Noteworthy News Articles on Mental Health Topics, October 20-24, 2002   Small Town, Big-Time Heroin Use Tracy Gordon Fox & Bill Leukhardt, Hartford Courant- 10/20/2002 WILLIMANTIC -- Three blond women hurry past a kids' soccer game to the quaint gazebo in Jillson Square, a traditional New England green framed by a white-steepled church and historic stone house. Michelle Missino, Jessica Canwell and her sister, Amy-Lee, are itching to shoot up the $10 bags of heroin two of them just bought with cash from a few quick tricks. They escape the late August sun and plunk down cross-legged on the cool wood floor. Missino wraps her arm tightly with a cloth tourniquet to raise a vein, tapping her feet in anticipation. Almost in unison, the women plunge their needles into the good veins they find between rows of purple-red track marks. They loll in the powerful high of the unusually strong dope, then head for the public water fountain. They pass an old man taking a break from his bicycle ride on a nearby bench, and wash the blood from their syringes as casually as if they were doing dishes.      This is a heroin town. Small, rural, open, friendly -- and hooked. Willimantic's Main Street has all the trappings of a modern-day Mayberry: planters of petunias outside the barbershop, retirees walking their dogs, kids on skateboards, stately Victorian homes high on a nearby hill. A new $14 million bridge spans the Willimantic River across from Jillson Square, decorated by four huge bronze frog sculptures in honor of a local folk tale. Nearby, the town and state are spending $32 million to make an industrial park out of the long-vacant granite textile mills. But heroin flows through this place as constantly as water under the frog bridge. Everywhere in the community of 15,823 in the middle of eastern Connecticut are signs of a decades-long reputation that has festered in a political atmosphere of ambivalence and denial, where officialdom often seems resigned to even the most flagrant dealing and use.      Heroin is in every Connecticut town, police say, its abuse accelerated by stronger forms that can be snorted rather than injected. What makes Willimantic an anomaly is the high visibility and volume of the trade in a 4-square-mile area of ostensibly small-town charm. On any given day, social workers estimate, 200 to 300 addicts live here. That doesn't include the 250 people who come to the methadone clinic every day. ``It's an amazing percentage of users for a city this size,'' says Leanne Dillian, executive director of Community Prevention and Addiction Service Inc. ``Willimantic acts like the regional supermarket for drugs,'' says Robert Brex, executive director of a regional substance abuse prevention council based in the nearby Dayville section of Killingly. ``A lot of people from rural towns come in here to buy.''      Heroin is embedded in the daily hubbub of life. The Willimantic River, which once powered the textile mills that made the city prosperous, now draws junkies to its muddy banks to shoot up. Discarded needles and empty glassine heroin packets litter the river's edge. Drug dealers step from porches of ratty homes on a dozen side streets to ask passing motorists, ``What do you need?'' Social workers come to Jillson Square to pass out mint- and berry-flavored condoms from a wicker basket to heroin-addicted prostitutes. Every Wednesday, the Bikers for Christ roar up on their motorcycles to distribute soda and doughnuts and offer counsel to the junkies. ``We've seen successes and we've seen people break our hearts,'' says John Gilmartin, one of the bikers. Every Thursday, men and women from the First Baptist Church wheel a Radio Flyer wagon laden with homemade soup and sandwiches to feed the addicted and the homeless.      When the carnival comes to town, as it does three times each summer, the prostitutes make extra money from the carnies who buy their services late at night after the rides are closed. Hookers climb into customers' cars as parents return to minivans parked beside the church, kids in tow licking ice cream cones. The local cable-access channel features a recovering addicts' roundtable.      Heroin is a constant worry at the police station, where overwhelmed detectives and street cops face an endless tide of heroin trafficking and drug-fueled prostitution. But violent crime is rare here, police say. What's common are petty thefts and burglaries, often committed by addicts seeking quick money for drugs. Without heroin, ``I'd be a crossing guard,'' says Officer Mike Cancellaro, a 14-year veteran of the Willimantic Police Department. ``There would be barking dogs and that's about it.'' A Town Gets Hooked No one put an ad in the paper the first day heroin arrived in Willimantic, but from the accounts of former police officers, old-time junkies and historians, the drug arrived in 1965 on Union Street. It most likely came with some of the workers recruited from Puerto Rico by the American Thread Co., then the area's major employer. It was cheap, and its customers eager. ``It cost $5. Pretty soon, people were lining up at the dealers' apartments. The police didn't know what was going on at first,'' says a resident who claimed that his older brothers helped establish the heroin trade in town. ``The product was coming in along the New York-Providence-Boston pipeline.'' Heroin trafficking and addiction quickly took root, though no one in the Willimantic Police Department recognized the magnitude of the problem.      Then, one day in 1970, the head of the Hartford office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration received a startling telephone call. Perplexed, he summoned his newest agent to his office. ``There's this guy on the phone. Says he's a cop out in Willie-mantic,'' the DEA supervisor said, botching the pronunciation. ``Claims they have a drug problem.'' He looked at a map but couldn't find the place -- never even heard of it. ``Go out there and check it out,'' he told his rookie agent, a guy nicknamed Duke. Duke figured he would take a ride and come back with nothing. Heroin was pervasive in Hartford and New Haven. But it seemed far-fetched that it would be trouble in a place as small as Willimantic.      The call to the DEA had come from Paul Slyman, a street-smart New York City transplant in his second year on the 11-member Willimantic police force. He was making frequent burglary arrests and starting to see a pattern. The burglars were telling him they were stealing to support their heroin habits. And they were buying their dope in town. ``People were coming from all over, from Norwich, Massachusetts, Rhode Island,'' says Slyman, who is now retired. ``I said, `I can't do this on my own. I've got to get help.'''      The Willimantic police weren't prepared for a drug crisis. A few years earlier, in 1964-65, 23 officers resigned from the department because of low wages and interference by town officials, according to news accounts. In 1971, police were preoccupied with a scandal in which five officers were accused of carrying on with college girls who lived in the Hotel Hooker, which at the time was leased as a dormitory by Eastern Connecticut State University. ``Cops didn't know anything about heroin,'' says Slyman, who joined the department in 1968.      Slyman vividly recalls his first meeting with Duke, who is also retired now and agreed to talk about his early work in Willimantic on the condition that he not be identified further. Together, the two set up a surveillance operation on the second floor of a furniture store at the intersection of Union, Temple and Broad streets. Sitting on easy chairs in front of the second-floor picture window, Slyman and Duke sipped coffee from a thermos, ate tuna sandwiches, watched and waited. ``What we found was we had people coming into Willimantic to score, and not small amounts. There were major couriers from Boston, Providence and Worcester,'' Duke recalls. ``We realized we not only had a street problem, we had a hub. It was like a wagon wheel and it all spiraled around Willimantic.'' He went back to the Hartford office and told his superior: ``You don't have a problem in Willimantic. In my opinion, you have an epidemic.''      So police and the DEA began to attack the heroin trade. The market was lucrative enough that one dealer decided Slyman had to go. He hired two men from New York City to kill Slyman for a $10,000 fee. ``The state police had to follow my kids to school and home from school,'' Slyman says. ``We were interfering with a lot of money every day.''      Despite the efforts of Slyman and Duke, and many other state, federal and local efforts to stanch the heroin flow over the years, nothing seems to have worked. For more than three decades now, the forces of economics, geography and community dynamics have nurtured Willimantic's role as a heroin hub. `Easy Money, Good Demand' When the American Thread Co. factory closed in 1985 and moved to North Carolina, where land and labor were cheaper, ``the heart of Willimantic was ripped out,'' says Thomas R. Beardsley, the town historian. ``I just think heroin came on the back of unemployment.'' ``Heroin was the silent epidemic in the 1960s in America,'' says Paul McLaughlin, executive director of Hartford Dispensary, which treats heroin addicts in eight clinics across the state, including one in Willimantic. ``Now the market has expanded into small towns and suburbs.'' Coventry police find needles discarded on the town's quiet country roads. Chaplin families have seen heroin hook teenagers since the 1980s.      But in none of those surrounding towns is the heroin problem so entrenched in a community's identity. ``Towns and regions get reputations,'' says John Kilburn, a sociology professor at Eastern Connecticut State University. ``People know where they can go to get certain items. This town for many years has been known as a place where they can get a heroin connection. Willimantic is a heroin town.'' Kilburn believes Willimantic's heroin problem is rooted in what he calls ``the theory of functionalism.'' ``Everybody believes there needs to be a place where deviance goes on,'' he says. ``You have to let it happen somewhere.''      