverty to places that are suburban, white and middle- or marginally middle-class. In New York, in recent years, these changes have made Staten Island a particular nexus of affliction. Its death rate from heroin overdose, and from the broader category of opioids, including oxycodone and other painkillers, is the highest of any borough in the city. From 2005 to 2011, according to city health statistics, as fatalities from overdosing on drugs decreased citywide, the death rate from opioid overdose on Staten Island nearly quadrupled, leaving it more than three times that of the Bronx.
What these new patterns of drug usage so readily remind us is that it is not marijuana that ought to be feared as a pathway to more insidious forms of addiction, it is those substances that remain perfectly legal. Jacqueline Fiore, the executive director of the Staten Island Y.M.C.A. Counseling Service, a highly respected drug treatment facility, said she and her colleagues in the recovery world had anticipated and worried about a heroin problem for several years because of the soaring rates of painkiller addiction they were seeing. Prescription painkillers had been notoriously easy to get on Staten Island until a state initiative implemented more rigorous monitoring two years ago.
Enforcement drove up the black-market price of pills like OxyContin, to about $25 each, on Staten Island, at a time when the cost of heroin was coming down. In 2010, 6 percent of patients going to the Y.M.C.A. Service — which has one branch on Staten Island’s North Shore and another on the comparatively affluent South Shore — entered the program addicted to heroin. Last year, that figure rose to 20 percent.
One morning last week at the South Shore facility in Eltingville, I met two of these patients, one of them a 27-year-old woman, Rebecca Ann Wolfson, who has been sober for 11 months, after more than 15 unsuccessful attempts at rehabilitation. Ms. Wolfson grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with a mother who was an OxyContin addict until Ms. Wolfson was 10. As a child she would accompany her mother on drug runs, she told me. Later, as a young teenager, Ms. Wolfson developed a drinking problem so severe that she wound up in the hospital with pancreatitis. Eventually, she had her gall bladder removed. After her surgery she was given a prescription for Percocet. From there she fell easily into heroin use, and a boyfriend became addicted as well, she told me."
continued http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/nyregion/addicted-to-drugs-on-staten-island.html?_r=0
.. this section is drugs in the media. but there are allot of good places on bluelight to get help with this.. recovery sections and other drugs is another.. here is some strong info that may help you.. sorry you are going through this
