The traditional old-school heroin trade in the New Orleans area still operates as a street corner marketplace. With the recent epidemic, drug hotspots can be found in greater numbers than ever, with abandoned houses and overgrown lots often serving as shooting galleries.
One corner in the St. Roch neighborhood visited recently by a WWL-TV crew hinted at the scale of the problem. Littering a lot hidden by a crumbling fence and shoulder-high weeds were used syringes, alcohol wipes, lighters and other drug-related trash.
A resident, who asked that his identity be withheld out of fear, said he and neighbors have called the police dozens of times in the past year. While patrols do pass by, the drug activity only slips into the shadows for a short time before revving back up again.
“It’s like a drive-through. We have seen maybe 100 people in an hour from this one location,” the resident said. “People flowing through on foot, on bike, by car. I've seen people inject on the street during the day sitting on the sidewalk…The drug dealers seem to have no fear.”
On the day WWL-TV visited, at about 11 a.m. on a Monday, the crew witnessed heroin deal go down within five minutes of arriving. A reporter spoke to the three customers before they drove off. They said they scored a $50 dose, enough for the three of them for the day.
That scene plays out in the city every day. But there is far more to the current epidemic than hard-core street junkies.
"This is real, it can happen to anyone."
Experts say the surge in heroin and opiate abuse is being fueled by a broad spectrum of users, from soccer moms to business professionals, in suburbs and rural areas, on college campuses and even high schools.
“Uptown, downtown, CBD, New Orleans East. The Ninth Ward. It’s everywhere,” said New Orleans EMS paramedic David Hutchinson.
EMS Medical Director Dr. Jeffrey Elder said, “We're seeing it in all age groups, all demographics. So anywhere from on the street to some of the wealthiest homes in the city.”
The unlikely spread of the heroin epidemic includes college campuses. Loyola University is among the schools which is trying to heighten awareness of the heroin scourge, offering one of the most progressive and far-reaching counseling programs of any local university.
The visibility of the program, called “Lift Up Loyola,” was ratcheted up after two recent campus tragedies.
Earlier this year, two students died of heroin overdoses in their dorm rooms. In Februray, Kyra Koman, a 19-year-old freshman music major, died of an accidental overdose from heroin and cocaine, according to the New Orleans Coroner’s office.
Then, in April, Juliano Mastroianni, 20, was found unresponsive in his dorm room three days before his birthday. The coroner’s office ruled his death as an accidental heroin overdose.
“After the tragedies, we wanted to give the campus community to know more about the resources available on and off campus,” said Alicia Borque, Loyola’s director of counseling and health services. “We wanted to make it easier to have conversations about problems that may be difficult to talk about.”
"I don't have a question. Actually, I'm an addict."
As an offshoot of the campus counseling push, the university recently hosted a panel discussion and film screening of the documentary, “Chasing the Dragon: The Life of an Opioid Addict.”
The panel discussion afterward featured U.S. Attorney Kenneth Polite, local FBI Chief Jeffrey Sallet, local DEA Chief Stephen Azzam and Orleans Parish Coroner Jeffrey Rouse.
The panel, despite being dominated by law enforcement officials, stressed the need for people to view the heroin epidemic more as a medical problem than a criminal problem.
The audience was receptive, but the spotlight was stolen by a slight sophomore student who took the microphone during the question-and-answer period afterward.
“I don't have a question,” Chase Malone said. “Actually, I'm a heroin addict.”
The room turned silent.
“And I've been clean for a year and four months,” he added, to which the audience burst into resounding applause. “I just wanted to come forward and show, this is real. It happens to everyone.”
Malone’s parents didn’t recoil when they heard about their son’s very public confession. In fact, just the opposite.
“I'm very proud of him for standing up. He knows that part of his recovery, in order to get better and continue on that road, that he needs to own it,” his mother, Teresa Malone, said.
In exclusive interviews in the days after the event, Chase Malone described how the diminutive youngest son of two successful attorneys got hooked on heroin.
“I started smoking weed at like 13,” he said. “From there, I just started experimenting with other things.”
Malone, an international business major, says he graduated to prescription pills, cocaine, then snorting heroin, and finally shooting up. At the time, he was in high school in his hometown of Atlanta.
“When I started using heroin, I got the rush feeling that people talk about. And once you get that feeling, then it's really hard to stop,” he said. “If your brain is wired a certain way you're going to enjoy a certain drug more than others and then you lean toward doing that more often. For me, that was heroin.
Malone said he got hooked in high school. Eventually, to pay for his habit, he said he started dealing heroin along with other drugs. He got arrested during his senior year in high school for marijuana, ultimately serving time on probation.
“While I was on probation, I could have been drug-tested at any time,” he said. “But they never did.”
If authorities had tested Malone for drugs, he would have scored off the charts.
He revealed that his heroin addiction had become a daily habit. He said he started buying $75 worth of the drug every couple of days, selling small amounts to friends to pay for his habit.
Among his crowd of heroin friends, Malone said he saw one close companion overdose and get rushed to the emergency room near death.
A short time later, tragedy struck again, only this time it was irreversible. One of Malone’s close female friends succumbed to a heroin overdose. Malone remembered the last very time he spent with her.
“I took her to a pawn shop and pawned her grandmother's watch, or something like that. And she died over the weekend,” he said.
Even on the day of his friend's funeral, Malone couldn't control his habit.
“I did heroin before her funeral. Which is kind of crazy for people who aren't addicts to think about. This person died of this drug and you're doing it at their funeral. But it was just something I couldn't control,” Malone said.
When he came off probation, Malone’s parents enrolled him in a rehab center and he arrived at Loyola sober. But by the end of his freshman year, he slipped.
Soon, Malone was fighting a $100-a-day addiction. When he began mixing heroin with Xanax in a dangerous attempt to match the buzz he used to get when he first started using, Malone's health started going downhill. Fast.
“At that point, death wasn't something I was scared of. I was even kind of inviting it, in a way,” he said.
Then something snapped, and Malone reached out for help. He called his parents and said he was desparate.
“It's very hard as a mom watching your child suffer like that,” Teresa Malone said.
She says she was shocked when she saw her son's deteriorating condition. She was even more shocked when he told her what he had been going through.
“It scares me to death. It still scares me. I still wake up in the middle of the night, scared that he is not OK,” she said.
Teresa Malone said the soul-shattering experience with her son has served to bring her family closer together. It also has enlightened her to the fact that the best treatment for addiction is to address it as a medical problem, no different than a disease like diabetes.
“I realize now that it's a disease that he had no control over,” she said. “And he has to work hard every single day to put his mind in the right direction.”
“Our role,” she said, “is to gather around Chase and giving him the love that he needs.”
