Sep 22, 2015 3 min read

Unless you know someone who has fallen victim to it, the heroin epidemic that has swept through Washington and Greene counties, along with other parts of the commonwealth and country, can seem like nothing more than an abstraction, a welter of statistics and sawdust-dry facts.

Numbers of overdoses. Numbers of fatalities. Rates of relapse. The cost of pain-killing prescription drugs that can be a gateway to heroin. The cost of heroin. The cost of treatment and the productivity that is lost to addiction.

Issues like these have been covered in this newspaper and in many other media outlets. But a two-part story that appeared in the Observer-Reporter Monday and Tuesday went beyond the data and large-scale trends and looked at the toll of heroin from a very human perspective. As part of our “Under the Label” series, it told the engrossing tale of Nicole Leith, a 30-year-old Monroeville native who now lives in Washington, and is shaking off heroin addiction and trying to get her life back on track. Her story reveals how commonplace heroin addiction has become and its riptide-powerful pull.

Leith grew up in what many would classify as a placid, “normal” environment, with a working father, a homebound mother and a younger brother. When she was in junior high and high school, Leith was never one of those kids who dabbled in alcohol or drugs. She had good grades, an array of friends and played softball. Leith’s mother, Connie, told our reporter Natalie Reid Miller, “We ate dinner together every day. My husband did the coach thing. I would think we were pretty normal. We did what we were supposed to do.”

It was when Leith entered community college that she started toying around with alcohol, marijuana and prescription drugs. Eventually, she slipped into the quicksand of heroin and found herself stealing and lying in order to keep up a ferocious, demanding habit. She tried to recover once, relapsed, but then came to Washington to get away from Monroeville and all the cues there that made her inch back to heroin.

Now, Leith is a certified recovery specialist who is managing a recovery house in Washington and guiding the effort of nine other women to jettison heroin from their lives for good. She advocates a kind of unadorned, scared-straight approach when it comes to warning people about the effects of heroin. Rather than, say, the sanitized, glamorous suffering of Frank Sinatra in the 1955 movie classic, “The Man With the Golden Arm,” it “looks like somebody who hasn’t showered for days. It looks like somebody who has lost all self-respect and self-love and self-worth. It looks like somebody who is dying on the inside and dying physically,” she said.

Combating heroin requires a return to the more prosaic realm of law enforcement and public policy. Education and awareness of heroin’s horrific impact must be emphasized. While the peddlers of heroin should be vigorously prosecuted, those who fall victim to it should be edged toward treatment rather than a jail cell. The prescription of opioid painkillers like Oxycodone, which is often a gateway to heroin, should also be closely monitored.

The action we take today can help prevent other people like Leith from having to fight a protracted battle against heroin.