Today, Willimantic is a busy stop in the Northeast drug trade. Suppliers in New York City sell heroin to wholesalers in Hartford, authorities say. The Hartford dealers sell to mid- and low-level dealers in Willimantic, who then peddle it to the concentration of users there and in surrounding communities, police say. The heroin market grew stronger in the 1990s with the increased availability of high-purity heroin, which can be snorted. The form attracts a new, younger user who shuns needles, according to the DEA. Most of the heroin coming into Willimantic originates in South America, a supply line that has increased dramatically since 1993, particularly in the Northeast, DEA officials say. It is smuggled into New York City and sold by Dominican syndicates fronting for Colombians.      Growers have found that the climate in the Andes mountains is so favorable that two poppy crops can be grown each season, unlike the single harvests in Afghanistan and other, older, poppy-farming regions. The added supply has created a flood of high-quality heroin being sold for less, the result of a price war among suppliers. Dealers can buy the drug in Hartford for as little as $5 a bag now and double the price in Willimantic, state and local police say. ``It is easy money and there is a good demand for it,'' says Det. Stan Gervais, one of the two officers in Willimantic's drug unit.      As a result, there are many more heroin arrests in Willimantic than expected for a community its size. Raids sometimes reap large quantities, as in February 2001, when local, state and federal officers seized 7,000 bags of heroin, one of the largest hauls in eastern Connecticut. Police found $15,000 hidden in a drawer of the dealer's night table. Figures from the Statewide Narcotics Task Force, a combination of state and local officers, show that the group makes more heroin arrests in Willimantic than in municipalities of equal or larger size. For example, in 2000, the task force made 45 heroin arrests in Willimantic compared with one in Bristol (population 60,137); 10 in New Britain (population 71,653); and two in Norwich (population 36,141). In 2001, there were 25 heroin arrests in Willimantic, compared with one in Norwich and six in New London (population 25,692).      In 2002, the task force made only eight arrests in Willimantic through September, but police say that number does not reflect a drop in heroin use or sales. State police believe one reason the number of arrests decreased is that Willimantic police chose not to assign an officer to the statewide narcotics group. ``There have been manpower problems this year,'' says state police Sgt. Jeff Hotsky, a supervisor with the task force's eastern division. ``Willimantic in the last year hasn't given a man to statewide.'' Meanwhile, most of Willimantic's dealers don't sell enough heroin to trigger the DEA's involvement anymore, because of new guidelines for prosecution. Thomas Pasquarello, assistant special agent in charge of the DEA's New England field division, says federal agents ``tend to work where the majority of drugs and traffickers are.'' Investigations by the agency must meet certain thresholds, mainly to ensure that the cases can be prosecuted at the federal level. In Connecticut, that means most DEA agents work in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport. Only rarely will one of those investigations lead them to Willimantic.      Willimantic Police Chief Milton King, during a recent interview, at first said he thought cocaine was the local drug of choice, citing a recent cocaine arrest and the success of ``Operation Bambi'' in 1987, when state and local officials targeted mid- and upper-level cocaine dealers. But later, after checking with the head of his detective division, he acknowledged that the majority of drug arrests -- 205 in the past year -- have been for heroin. ``It goes on everywhere in town,'' King says. His 39-member department can handle the heroin problem, King says, but concedes it's not easy. ``Of course it's frustrating. We're arresting some dealers three and four times. We just keep going out and banging them,'' he says. He also points to the low rate of violent crime, particularly around Main Street. King says he wasn't able to put an officer on the Statewide Narcotics Task Force this year because of budget constraints. That's also why the department recently suspended its community policing bicycle and foot patrols. Funding A Habit With heroin addiction comes prostitution. And in Willimantic, hookers troll Main Street and Jillson Square around the clock. Most of the women are emaciated addicts, sick with AIDS or hepatitis. And yet some of them can make up to $600 a day turning tricks.      Michelle Missino, 30, a bleached blonde with thick blue eyeliner, skimpy outfits and a $300-a-day heroin appetite, lives in the Hotel Hooker, named after a 19th-century businessman, Seth Hooker. Her story is a familiar one here. Missino ran away from her Norwich home at age 14. She says she was raped her first week on the street. Over the years, she has had four children, now ranging in age from 17 months to 9 years, all by different men. She lost custody of them all. Her mother has custody of three; the other has been adopted.      In her tidy room at the hotel, she keeps photographs of her children in a red notebook. After smoking crack and shooting heroin one night in late August, she looks wistfully at the smiling images of her kids. She hasn't talked to any of them in more than a month. ``Look at her face,'' Missino says, holding a picture of her 4-year-old daughter. ``Her birthday was Aug. 6, and I haven't called. Isn't that awful?''      Missino is well-groomed and smells of light perfume. She showers between tricks and washes her clothes at the laundromat. She is careful to store the black bag with her crack pipe in the drop ceiling. At night, she paces the sidewalks near Jillson Square, flagging down cars. ``Forty dollars will make you holler,'' she cries.      In January, Missino nearly died of a heroin overdose. She shot up two bags just after being released from prison and stopped breathing. As the paramedics shot her up with Narcan to reverse the overdose, Missino says, she had an out-of-body experience. ``I seen myself laying there and I was saying to myself, `Get up Michelle,''' she recalls.      Rosa, 23, who returned to Willimantic in June to see friends, is probably more typical of the girls on Main Street. Most wear filthy clothes, bathe in the silty Willimantic River between dates and have track marks up and down their arms. The day Rosa surfaces in Jillson Square, she is dope sick and shivering under a sweater. She carries a backpack and clutches a black cat she named Melissa after a friend who committed suicide. Her gray sweat pants are dirty with blood and grass stains. The black polish on her fingernails is peeling. A dark bruise she can't explain mars one eye. Her cat curls against her chest and naps. ``I love her. She's all I got,'' Rosa says, snuggling her face against the cat.      The day before, she tried to sell the cat to someone for a fix. She has been shooting up for eight years, sometimes as many as 20 bags a day. ``When I come back to the streets, it's because I'm sick of living a life with nobody,'' she says. Once she dreamed of being a day-care teacher. But she couldn't keep her own baby, a boy who is now 7 and living with Rosa's mother. Rosa doesn't remember the last time she saw him.      A friend got her hooked when she was 16. When she first used, it felt good. Now all she feels is sick. ``Every day, you wake up sick. Then you steal and sell your ass out here. You sell your soul out here,'' Rosa says. ``I'm left with nothing. That's not cool. There's nothing cool about it.'' Addiction Inherited As in most small towns, traditions cycle down from one generation to the next. In Willimantic, the sons of former policemen arrest the same dealers their fathers nabbed, sometimes on the same streets, sometimes in the same houses. Generations of families here have been destroyed by drug use, countless young people lost to overdoses or prison. ``In most towns, parents pass down property to their children. Here, parents pass down their addictions,'' says Nancy Clark, a resident.      Even the police who spent years fighting the heroin scourge sound fatalistic. ``The only thing I think about is, we did what we had to do, to the best of our ability, and there was just no stopping it,'' says Slyman, the former Willimantic cop who first alerted the DEA. ``I thought I had the answer back in the late '60s and '70s. We hit them hard with undercover operations, and that wasn't the answer. We've tried everything. It just didn't work.''      Now his son, Larry Slyman, a state trooper assigned to the nearby Windham Heights housing complex, and his nephew Carl Caler, a Willimantic police sergeant, are fighting the same battle. They have arrested some of the same suspects Paul Slyman did. ``A guy drives over the bridge and gets stopped by Larry,'' the elder Slyman says. ``He says, `I know your father. He stopped me the same place 20 years ago on the same charge.' '' Caler has had the same experience. ``People arrested by him 20, 30 years ago, say, `Hey are you related to Slyman? He arrested me before and now I'm straight,''' Caler says. Caler holds the record in Willimantic for the most cocaine and heroin seized at one time -- 4 1/2 pounds of cocaine and 2,400 bags of heroin. ``We try, but it just isn't getting any better,'' he says. Larry Slyman, a high school basketball star at Windham Regional Technical School, became a trooper when he was 20. He says he was shocked at how many people used heroin. ``There are professionals to basically homeless and everyone in between,'' Larry Slyman says. ``The drugs have always been here, and they still are.'' Death at Hotel Hooker Tracy Gordon Fox, Hartford Courant- 10/21/2002 WILLIMANTIC -- Jessica Canwell wearily climbs three flights of dark, creaky stairs to the top floor of the Hotel Hooker, where a needle waits for her in a cluttered room smelling of stale food and urine. Less than an hour earlier, her boyfriend had died at Windham Community Memorial Hospital of a needle-borne infection. John Davis took his last breath as Jessica, 22, went for a soda in the hospital's lounge. She came back and leaned her head onto his chest, hoping to hear a heartbeat, to talk to him one last time. He died a day before his 44th birthday.      