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Less than a week before, Dr. Densen-Gerber—an outspoken, sometimes abrasive woman of 35, "Doctor Judy" to all who know her—took Ralphie to testify before a New York State legislative committee investigating addiction among the young. Now she asks him: "Why did I take you there?" "I guess you wanted to put me on TV," Ralphie answers. "No," she tells him. "The only reason I took you there is that only if they saw you would they understand that tiny little people like you are doing things they shouldn't do. You are an example of hundreds of other children, Ralphie. Ralphie is not special."
The gathering tragedy is that Ralphie is not special. Heroin, long considered the affliction of the criminal, the derelict, the debauched, is increasingly attacking America's children. Part of the dread and the danger of the problem is that it spreads all too invisibly. No one knows how many heroin addicts of any age there are in the U.S. But in New York City alone, where most experts think roughly half the heroin users in the U.S. live, 224 teenagers died from overdoses or heroin-related infections last year, about a quarter of the city's 900 deaths from her oin use. So far this year, over 40 teenagers have died because of heroin. There may be as many as 25,000 young addicts in New York City, and one expert fears the number may mushroom fantastically to 100,000 this summer. Cautious federal officials believe that heroin addiction below age 25 jumped 40% from 1968 to 1969. However imprecise the figures, there is no doubting the magnitude of the change, or the certitude that something frightening is sweeping into the corridors of U.S. schools and onto the pavements of America's playgrounds. It has not yet cropped up everywhere, but many experts believe that disaster looms large.
"A heroin epidemic has hit us. We must face that fact," says Dr. Donald Louria, president of the New York State Council on Drug Addiction and author of Drug Scene. Dr. Elliot Luby, associate director of Detroit's addict-treating Lafayette Clinic, concurs: "Addiction is really reaching epidemic proportions. You have to look at it as an infectious disease." Epidemic, of course, is a relative term, but as a Chicago psychiatrist, Dr. Marvin Schwarz, says: "Now we're seeing it clinically, whereas before we weren't. The kids on heroin all have long histories of drug use." At the California-based Synanon self-help centers for addicts, the teen-age population has risen from zero five years ago to 400 today. In San Francisco, Dr. Barry Ramer, director of the Study for Special Problems, calls heroin now "the most readily available drug on the streets." He adds: "In my wildest nightmares, I never dreamed of what we are seeing today."
From Rush to Scramble