Heroin deaths may set record
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Heroin deaths may set record
The young people kept coming at all times of the day during the past week, sitting around a table at the Gillis home to share photographs and stories. The parents took all of this in at a time when you might expect them to be unable to hold back tears. They were grieving in their own way.
Joan and Philip Gillis didn't shut the door to their Hanover home after their daughter, Holly, a 21-year-old woman described as beautiful, shy and sensitive, died of a heroin overdose one week ago. They opened it and were surrounded by their daughter's friends.
They listened to young people talk about how tough it is to be a teenager, to feel out of place at school, to be picked on by kids who are part of the so-called "in" crowd, to feel terrible pain and be unable to squelch it. They listened to some of them talk about the attraction of drugs, the sometimes fatal attraction of heroin. They listened to others who said they tried to talk Holly out of using drugs. They said they always held on to hope that Holly would stop using drugs, but the girl they raised died long ago, so by last week they seemed beyond tears.
"Two years ago, we mentally buried her, thinking we couldn't deal with it anymore," Joan Gillis said.
They had been grieving for years, sending their daughter to detox and drug rehab programs over and over, about 40 times by their recollection. They say many people in town don't seem to know there is a drug problem, and certainly not a heroin problem, in local schools. Most people sure don't talk about it.
That is why the Gillis family wanted to talk about it last week. They want people to know heroin is a big problem.
Their daughter had been using heroin since she was 16 and gave it to two younger brothers. A group of young people sitting at the Gillis home last week were asked how many ever used heroin.
Four raised their hands.
Morris County Prosecutor Michael Rubbinaccio last week acknowledged that Holly Gillis was one of two young women to die of apparent drug overdoses in Hanover in recent weeks. He said another apparent overdose death occurred in Wharton last month.
Authorities said they are waiting for toxicology reports on all three recent deaths. They report that, in addition to those three suspected drug deaths, there have been 15 confirmed overdose deaths in the county this year, including a teenager from East Hanover, with eight involving heroin.
That appears to be a record-setting pace, ahead of last year's 22 overdose deaths for the entire year and the 24 deaths recorded in 2000, which authorities said was a record at the time.
Yet, Rubbinaccio was saying last week that there is no heroin epidemic.
Reporting deaths
John Dangler, his predecessor, made a point of publicizing every heroin death starting in the late 1990s because, he said, he wanted Morris County residents to know the drug had made its way to the suburbs. His office reported 19 heroin-related deaths in 1998 and the same number in 2000 when law enforcement authorities were saying heroin was a huge problem. Now, without that kind of publicity, it appears that some people have been lulled into believing heroin has gone away.
Some people posting on a Hanover Township Web site last week seemed surprised that drugs are such a big problem. It seemed few heard about the first death in Hanover last month, at least not until a week ago, after Holly Gillis was found lying on her basement floor.
Gillis' parents have made a point of talking about their daughter. They don't want her death to be forgotten. They want people to read about it, to ask questions, to talk to their children.
"We want something to happen," said Philip Gillis.
Rubbinaccio did not fully explain why he doesn't make a point of publicizing heroin deaths, as Dangler had. He said he doesn't want to release information about drug deaths until after he gets toxicology reports. But even then, the prosecutor's office hasn't exactly been going out of its way to let people know how many people are dying from overdoses.
Rubbinaccio did make a point of announcing last week that heroin containing a painkiller called fentanyl, a potentially lethal additive, has been found in Morris County.
"I like to put out specific information when we have a public health threat," he explained.
So why not publicize all drug overdoses?
Rubbinaccio said there is no evidence of a growing epidemic. He may not want to frighten people. But you could argue that people should be frightened when two young women die in the same town weeks apart, and when a teenager from the same area died not long ago.
Decade-long problem
Not that the problem is focused on any one part of Morris County. Rubbinaccio pointed out that the 22 deaths last year occurred in 15 towns. He may be right when he says the problem is not growing, even if the number of deaths appear to be this year. But heroin has been a big suburban problem for about a decade, and Rubbinaccio said last week that he would consider doing more to make drug deaths public.
Joe Hennen, who runs Daytop, a Mendham drug treatment center for young people, said this past week that the heroin problem peaked about four years ago in Morris County and has not been getting worse. But he added that almost half the young people in his treatment program have used heroin, and the number of female addicts has been growing.
The problem isn't a sudden surge in heroin use, he said. The problem is that heroin use hasn't subsided.
"It peaked and leveled off at a very high level," Hennen, who was in Canada on vacation, said by phone.
'Still an epidemic'
"It is still an epidemic. ...Heroin is no longer on the front page, and people would like to believe it's not there. But it's a major issue."
Hennen pointed out that most parents do not want the death of a child publicized, and that law enforcement officials have to weigh public awareness against being sensitive to grieving parents. The result has been that heroin seemed to disappear from the front pages, and people seemed to forget that it is a problem, even while young people have been dying.
Joan Gillis was saying last week that she didn't know about heroin a few years ago, when she learned that her daughter was using the drug. She said she didn't know how often her daughter used heroin, and didn't understand the nature of the addiction.
Intense high
Kids who use heroin have said they always chase a more intense high, always look for a more potent drug, and it doesn't matter that using heroin makes them throw up. Joan Gillis said she thought people who used heroin simply were able to quit using.
"That's funny," one of the young people sitting in her living room said.
Holly Gillis' parents talked about their daughter's chaotic life, how she was banned from three psychiatric hospitals, how she was diagnosed as bipolar but no one ever seemed able to treat her mental health and drug problems at the same time. They dragged her to hospitals that couldn't keep her against her will.
Her friends talked about her wild side, and about her gentle side, about how she would go to Newark to buy drugs and bring ice cream to hand out to the neighborhood children. Some of her friends said they stopped coming around because it was too painful to deal with her addiction. They said she wanted to stop doing drugs, that she didn't want to hurt her parents. She overdosed so many times that her friends and relatives lost count.
"She died a lot," said Tom Gillis, 18, her brother.
At age 14
Tom Gillis said he started using heroin, which he got from his sister, when he was 14. He once told a close female friend that drugs were more important to him than she was. Yet he said he was able to stop using after about a year, replacing drugs with intensive reading of classic literature. He now attends CCM and is considering becoming a psychologist because he wants the world to understand "how hard it is to live as a teenager."
He said his sister was born different, that she was ultra-sensitive, and Joan Gillis said her daughter lived life intensely. Holly Gillis' friends say she thought she was ugly, although she was beautiful. She thought she was fat, even when she was thin. She loved Boy George because she related to the pain, and loved Marilyn Monroe for the same reason. She was smart, they said, and able to read and play chess before she went to kindergarten. She had high SAT scores, they said, and so much promise.
"She was heaven and hell, intensity beyond belief," Joan Gillis said.
Her parents were still trying to understand her pain last week. They were talking to young people about what it is like to be young. They were talking to newspaper reporters because they were wondering where all the headlines about heroin had gone. They wanted their daughter's death to be public. They wanted people to know who she was, how she died, and that heroin has been in the suburbs for years, killing young people, even if you haven't been reading about it.
Abbott Koloff can be reached at (973) 989-0652 or akoloff@gannett.com.
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