Jessica's younger sister, Amy-Lee, 21, understands. She lost her boyfriend to a heroin overdose six months earlier, and she prepares her sister's "works," knowing she'll need a fix to cope with the grief. Jessica injects the cola-colored mixture of tap water and heroin under a scab that has formed over an infected abscess in the crook of her arm, into the same vein she has used for three years. She pumps the syringe, drawing up her own blood, and shoots the dark red mixture back into her arm. The heroin does nothing to numb her pain. She collapses on the worn mattress and weeps, haunted by memories of her boyfriend's dead eyes staring at the hospital's white ceiling. "I don't want him to be gone. I just want one more minute. Please, somebody, let me have another minute," Jessica wails to Amy-Lee and some friends who have gathered beside her on the bed. They gently brush tear-matted hair from her face. The friends bring sympathy bags of heroin instead of flowers or casseroles. They sit next to Jessica and talk about John in soft, consoling voices above the whir of a window fan. A small television blares a rerun of "Law and Order."      Death is a familiar companion at the Hotel Hooker, a grim brick building filled with junkies, the mentally ill and the hopelessly poor. It's a place saturated in heroin, a place where people die. Shortly before John Davis died on July 15, he told his friends there was a man dressed in black, like the Grim Reaper, lingering in the corner of the room he shared with Jessica. Death has visited many rooms at the hotel, more than once in Room 52. The previous tenant died of a heroin overdose, and was found lying in the bathtub. Then a woman dropped dead of an overdose on the dirty gray and red linoleum tile in the hallway just outside the door.      "This building is cursed," says Amy-Lee, who lives across the hall from her sister. "There's spirits in some of the rooms. I've seen them. So have others," says Wendi Clark, a recovering heroin addict who lived in the hotel from 1996 to 1999. "Some of the rooms have seen a lot of overdoses. I once saw the face of a man reflected in the door of my microwave. Some of the communal bathrooms -- you go in and you feel someone else is there, even though you're alone. It's creepy."      Amy-Lee awoke last January with her boyfriend lying on her chest, his body already stiff with rigor mortis. Amy-Lee gave her sister the queen-size mattress they shared, no longer able to sleep on the spot where he died. Afterward, Amy-Lee took an overdose of sleeping pills and would have died if Jessica hadn't found her and called an ambulance. "You're in so much pain. You literally feel your heart breaking apart," Amy-Lee says now as she watches her sister grieve for John. Amy-Lee knows how the hurt can linger; sometimes she thinks she sees the ghost of her boyfriend walking up the stairs to the fourth floor.      Jessica lies in a fetal position on the same stained, sweat-soaked sheets where John had lain a few days before. She has put on his green plaid flannel shirt and tan moccasins despite the stifling July heat, and buries her face in a pair of his khakis to remember how he smelled. Soiled clothing, empty bags of junk food and stacks of dirty dishes are strewn on the stained, pea-green carpet. The last bowl of uneaten chicken noodle soup that Jessica fixed for John remains on a small table near the refrigerator.      The room is oppressively hot and gloomy as a thunderstorm approaches. The skies open and rain comes in through the fan in the window. Jessica slowly lifts her large frame off the bed and walks, dazed, down the hall to the fire escape. She steps outside, lifting her face into the driving rain mixed with hail, oblivious to the lightning and crashing thunder. "I'm so sorry, John, and I love you. I do. I love you a lot," she says on the wobbly fourth-story fire escape.      Drenched and drained, Jessica wanders back to her room, her bulging blue eyes pink from weeping and days of sleeplessness. A woman in the hall tells her there is a Puerto Rican superstition that when someone dies and it rains, it means the angels are crying. "God takes everyone that's good, but never takes the evil people, ever," Jessica says angrily. Dorcas Velazquez, a social worker who visited John in the hospital and drove Jessica home after he died, thinks Jessica needs to pray. She takes her to a Seventh-day Adventist church a few miles from the hotel, where they sit on the red upholstered pews reading Psalms. Tears fall down Dorcas' face as she talks gently to Jessica, whom she has tried to help for years. She tells Jessica that dying is only a sleep until Jesus comes again, and that she loved John, too, but that he had made some poor choices. "God doesn't want us to suffer," she says softly. "But every time you put that needle in your arm, you are dying." Jessica gets back into Dorcas' car and leans her head against the passenger window. "I feel like I'm not even alive," she whispers. Corridors Of Living Dead When the Hotel Hooker was built in 1887, it was considered the finest hotel between New York and Boston, an elegant rest stop for wealthy executives who came to visit the thriving thread mills. Seth Hooker, who had built other hotels in Colchester and Willimantic, offered 100 rooms that were among the first in eastern Connecticut to have electric lighting. The hotel offered a fine restaurant, billiards and a barbershop, and it was host to meetings of the Venerable Club for gentlemen over 70.      In 1938, Rose Riquier bought the hotel for $14,000 at a time when travelers were gravitating to motels closer to major highways, and the hotel was already beginning to decline. Her son and grandson now run the business, which operates more like a rooming house. Bob Riquier, Rose's son, says he knows what goes on in the rooms, but insists he has no control over it. "I'm not a cop." The cops do raid the place on occasion, but with little effect. In fact, the police and fire complex abut the rear of the hotel where dealers sell heroin day and night, an in-house convenience for the resident junkies. The sales go down inside the rooms, away from the security cameras placed in every hotel hallway and fire escape.      Tenants walk like the living dead along the dark, wood-paneled corridors. Putrid hot air wafts from the open back door like an entrance to hell. On hot summer days, swarms of gnats gather underneath the brass chandeliers that hang from the high ceilings in the lobby, where yellowing photos of Seth Hooker stare down from a picture frame. The wallpaper in the rooms is peeling, the drop ceilings are bowed and the scurrying of rats is a familiar sound. The hallway floors are stained from cigarette butts and sticky with spilled beer. The air stinks of cigarette smoke, fried food and urine from the bathrooms on each floor.      A 17-year-old girl, eight months pregnant, lives on the second floor, her sunken eyes weary and sad as she wanders through the hall. Doctors told her that her baby is terribly underweight and will probably be sent to intensive care when it's born. On the third floor, in the room below Jessica's, there's a man who eats rats. People have seen him catch them by the Willimantic River and fry them up on the stove. His mother once paid Jessica $100 to remove the rats and their cages while he was out one day. She stuffed the rodents into a garbage bag, threw it out by the river and bought heroin with her payment. The "Rat Man" walks down Main Street wearing only a pair of shorts and heavy work boots, rattling metal chains wrapped around his ankles -- he says they help strengthen his legs. Lately, he has been screaming at night about government conspiracies and throwing things around his room. Another tenant collects hubcaps and hangs them on his walls like trophies. He shows them off to visitors and, with a toothless grin, recites where and how he got each one. He has four televisions stacked atop one another, all tuned to different channels.      Jessica's next-door neighbor says she is hiding from the CIA and spews an endless stream of conspiracy theories. "I've had big-time trouble with the government," she says. "How come the Secret Service arrives at my door and asks me if I'm a communist?" Jessica hears her talking and answering herself in a strange, deep voice. Jessica has seen more than a dozen overdoses in the hotel. One man overdosed, and when paramedics brought him back from death's door, he sat upright and said: "Fourth floor, women's lingerie."      In August, a trucker visiting a friend down the hall from Jessica and Amy died after smoking crack and shooting heroin. Unable to maneuver the large man's body down the narrow staircases, firefighters drove a truck up to the fire escape at the rear of the hotel. They slid the 300-pound body into an orange rescue sled and sent it down a ladder into the waiting medical examiner's van. `The Worst Mistake' Jessica's room is decorated with blue-check curtains, drawings of Garfield the cat, and various knickknacks. Candlestick holders with white angels sit atop a corner cupboard holding up a drooping ceiling square. Drawings of children, dried flowers and a heart-shaped wall-hanging that reads "Bless this home" cover the pink paint and peeling wallpaper. "Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul" and "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Breaking Bad Habits" are among the books on a shelf that doubles as a television table. Jessica strokes the ears of her black and white cat, Baby.      The hotel is her home, the most stable one she has known, a place where she and her sister have lived together longer than at any other time of their lives. "Our floor is our family," Amy-Lee says, sitting on the mattress in her room where daytime talk shows blare from a small television set on a worn wooden dresser. "She is like my mother, my sister, my best friend," Amy-Lee says about her sister.      Jessica says she was born in Enfield to a drug-addicted, alcoholic mother who would start the day with a martini and finish it by shooting cocaine. Jessica had been in 12 foster homes and in and out of mental hospitals by the time she was 16. Amy-Lee was raised mostly by her father, she says, but was also in several foster homes. Jessica and John moved in together at the Hotel Hooker five years ago, a year after they met in a Danielson homeless shelter.      The Canwell sisters say they were abused by their parents, foster parents and their grandmother, who told them all children are mistakes. Jessica still carries a pink, U-shaped scar under her left eye from when her stepfather pushed her down a flight of stairs when she was 7, she says. Jessica says she was sexually assaulted when she was 6, and torn inside so badly she has been told she can never carry children. Her mother once sent her to elementary school with a mixture of orange juice and vodka in her thermos. Jessica has no pictures of herself as a child or of her and Amy together. The only birthday celebration she recalls is when she got a stale cake in the mental hospital after attempting suicide. "I was raised like a pingpong ball," she says, blowing a stream of cigarette smoke.      