Heroin is not chic within 'U' community

LSA junior Mike Bito said his impression is that it is a "dirty, kind of disgusting habit."

Engineering senior Corneil Paauwe said that from what he's heard, "It's something you don't want to mess with."

Heroin and its images may be surfacing in many places, but not on college campuses.

Despite images of pale, sickly models appearing on the pages of trend-setting fashion magazines and frequent references in movies and pop culture, the "heroin chic" trend hasn't found a home at the University.

Department of Public Safety spokesperson Elizabeth Hall said that the last three years have been free of heroin arrests on campus. "The only report of heroin (in the last three years) was made in 1997 for possession of heroin paraphernalia," Hall said.

The Livingston and Washtenaw Narcotics Enforcement Team, which handles all narcotics cases for Washtenaw, Jackson and Livingston counties, arrested 19 people for offenses related to heroin possession in the past six months.

Heroin use has increased overall across the nation in the past seven years, according to David Osborn, a spokesperson for Phoenix House, a New York-based substance abuse service organization that has helped 70,000 people overcome addictions since its initiation in 1967.

"Use of the drug has really been on the upswing since 1990," Osborn said. "There is something around now called 'heroin chic,' as if it's become a chic drug," he said.

LSA first-year student Marisa Kelley said she has seen "the whole heroin chic" image in women's magazines, and does not think the photographs are appealing.

One student said the drug's popularity is reinforced by messages people get from television.

"(It is) probably easy to get, even though I haven't really heard of it (on campus)," said LSA sophomore Karren Benedict, adding that television often portrays the drug as "popular and in demand."

Deborah Kraus, a clinical psychologist with the University's Counseling and Psychological Services office in the Michigan Union, said heroin makes users feel like they are in sort of a dream world. "The reason that heroin is so addictive is that it feels like there's some kind of fuzzy buffer to people - in their world," she said.

But Kraus said at the same time that users are insulated from negative incidents around them, they are also isolated from good feelings. She said users are always looking for a high that will satisfy them as much as their first one did.

"What heroin addicts have told me through the years is that they're always chasing that first high," she said.

Heroin is also known to users as smack, horse, H or junk. Some side effects of using heroin, besides addiction, include dry, itchy skin, nausea and vomiting, reduced sex drive, scarring along veins where heroin has been injected and a greater risk of AIDS from unsanitary injection.

The effects of heroin struck close to Ann Arbor as early as last week, when two 20-year-olds in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham died of heroin overdoses.

Forster, a former state wrestling champion, had been a heroin addict for as long as two years, and is believed to have given heroin to four high school students at a party approximately two weeks ago. According to Oakland County Medical Examiner's office records, Forster's relatives told investigators he was a heroin addict for two years.

According to the Monitoring the Future Study, less than one percent of college students surveyed said they had experimented with heroin in 1996.

Osborn said an inhalant version of heroin has emerged over the past four or five years, causing many to view the drug differently. "(The) idea that you can inhale heroin has taken away some of the stigma of shooting a needle into your arm," he said.

11-07-97