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Drug fatalItIEs oN thE rIsE

‘We don’t know how bad it is’

Online: To learn more about the growing

heroin problem in Connecticut and beyond, go to nHrEGiStEr.cOm/tOPic/HErOin.

inside: County-by-county deaths attributable to heroin in 2010 and 2013. PAGE A5

NewHaven65

Middlesex8

Litchfield20

Hartford82

Tolland6

Windham8

New London34

Fairfield34

LitchfieLd 20

hartford 82

toLLand 6

Windham 8

middLesex 8neW

haven 65

neW London

34

fairfieLd 34

heroin deaths by county in 2013

Source: Connecticut Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

note: Red dots graph the relative number of 2013 deaths, by county, due to heroin.

ThinkSTOCk.COM

Dramatization of a heroin user dissolving the drug in a spoon.

ThE TREnTOniAn

A person injects heroin into an arm.

“I’m very scared for our nation in how fast this has grown and spread. this is an epidemic.”— John Roberts, retired Chicago police officer

By MaryJo Webster and Jessica glenzaDigital First Media

Elected officials, law enforcement officers and others proclaim there’s a heroin “epidemic” sweeping the country, and it’s taking hold in ru-ral and suburban communities once considered unlikely places to find il-licit drugs.

But nobody knows how many people have died.

Nobody knows how many have overdosed and survived.

Nobody even knows for certain where the problem is most severe.

The Centers for Disease Con-trol and Prevention reported that 3,036 people died in 2010 from her-oin overdoses, but due to problems with how death investigations are conducted and how those deaths are documented, the CDC estimates that its tally is at least 25 percent short, possibly more.

“I’m very scared for our nation in how fast this has grown and spread,” said John Roberts, a retired Chi-cago police officer who created The HERO Foundation after his son died of a heroin overdose in 2010. “This is an epidemic. But it’s not getting the attention that it needs because we don’t know how bad it is.”

In Connecticut, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner keeps data on overdose deaths. In 2013 there were 257 heroin-related over-dose deaths, up from 174 in 2012. In 2010, the latest data available from the CDC, 74 people died of heroin-related overdoses in Connecticut. While that 257 percent increase is re-flected in data kept at the state level, it isn’t seen in the nationwide statis-tics, which haven’t been updated for

heroin: ‘Epidemic’ sweeping nation; scope unknown

hEroIN » PagE 5

By Isaac aviluceaiavliucea@registercitizen.com @IsaacAvilucea on Twitter

The walls, papered in obituaries of friends who succumbed to drug overdoses, had finally closed in on Michael Carlson that fateful day in April 2009.

While his parents cooked dinner in the kitchen of their Bristol home, Carlson snuck to his bedroom to boot heroin for what he believed was the last time, in a suicide attempt. When his parents checked on him, they found him gray, unconscious and not breathing.

Tracy Carlson rushed to the laundry room for the bottles of Narcan she had purchased two weeks before, at a parent support group meeting in Southington. At the time, she had only $9 in cash, enough for three bottles of the life-saving drug. She needed two to get her son breathing again, before paramedics arrived and took over.

Michael Carlson, in the midst of what medical experts call acute withdrawal, lashed out at paramed-ics loading him onto an ambulance.

“I remember waking up long enough to tell my guy on the right to f--- himself,” he said.

Now 25, Michael Carlson is living and working as a drug and alcohol interventionist in West Palm Beach, Florida. He knows he’s alive today because of Narcan, also known as naloxone, a drug that counteracts opiate overdoses by reversing re-spiratory failure when administered within a four-minute window, the amount of time the brain can sur-vive without oxygen.

Despite the drug’s efficacy at re-ducing the mortality rate of heroin and opiate addicts — more than 10,000 reversals in the U.S. and

Narcan: Access to overdose reversal drug still limited

NarcaN » PagE 5

By Jim sheltonjshelton@nhregister.com @JimboShelton on Twitter

NEW havEN » A new book offers the best glimpse yet of the social-climbing sneak thief who stole millions of dollars in rare maps from Yale University and other institutions a decade ago.

E. Forbes Smiley III, a Gatsby-like character who rose from mod-

est beginnings to the inner circle of the rare map world, is the cen-tral f igure in “The Map Thief,” which arrives in bookstores in early June.

Smiley made off with $2.3 million in antique maps from Yale, Harvard, the New York Public Library, Bos-ton Public Library, the British Li-brary and the Newberry Library in Chicago.

His arrest in 2005, after he

dropped an X-Acto knife on the floor of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s reading room, sent shock waves through the ranks of rare book and map collectors, li-braries and dealers. It also exposed serious lapses in library security at Yale and elsewhere.

“At (Yale’s) Sterling Memorial Li-brary, even they would admit secu-rity wasn’t adequate at the time,” said Michael Blanding, the Boston-

based journalist who wrote “The Map Thief.” “The Beinecke had tighter security, but Smiley stole from there several times previously before he was caught.”

Smiley admitted to pinching 97 maps, starting in 2002. They in-cluded a 1631 map of New England by John Smith, a 1676 map of New England by John Seller and more than a dozen others at Yale.

NEW havEN

Yale ‘Map Thief’ story told in new book

thIEf » PagE 2

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