When she was a teenager, Amy-Lee was tied to a bed and severely beaten by a boyfriend when she was 7½ months pregnant. She lost her baby. A few years later, she miscarried twins, and went into a deep depression. She is drawn to abusive men, and her latest boyfriend is no exception. He became enraged in August after seeing track marks on Amy's arm one night -- he thought she only snorted heroin. He kicked her, Amy says, threw videotapes at her and grabbed her arm so hard she couldn't move it for days. Her sister created a makeshift sling out of a red nightgown. "I know I'll end up in ICU at the hospital or buried 6 feet under," Amy-Lee wrote in a police report when she sought a restraining order against her boyfriend. Amy-Lee moved to Jessica's room for a night, but then went back to her room, where her boyfriend was living, and lay down in the bed with him. "I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight," Jessica told her. "Your own cat can't even be in there because he hit her."      Amy-Lee never intended to catch her sister's heroin habit. She came from her aunt's house in Springfield for a weekend visit two years ago, carried her overnight bag up to Jessica's room and never left. That weekend she met a man with dark, seductive eyes and fell in love. Jessica was already hooked on heroin, but Amy-Lee avoided it, choosing to snort cocaine or smoke marijuana. When her boyfriend died of an overdose, Amy-Lee tried snorting a few bags of heroin because she wanted to end the pain of losing him. A month later, she was shooting it into her veins. "I told her not to every day," Jessica says. "I never wanted her to do it. I honestly wish she never left Springfield. I love seeing my sister, but not this way. I feel so guilty. She watched me set up the heroin, shoot the heroin. I feel guilty because now she's using."      Amy-Lee's room is decorated like a college dorm room, with posters and stickers on her mirror. Many show her favorite "Winnie the Pooh" character, Eeyore. She still hasn't mastered how to get the needle into her vein. One day in June, before John's illness took hold, she padded in beach sandals across the hall and knocked on Jessica's door. She asked to borrow the lanyard from a key chain with an Eastern Connecticut State University logo on it. She licked the needle so the heroin wouldn't burn her skin, tied the lanyard around her forearm, and futilely poked the needle into the side of her wrist, already marred by a trail of track marks. After watching her sister fumble with the syringe, Jessica took over. She found a vein and expertly inserted the needle. "I don't like doing this for you at all," Jessica said. "It bothers me to have to shoot up my sister."      The heroin Jessica and Amy-Lee shoot up each day is usually just enough to keep at bay the stomach cramps and intolerable bone pain that comes when the dope wears off. They rarely have enough to get high or duplicate the euphoria of the first time. "It's just the worst mistake I've ever made," Amy-Lee says. "I'm 21 and I feel like I'm 70, like my body is deteriorating. Literally, I feel like my bones are crumbling. If I knew when I did my first bag of heroin there was so much pain attached, I probably never would have done it."      When John was alive, he worked at a poultry farm, where he earned enough money to support their habits. He'd come home exhausted, his jeans and T-shirt covered with chicken manure, and a small amount of cash in his pocket. Jessica sometimes got angry when John didn't come home with enough money, and would demand that he go out "canning." After three to four hours of digging through dumpsters, John would drag garbage bags full of cans to the supermarket to cash in the deposits. Once he got $13, enough to buy a bag of heroin. At one point, Jessica worked one day a week tending the garden of a local man, but didn't make enough to support her nearly 10-bag-a-day habit. When they couldn't get enough money for drugs, they ended up sick in bed. When the sisters fought, it was usually because one had more dope than the other. A Fleeting High Just two weeks before he died, John's welfare check and paycheck arrived and he and Jessica celebrated. There was plenty of dope, and they shot up so much they actually felt high. That week, they romped in their shorts and T-shirts in the river during a rare summer outing from the hotel. She playfully wrapped her white legs around his thin, dark body as he spun her around in the water and kissed her lips. Jessica talked to John in a cartoon voice and he laughed. The sisters filled up two shopping carts at the supermarket and Jessica cooked a feast of pork ribs, cheddar- and bacon-flavored mashed potatoes and wax beans. Later that night, Jessica had a headache. John was still high and went out on the fire escape to watch fireworks that someone was lighting a few blocks away.      The next day, July Fourth, John, Jessica and Amy-Lee shot some heroin and went downstairs for Willimantic's Boom Box Parade. They danced along Main Street, laughing while a family standing along the parade route sprayed John with squirt guns. Jessica caught so much candy from marchers that she collected it in a plastic grocery bag as if it were Halloween. John became ill a few days after the parade. Jessica assumed his high temperature and pain came from AIDS. "You didn't go to the doctors and you didn't take your medications. You could have prolonged it," Jessica tells John, half scolding, half crying. "You could have stopped it, but you didn't want to. Now I have to sit back and watch you fade away and it's not fair."      The emergency room sent John home with a prescription for Motrin and a mild muscle relaxant. There was no mention of the infection that would kill him six days later. He limped back to the hotel, barely able to move. John lay on the bed for several days with the lights off and the shades drawn, shivering under two blankets even though the room felt like a furnace. He dozed and watched TV, his head resting against a pillow on which Jessica had written: "Lovin John 4 Life" and "Love hurts." "I want to help you, John. Hear me?" Jessica said as she gently removed his clothes and bathed him with a damp cloth. His back hurt so much he couldn't change his own clothes. After the sponge bath, Jessica shot heroin into his arm to ward off withdrawal and tried to feed him soup and sips of Pepsi. She baked a chocolate cake in the rusty toaster oven in their room, frosted it with vanilla icing, and used candy from the parade to spell "Get Well" on the top. "Look at your cake. Make me feel like I did something good for a change," Jessica urged John. "It's good, Jess," he said, too sick to make a fuss. "The way I see it, if she wants to take care of me, that's nice," John said when Jessica left the room. "But the way I look at it is, I've been taking care of her for as long as we've been together. She doesn't ever have to consider going out there to sell her ass."      The next day, John grew sicker. His eyes were filled with fear. "My wife died from AIDS. My brother died from AIDS, and I watched them. They were on morphine and had machines. I don't want that. I want them to put an IV in my arm and send me home," John said. He said he needed to say goodbye to his children, his brothers and sister and his mother. He looked as if he had aged 20 years, his ribs and cheekbones pressing through his sweaty skin. Jessica sat down beside him and gently stroked his long hair. He had given her a fake gold wedding band a few months earlier, and Jessica began referring to him as her husband. "I swear I love you," she said, kissing his cheek. They stared at each other for a moment. "I love you too," he said. An ambulance took him to the hospital two days later, when his fever increased and he began hallucinating. A needle-borne infection had poisoned his blood. He died July 15 holding his teenage son's hand, a day after his mother, siblings and children came to say goodbye. Gift Bags Of Heroin Three days after his death, John's body lies in a New London funeral home in a cherry-wood casket lined with white satin and surrounded by red roses. His hair is cut short and he is dressed up in a gray shirt and suit jacket. Jessica has painted her nails a rosy pink and wears a long-sleeved black and white shirt in the 90-degree heat to cover her track marks. Her sister and friends from the hotel show up 10 minutes late for the funeral in a light blue van driven by Dorcas. Jessica is waiting outside for them, crying because she thinks no one is coming. Amy-Lee shows up in a long black dress she borrowed from Jessica, just long enough to conceal the beach sandals on her feet.      When the Rev. Benjamin Watts speaks, Jessica thinks he is lecturing her. John, he says, made poor choices. John's death should be a wakeup call. "He himself chose to hang out with some of the wrong people. His demons have fought him so valiantly, they took his life," the minister says. "He is in the hands of God. Do not follow everything he did. Learn from his mistakes."      John's teenage children -- two daughters and a son -- pause at his casket and weep for the man they knew best when they were small, a man who played ball with them and dressed them for school. He is evident in their smiles and tall, thin physiques. Jessica hugs them for a long time, then returns alone to John's casket after the funeral home has emptied. She leans over him, and cries softly, her body shaking with grief. She caresses his chest covered with red rose petals and whispers, "I'm sorry John. I'm so sorry." Then she gently kisses his forehead and leaves.      She weeps when she arrives at John's mother's handsomely decorated home on a middle-class cul-de-sac in Uncasville. His mother, a large woman in both size and personality, has put on a spread of homemade chicken, pasta, rice, salad and desserts. She tells stories about how sickly John was as a child, how he'd go into the hospital for one ailment and contract another. John's brother, Phil Davis, an engineer, says he went to the Hotel Hooker three years ago intending to bring John home. He left realizing it was too late. "His features were different. His cheeks were sunken, his frame smaller. He was someone else by then," Phil says, tears filling his eyes. "When I saw him I knew there was nothing I could do at that point, nothing I could do to help him."      Within an hour of returning to the hotel, Jessica buys a bag of heroin and mixes it with water from the bathroom tap. She squeezes the abscess in her arm until a yellowish-white substance comes out, then jabs the needle into her arm. Later that night, there's a street fair outside and Jessica comes out of the hotel onto Bank Street, still in her funeral clothes. She walks toward a trailer where a disc jockey is encouraging people to sing through the karaoke machine. She is holding the small hand of her friend's 9-year-old niece. The girl is crying because she misses John. Jessica gently wipes the tears away and holds the child to her chest.      Amy-Lee and a group of friends all put their arms around Jessica, and the group sways gently to "Amazing Grace," sung by an older woman friend. It is the song everyone sang at John's funeral. Jessica gathers her strength and steps up onto the trailer. In a strong, beautiful voice, she belts out Celine Dion's "Because You Love Me." She weeps when she finishes. Jessica returns to the hotel, where gift bags of heroin are coming in. She shoots up and smokes marijuana with her friends. She says that when her friends stop giving her drugs, maybe she'll enter a program and get straight, maybe next week. "I'm tired of waking up sick. I'm tired of going to bed sick. I'm 22 years old and I'm so ... tired." The Needle Of Mourning A week later, after a memorial service for John at St. Mark's Chapel, Jessica starts feeling sick. Another week goes by, and she has a high temperature, a terrible cough and excruciating pain in her chest. She tells Amy-Lee and her friends to leave her alone, to just let her die and be with John. She finally agrees to go to Windham Community Memorial Hospital, and shivers under several blankets as nurses tend to her in the emergency room. Doctors rule out AIDS and then place her in isolation for four days, thinking she might have tuberculosis. The TB test comes back negative. Jessica is told she has a stubborn staph infection in her lung that will require at least 10 more days of intravenous antibiotics. They tell her she would have died in a day or two without treatment. It's the same type of infection that killed John, possibly transmitted through needles.      After nearly a week on methadone at the hospital, Jessica is looking better, her eyes are bright and she is thinking more clearly. But every time she goes to the bathroom, dragging her IV with her, she imagines John lying in the bed when she returns, his lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling. She's missing her cigarettes, her sister and the hotel. When a nurse makes a mistake and puts Jessica in isolation again, Jessica becomes unhinged. She curses at the nurses, checks herself out of the hospital and calls a friend for a ride back to the hotel. Her doctor telephones her at the hotel and tells her she must come back for treatment or she might die.      The next day, Jessica agrees to return for more X-rays and to get a prescription for antibiotics. She returns to the hotel. The infection begins to improve and Jessica says the methadone has cured her of her heroin habit. "I don't do that no more," she says. Jessica remains clean for a few days, until her dealer gives her a "bundle" - 10 bags of heroin - free until she can pay her debt. "I wasn't strong enough to say no. They wanted me back into it," she says, crying. She has made a shrine to John in her room. His picture is pasted on every wall, along with flowers she was sent after his death.      On a sticky August night, a month to the day after John died, Jessica carefully arranges a clean needle and sterilized water on a chair next to her bed. A social worker provides the water and some bleach in an effort to prevent another infection. Jessica shoots heroin into the crook of her arm, where the infection has healed into bumpy red scar tissue. She fixes her hair, puts on a leopard pattern shirt and a pair of black pants, and goes with some friends to the American Legion hall for a night of karaoke. Her strong, sweet voice fills the dark, smoky bar as she sings the words to "Angel," a song widely believed to be about heroin, by Sarah McLachlan: In the arms of the angel, fly away from here, From this stark, cold hotel room and the endlessness that you fear. You are pulled from the wreckage of your silent reverie, You're in the arms of the angel May you find some comfort there. Within a week, Jessica and Amy-Lee are each shooting 15 bags of heroin a day after finding work at the same chicken farm where John was employed. They're doing triple the amount they used to, and Jessica has started smoking crack. "You know your limit when you're a heroin addict," Jessica says. She's so high she is slurring her words and starting to nod off. "We feel good now. We don't worry about tomorrow." Jessica didn't turn to prostitution until nearly two months after John's death. She entered a rehabilitation program in Norwich on Sept. 9 and is now more than halfway through the 60-day program.   A Killer of Families Tracy Gordon Fox & Bill Leukhardt, Hartford Courant- 10/22/2002 WILLIMANTIC -- Luke Rector is just 20 and already his parents have asked him what kind of funeral he wants when his heroin habit kills him. Heroin has robbed Sue and James Rector of the person who was once their shy, well-behaved little boy, the one who excelled in geography and never gave them any trouble. ``He's gone, he's lost,'' says Sue Rector, an elementary school teacher in Marlborough, tears streaming down her face. ``I'm sure if he keeps going the way he is now, he'll be dead.''      Luke is in prison now, serving a two-year sentence for violating his probation on a robbery conviction. It's a lot safer than living on the streets of Willimantic, selling his body to men for enough money to support his heroin habit. ``Honestly, when I heard he was in jail, I was relieved because he was off the streets,'' his mother says softly. Sue Rector used to see him on the street, less than a mile from their comfortable home in Willimantic. Sometimes she would buy him a sandwich so he wouldn't go hungry.      Luke's older brother, Larry, used to shoot heroin, but he's been clean since spring. Larry hopes to start some college courses. He's frustrated that his brother doesn't want a future. ``I ask him all the time, `What are your goals, what are you trying to shoot for?' And he says, `I don't know. Nothing.' That's what scares me the most,'' Larry says. ``We were supposed to grow up as two average kids in a middle-class family, and look at us now.''      Before Luke's arrest in early June, he wandered the streets of Willimantic, sometimes sleeping outside. He seemed to be the only male prostitute on the street, so he had little trouble finding dates. On cooler nights, he'd shiver in a T-shirt. Bulky coats aren't good for business. Which is why on an unusually cool night he was huddled on a bench in Jillson Square, eyeballing every passing car for any sign of interest. To a casual passerby, Luke looks like a handsome young man with scruffy James Dean looks.      If he trusts you, he may talk about the time some thugs at a downtown bar taunted him, then raped him. He may talk about how he started drinking at age 14, then began snorting heroin at 16 after someone told him he should try it because it was `` a million times better'' than alcohol or pot. ``I need to score bad tonight,'' Luke says, rubbing his cold hands together. ``I don't want to get dope sick.'' When he buys heroin, he often shoots up behind downtown buildings. Sometimes, he acts like the kid he is, playing with some of the skateboarding teens on the sidewalks along Main Street. But not often. Mostly he's serious, working to feed his habit.      He glances over at the annual firefighters' carnival, which was occupying half of Jillson Square one night. Some guy at the fair was his date the previous evening. ``He was a nice guy. Bought me five bags with the money,'' Luke says. Some of his dates are regulars who take him to their homes to spend the night. ``That was good,'' Luke says, reminiscing as he stares at passing cars. A Honda slows down. Luke bolts off the bench into the waiting car and speeds off with the male driver. A 24-7 Business The Rector boys typify a growing segment of heroin users in the past decade -- young, middle-class and white. In 1992, the country had 630,000 heroin addicts, according to a study by the federal National Drug Information Center. By 1999, that number was up to 980,000, with an additional 200,000 to 400,000 reporting having experimented with it.      Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, said after a 1999 hearing on heroin use that during the late 1990s there was a startling increase nationwide in heroin use among white suburban teens. ``People falsely believe heroin abuse is just an inner-city problem,'' Grassley said after testimony from teen heroin addicts from middle-class suburbs in California, New York, New Hampshire and other states. Several of the teens said they began using heroin when they were 13. ``We're talking about white-collar professionals from affluent suburbs and kids from small farm towns,'' Grassley said.      Many of the new users are afraid of using needles, so they sniff heroin. More than half start injecting heroin for the stronger high. New users falsely believe people can't become addicted by snorting, says Dr. Herbert Kleber, medical director of Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. Treatment centers in New England report an increase in heroin addicts under age 20 seeking help, according to an August 2002 survey by researchers with the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The average age of someone's first use of heroin dropped from 26 in 1991 to 17 by 1997, according to studies by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services substance abuse division.      Northeastern Connecticut, as elsewhere, has seen increased heroin use among young people. ``It's everywhere. It's easier for high school kids to buy heroin than beer. Plus, package stores close at 8. Heroin is a 24-7 business,'' says Geri Langlois, a former Thompson first selectman and former state representative who is a recovering cocaine user. ``If you gave me money and 20 minutes, I'd come back with all the heroin we could afford.''      Langlois knows of a group of eight teenagers in Chaplin, just north of Willimantic, who got hooked on heroin last spring. They began by snorting it. One family has two sons fighting addiction. A son from another family is out on the streets, stealing to support his habit and hiding from the police. Two of those families agreed to interviews, both on condition that the names of their sons, who are now in detoxification programs, not be used.      In the family with two heroin-addicted boys, the parents became terrified by the sons' wild rages. It was like ``living with terrorists.'' ``They used to be so close. Now it's like Cain and Abel,'' their mother says. ``Heroin turned these caring, compassionate boys into monsters.'' The secret habit of the eight teenagers was revealed when a parent found bags of heroin under a mattress. The parents learned that their kids were stealing money and items for drugs that they'd buy in Willimantic, sometimes in the Hotel Hooker. Now five of them are in various stages of recovery. It's a gamble.      Vivian Schweitzer of Willimantic knows. For years, she prayed that her youngest daughter, Anne Marie Brochu, would kick her heroin habit. Anne Marie began using at 16. She dropped out of school and once stole $800 of her older sister's wedding money to buy drugs. The girl who wanted to be a hairdresser grew up to be a heroin-addicted prostitute in her hometown.      Today, Brochu is incarcerated in York Correctional Institution, serving five years for crashing a car, while high on heroin, into another vehicle on Route 6 on Oct. 23, 2001. She killed the other driver, Gerry Suprenant, 23, of Brooklyn, an Eastern Connecticut State University student. Brochu was coming off a four-bag high. ``I'm glad she's locked up,'' Schweitzer says. ``At least we know where she is for the next five years. I won't have to worry that she's out somewhere, hurting herself or someone else.''      Florence, a Willimantic grandmother who asked that her full name be withheld, knows all about heroin. It wrecked the hopes and dreams she had for her grandson, now 17, whom she raised. Now her hope is that he stays away from her. Her dream is that he kicks his heroin habit. She had him arrested in mid-July when he broke into her house, looking for things to sell. He said it was for rent, but she knew it was for heroin. He threatened to kill her when she told him to leave, so she called the police. A few days later, she went to Danielson Superior Court and got a restraining order barring her grandson from any contact with her. While there, she looked at the names on the day's court docket. ``I saw so many names of young people I knew, kids who were good but fell apart when they got messed up on drugs,'' Florence said. Alcohol At 14; Heroin At 16 Sue Rector has a difficult time talking about Luke. It's a painful admission for his parents -- one a teacher and the other an insurance company accountant -- to make, to say that their son is a heroin addict. It's so painful that James Rector can't talk about it. But Sue Rector wants other parents of middle-class children to know that it could happen to them, that one day their own child could be shooting heroin, particularly in Willimantic.      Her face is sad and worn as she talks at the kitchen table in her quaint kitchen, decorated in country blue and brick with heart-shaped decorations that say ``peace and love.'' She keeps a picture of Luke in a cap and gown holding the high school equivalency diploma he got the last time he was in prison. He was No. 1 in his class, his one success in recent years. Sue Rector has taken down the most recent pictures of her son; they are just too painful to look at. Instead, she displays pictures of Luke when he was young, an angelic, smiling, towheaded toddler dressed in a red-and-white check shirt and overalls. ``Luke was such a good boy. We thought, he's fine, we won't worry about him,'' Sue Rector says, a tinge of irony in her voice. ``He was our little blessing for a long time.''      The Rectors had moved to Connecticut from Texas, drawn by a job at an insurance company and to Willimantic by the reasonable price of their Dutch colonial in a decent neighborhood. Their boys went to church on Sundays and to Bible study and a Christian youth group during the week. Luke, it seemed for the longest time, was the perfect child. He slept as an infant, and doted on his parents, giving them homemade gifts for Christmas and Thanksgiving. He was a straight-A student in middle school who played soccer and baseball. The Rectors worried more about Luke's older brother, Larry, who had been a difficult child and was diagnosed as bipolar by the time he was 7. Larry, two years older than his brother, needed and got most of the attention.      The first indication something was going wrong with Luke was when they found him drunk at age 14. He told them he was upset about something a girl had said to him. What he was afraid to admit to his parents was that he strongly suspected he was gay. At 15, because of Luke's unruly behavior, his parents tried something drastic. They sent him to a faith-based school in the Dominican Republic, aimed at helping troubled boys. They could afford to keep him in the $38,000 program for only a year. Luke came home. ``He came back and we tried to get him going with something else. At that point, everything we tried to do for him, he rejected,'' Sue Rector said.      By the time Luke was 16, he had run away from home and was out on the street. Luke says that after his first brush with alcohol at 14, he stayed away from drinking for a while, but then started smoking pot. He first tried heroin at 16 in August 1998, after he came back from the Dominican Republic. ``The best way to describe it was heaven on Earth,'' Luke says, sitting on a park bench in Jillson Square, between dates a few weeks before he went to jail. ``I was so high I forgot about all my problems. I just loved it.'' By the next summer, he was shooting between three and eight bags every day. At 18, he would sleep in abandoned buildings, under bridges. His parents would get him into program after program, and he'd always leave after a couple of weeks.      Larry Rector tried heroin -- he claims because of Luke -- and two years ago, nearly died of an overdose. Larry's heart stopped, but paramedics revived him. ``I knew I was dying and couldn't move. I was praying for God to let me into heaven and please forgive me,'' Larry says.      Larry believes his brother turned to drugs to avoid his conflicting feelings about being gay. ``We were raised with a system of values firmly ingrained. To have feelings that go against it would bother him,'' Larry says. Indeed, Luke's parents don't accept his lifestyle, and have tried to change him rather than accept him for who he is. ``I don't think that is something that is inborn,'' Sue Rector says. ``Homosexuality is wrong, which I believe. If someone is a homosexual, it is wrong, but they need to get help in dealing with that.'' If Luke ever shakes his drug habit, Sue Rector says, she would like to send him to a facility in Nashville called Love in Action, marketed as intensive ``recovery from sexual sin.'' Sue Rector says she constantly questions her decision to move to Willimantic. ``When we bought the house, a couple of people told me there was a real bad drug problem,'' she says. ``If I could go back in time, I would not have moved into this town.''   The Courage to Heal Tracy Gordon Fox & Bill Leukhardt, Hartford Courant- 10/23/2002 WILLIMANTIC -- Religion, non-impact aerobics and polka music each get their own public access TV shows and audience here. So does drug addiction. It's called "Positive Faces," an upbeat show on cable Channel 14 that focuses on recovery. It's the flip side of the town's intractable heroin problem -- the success stories of people who have kicked their habits. "Willimantic is a recovery town," said Terri Keaton, a recovering heroin addict who works as a counselor with Perception House, one of the community's several treatment centers. "I can't go to the market without seeing someone in recovery who waves or stops to talk."      Since the 1970s, a network of state-licensed programs has tossed lifelines to addicts seeking to escape their suffering. Halfway houses and supervised-living apartments are sprinkled throughout Willimantic, providing homes for recovering addicts while they rebuild their lives, find jobs and try to root out the behaviors that trigger relapse. There's a men's home, a women's home and a house for recovering people who also are sick with HIV. There are self-help meetings every night of the week.      "Addiction is a disease," said Diane Potvin, the creator and co-host of "Positive Faces." She's a recovering alcoholic who for 14 years was the executive secretary to the first selectman of the town of Windham, of which Willimantic is a part. She's now a member of the staff of the nonprofit Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery. "We don't make it easy for people to stop and get better. Especially with heroin. We put shame on them," Potvin said. "On this show we try to bring recovery out of the shadows, to rid it of the stigma."      Twice a month, Potvin and a volunteer crew of recovering addicts meet at the cable TV studio to field viewers' calls and ask guests in recovery about their new and sober lives. Quite often, the drug the show's guests have kicked is heroin. Heroin was the downfall of Columbia native James Couchon, a guest on the show in July. "When I was using, I couldn't walk down the street in Willimantic without the police slowing down to see what I was up to," said Couchon, who is now clean and has a good job, a good marriage and a home. Couchon hoped his televised story of transition to a better life might aid someone struggling with addiction. "It's been 10 years in recovery for me. I don't mind talking about it," Couchon said later. "I had a lot of fun doing the show." So do the people who tape it.      One hot August night, bright TV studio lights heat up the set. Potvin and a co-host, Geri Langlois, a former Thompson first selectman and state representative recovering from cocaine addiction, get ready for the latest show. Their guest, Heather McDonald, will speak about a program in East Hartford that helps people battle both addiction and mental illness. Across the hall in the control room, volunteer technicians Alan Szumkowski, Carlos Rivera and Kara McMellon joke around before taping begins. The three are recovering heroin addicts.      Szumkowski, Potvin's brother, kicked heroin four years ago. Rivera and McMellon got sober while incarcerated. They met at a 12-step meeting in Willimantic, where they were living in separate residential treatment programs. Both had been sent on probation by the Department of Correction to long-term programs to kick their habits. The two programs in Willimantic where each landed are among the 58 state-licensed residential rehabilitation sites across Connecticut. "I'd never heard of Willimantic," said McMellon, who was born in New Haven. "Coming up here in the van from York prison in Niantic, I looked outside at the country and fields and thought they were going to drop me off at some little farm. Willimantic turned out to be a positive place for me." Offering A Haven The addicts and drug-addicted prostitutes in Willimantic are more visible than they might be in larger cities. Here, they stick out like rocks poking from the surface of a shallow pond. But sympathy -- and empathy -- are also closer to the surface. "In this small town, everything is more concentrated, more obvious," Potvin said. "Heroin has destroyed everything for these people. I'm sure not one of these girls woke up one morning and thought they'd like to become an addict and a prostitute. It's where the drug pushed them. "But we shouldn't lock them up in jail because they're `bad people.' ... We need more treatment and less prisons."      Willimantic has outreach programs to help addicts still on the streets, social workers who try to keep addicts and prostitutes from risky conduct that could result in AIDS or hepatitis, and several church groups that provide food, clothing and friendship. "All the agencies work together as a team with referrals, finding work or jobs," said Mercedes Arroyo, director of the Puerto Rican Organizational Program, a nonprofit agency that helps the town's many Hispanics. "A lot of people come to Willimantic because it's a better place to live and raise children. But they may need help."      Moises Ramirez, who is captain of the local Salvation Army post on Pleasant Street, offers several youth programs, including soccer teams. He said he gets assistance from other agencies if he runs into a situation he can't handle. Willimantic is a friendly town, and he says he has seen no racism since he arrived here six years ago. Ramirez said he tries to steer children away from drug use and crime. "That's what the Salvation Army did for me in Mexico City," he said. "I began going there when I was 8. We're not here to change the whole town. We can't. But you never know what that one kid you help will turn out to be -- a scientist, the next Martin Luther King."      There's also a soup kitchen that started in 1981 to help those who became unemployed when the town's thread mills were shutting down. The Covenant soup kitchen is in the basement of St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Valley Street, a few blocks from the Hotel Hooker, town hall and Jillson Square. Its director, Paul Doyle, is a minister who came from a church in Palm Springs, Calif. The kitchen averages 24,000 lunches and 14,000 breakfasts a year. "The soup kitchen is a safe haven. We work really hard to make sure there is no judgment," Doyle said. "Heroin is the drug of choice here for poor people in this town. It's cheap and available. Heroin is extremely prevalent here."  If people ask for help, Doyle and the staff will do what they can to get them into treatment. "Sometimes the easiest part of all of this is stopping using. Then comes the hard work -- dealing with life without using," he said. "To get rid of your `lifeboat' for the hard times is the most difficult."      The Rev. Fred Wright, pastor at the First Baptist Church on Jillson Square, said he is sometimes asked by out-of-town folks if he's nervous about the drug-addicted prostitutes who hang out at the park next door. No, he said. "I'm a country preacher and this is my first time really learning about addiction," Wright said one night at a meeting in his church. "But I see it's not about a bad person becoming good, but a sick person getting better."      At least once a week, social workers arrive at Jillson Square in a camper, put a card table in front of it and begin passing out handfuls of condoms to prostitutes. Inside the air-conditioned camper are cold sodas, fresh pastries and Dorcas Velazquez. At 5 feet 2, Velazquez isn't an imposing figure. But the 54-year-old mother of two commands respect from the prostitutes and homeless as a caring counselor. "One guy told me I do more for him than his mother," she said. "Who am I to judge? The person who is addicted -- they ache, they're sick, and the only thing that will make them feel better is a bag."      Velazquez was raised in a strict Christian home in New York City by parents who taught her to respect everyone and not to laugh at anyone's pain. She moved to Puerto Rico to raise her two small children, fearing the drugs and crime in New York. She moved to Willimantic about 12 years ago and worked for a local pediatrician. He suggested that she apply for a job as a social worker because she was bilingual and an excellent listener.      Velazquez has seen many addicts die of overdoses on the street or inside the Hotel Hooker. "Each room in the hotel has a story you can tell," she said. "People have been raped, people have died in there. There have been overdoses, beatings." She cried when one of her clients, John Davis, died recently. She comforted his girlfriend, Jessica Canwell, who came to see her in Jillson Square. "I feel that the people who died, I can't do anything for any longer," she says. "The people who are alive, I can help." She waits for the moment when an addict knocks on the door of her camper and says he wants to get into a program. "We're here to wait for that moment, when they say it's time," she said. `What A Journey' Szumkowski, one of the "Positive Faces" volunteers, had tried to stop using heroin many times. He's been clean and sober now for four years. "I began using heroin in my teens," says Szumkowski, 48. "We used to come down to Willi from Manchester to buy if there was a raid in Hartford and the heat was on."      Today, McMellon, 32, is a trusted clerk in a local store. It amazes and humbles her that she has a "normal" life. "I don't want to ruin this. I have my own hopes and dreams. I just want to be happy. I used to walk down the street and proclaim that I was an addict and I truly thought I was happy. But I didn't know how much drugs distort until I stopped." She started using at age 13, quickly progressing from alcohol to cocaine to heroin. "I kept it up until Oct. 2, 2000, when I went to jail. ... I had a terrible habit. Three bundles [30 bags] of heroin. I began shooting cocaine to offset the heroin. Heroin made me feel wonderful. It makes all your troubles melt away and the world is wonderful. You know the feeling? Well, it's like hugging a big warm, fuzzy blanket right out of the dryer on a winter day."      Rivera, 34, another volunteer, is a strong, stocky man with a hoarse voice and a warm smile. He was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, where he dreamed of becoming a boxer or ballplayer. Instead, he became a gun-wielding heroin addict who broke his mother's heart by fighting, robbing and stealing. He spent most of his teens in prison. "I never got past the fourth grade. To me, jail was the school of life. I was a thief. A liar. A cheat. A troublemaker. A punk. My father was an addict. My mother wasn't. He was shot and killed in 1980. Drug business. I have four brothers and three sisters. They're all crazy for dope. I had three brothers die of AIDS." He says he was a "revengeful person" then who loved fighting. "You want to mess with me, punk? Put a bag of dope in my system and I was superman. I was the same punk, the same jackass everywhere. To me, the American Dream was to go to New York and sell drugs."      So he came to America, first to New York, then to Waterbury, where his mother was living with a married daughter. His arrest there on drug charges put him on the path to recovery. "I graduated from the streets to the pen. From the pen, I got sent to Perception House in Willimantic. That's how I got here." Today, he's a kitchen supervisor at a local restaurant, proud of the promotions he's gotten and thankful for sobriety and for Kara. He speaks to any addict who seems receptive. "My faith is strong. My biggest enemy is loss of hope and despair," he says. "Biggest thing I ever did for myself in recovery is open myself up to white people. First I got a maintenance job. Now I'm a prep supervisor. What a bless. What a journey." Can't Somebody Do Something? Tracy Gordon Fox & Bill Leukhardt, Hartford Courant- 10/24/2002 WILLIMANTIC -- Five years ago, townspeople thought they knew how to stop the heroin trade. They closed a public health program that gave away 50,000 sterile needles a year to reduce the spread of AIDS, hepatitis and other diseases among some 300 client-addicts. The program had become a lightning rod for public anger about drugs after a 2-year-old girl was pricked in her yard by a discarded syringe. Critics said free needles attracted addicts and addicts attracted dealers. When the program shut down in March 1997, it became the only state-sponsored exchange ever closed in America.      But heroin continued flowing into town, as it has for more than 30 years. ``Our needle exchange went away, but not our heroin problem,'' town AIDS outreach worker Kathey Fowler said recently as she inspected an addict's shooting gallery a block from Main Street. She plucked five used syringes from the ground and carefully put them into an old coffee can she found. ``All of the problems blamed on the exchange still remain,'' said Robert Broadhead, a University of Connecticut sociology professor who studied the exchange's rise, fall and aftermath. ``Including a large and active illicit drug scene.''      That's why bloody syringes still end up in town parks, on the banks of the Willimantic River, by the pay phone behind the Cumberland Farms and in dozens of other spots favored by the town's 200 to 300 junkies. It's why cops can break down the door of an apartment and find a dealer with 7,000 bags of heroin and $15,000 in cash in his bedside table. It's why longtime residents have nicknamed the drug-plagued sections off Milk Street ``Sodom.'' And it's why ``Willimantic is the heroin capital of Connecticut,'' according to Clifford Thornton, a retired telephone company executive from Windsor whose nationally known group, Efficacy, seeks the legalization of drugs and the elimination of mandatory minimum jail terms.      But is legalization the answer? What about a massive police crackdown or better treatment services? Can heroin ever be uprooted here? Or have illegal drugs become as permanent as the granite bedrock under the town? Interviews with police, social workers, longtime residents and community leaders show no consensus on a plan of attack. In fact, a feeling of weary resignation seems to weave through their comments. ``At a certain point, you do become hardened by it,'' said Roger Adams, chairman of the Windham Chamber of Commerce. ``It's there and is a part of life.'' Funding And Priorities Local police insist they could make an impact if they weren't hampered by lack of resources and funding. State Sen. Donald E. Williams Jr., D-Killingly, says Willimantic may need outside help to combat its drug problem, including bringing in the state police. ``I think it's fairly well-known there has been a drug-trafficking problem in and around Willimantic,'' Williams said. ``We have to step up our resources and put people in jail who are bringing the drugs in.''      State Police Sgt. Jeff Hotsky, a supervisor at the Statewide Narcotics Task Force, said that with enough police officers ``you could saturate the area. ... You could drive them from one part of the city to the next. It does make it a lot more difficult for them.'' State police succeeded in at least submerging dealers in the once drug-ridden Windham Heights housing complex two years ago, when they assigned seven troopers there in a community-policing program. ``There is no more open dealing,'' said Sgt. Stephen Ostroski, who supervises the nationally recognized program. ``If there are, either we would see them or someone in the community does and tells us.''      Willimantic Police Chief Milton King insists his local community-policing program has made inroads in the Hispanic neighborhoods, where residents are starting to turn in dealers. But budget constraints and questionable manpower decisions have made it impossible for the department to put a dent in the heroin trade. The 39-member department, four officers short because of disabilities and retirement, didn't have the staffing this year to spare an officer for the Statewide Narcotics Task Force, a combination of state and local police. Instead, the department lent its best drug detective to an FBI task force a couple of times a week in exchange for some federal funds.      King acknowledged that the Statewide Narcotics Task Force ``has been a blessing to this community for the past 15 years.'' But he added: ``We're under budget constraints. I could not pull away an officer. If I sent someone to Statewide, he or she is gone.'' ``That's an issue that has to be dealt with,'' said Windham First Selectman Michael T. Paulhus. He vowed that town officials would look into putting an officer back on the task force. He also said the town would look into restoring walking and bicycle beats, which were cut this year to save money. Meanwhile, without police on the ground, junkies shoot up in the parks, knowing that officers who pass by frequently in cruisers can't see them from the vehicles.      Although heroin use and trafficking is a critical problem in Willimantic, it's not the most pressing issue for the state's attorney's office in Danielson, which handles criminal cases from Willimantic and the rest of Windham County. Windham State's Attorney Patricia Froelich says her top priority is child abuse. Windham County has the highest percentage of sexual assault against children of any judicial district in the state. ``My issue is we certainly have a narcotics problem, but the numbers aren't as staggering as the child abuse problems,'' she said. Staffing is also an obstacle for her. ``In 15 or 16 months, it's become obvious we need more than four assistants, but I am just not going to get that,'' Froelich said. ``The state's fiscal situation is a problem for us.''      Froelich said she takes a harsh stance with the heroin cases, particularly dealers. She makes sure that, whenever possible, dealers are charged with selling drugs within 1,500 feet of a school, day-care center or housing project. That charge carries an additional three-year penalty.'`Several defense lawyers have complained to me about it, saying everywhere in Willimantic is within 1,500 feet. My response is, `Good,''' Froelich said.      But even when dealers are prosecuted, they often have enough money to post bail. ``We can argue for high bonds and the judges can impose high bonds, but people are posting them,'' she said. ``If they eliminate one dealer today, to me, that's making progress,'' Froelich said. ``We do what we can do. There are days when we are just shoveling sand against the tide.'' The Treatment Debate King, one of the leading opponents of the doomed needle-exchange program, speaks for many when he says the answer lies in more police work and fewer of the social services he believes draw addicts here like ants to sugar. ``There are more outreach programs in 4 square miles than there are in most cities,'' King said recently. ``Every agency in this community provides for people who are unfortunate and can't provide for themselves. They gravitate to ... the soup kitchen, the methadone clinic, AIDS outreach.'' But other community leaders disagree. They say Willimantic needs more and better addiction treatment services. ``It's the chicken-and-egg kind of question,'' said Williams, the state legislator. ``The issue of ongoing concern is the lack of resources for drug treatment. We need to get people who are addicted back on their feet to a path that leads them away from addiction.''      Leanne Dillian, executive director of Windham-based Community Prevention and Addiction Services Inc., said treatment, not prison, is the way to help almost all drug users. ``Addicts as a whole are targets. They do end up in prison, often serving stiff sentences for nonviolent crimes like possession,'' she said. ``We need more treatment slots. Our clients aren't good at waiting for treatment. More than a half hour in a waiting room and they're out the door.''      Less money for prisons and more on medicines to quell relapses and cravings also would go a long way to help sick and suffering addicts, she said. Just this month, she noted, the federal government approved buprenorphine to treat people addicted to heroin and other opiates. The drug, approved after years of clinical trials, can be administered in a doctor's office instead of a special clinic. It opens the door for physicians to treat addicts.      Paulhus said town officials are open to any suggestion that might help diminish the drug trade here. ``Enforcement is but one aspect. Recovery works. Some people need four or five tries, others a dozen or more. But there are people out there in recovery who are living proof that you can stop using and go on to be a productive member of society,'' he said. ``We are acutely aware of recovery. We advocate for more treatment.'' Thornton, the Windsor man whose group, Efficacy, is one of several nationwide that believe this nation's drug laws perpetuate drug use and sales, said the focus must shift away from the criminal model. ``Are people ever going to stop using illegal drugs? No,'' said Thornton, whose mother died of a heroin overdose. ``So you have to look at a policy that would cause the least amount of harm to people who use and to society as a whole. The current system is not doing that. When we eliminate a drug dealer through arrest, all we're doing is creating a job vacancy, which people line up to fill.'' Battle-Weary Many in the community don't think heroin will ever go away, no matter how it is attacked. It's been around for so long, and its legacy now runs so deep, they've grown weary of the fight. ``I think there is an element that people are resigned to it. They'll say, `They're there again, it's time for another sweep,''' Adams of the Chamber of Commerce said.      Paul Slyman, the retired Willimantic police officer who first flagged the heroin problem to federal authorities in 1970, said there seems to be no stopping the flow of heroin into Willimantic. ``I have no idea what you can do to stop it. Even the government can't figure it out and they have millions of dollars and all kinds of equipment,'' Slyman said. ``Wherever you concentrate a show of force, they will find another place.''      John Kilburn, a sociology professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, believes the answer may lie in better job opportunities, but the perception of Willimantic as a heroin town has impeded its progress in adjusting from a manufacturing town to a service economy. ``The morale of the town is low and many longtime residents blame it on heroin. And because of that, it inhibits the level of confidence to adjust to the new economy,'' he says. Eastern, he says, is caught in a ``double bind.'' Students are encouraged to support the Main Street businesses, but then are warned to be careful of the drug addicts there. While the town complains of budget woes, Eastern claims it brings in $39 million in direct and indirect spending to the community. But campus life goes on away from the most troubled drug sections.      There is a movement in town to enhance the image of the Jillson Square and Main Street area by transforming it into a regional arts center. This spring, town leaders started Third Thursday, a street-and-arts celebration that draws hundreds of families to Main Street once a month. ``The problem with Main Street is the only people you see much of the time are the people hanging out,'' said Jean de Smet, one of the street festival's organizers. ``You bring more people out and you don't notice these people.'' But Paulhus acknowledges, ``There is no magic bullet, no simple solution to this problem.'' Meanwhile, heroin remains so common and so entrenched that Paulhus receives monthly collection reports on the number of needles picked up by the police or public works employees. Since March, town workers have collected 203 discarded syringes. Town police collected 145 needles. Public works crews found 58.