At first, there were only whispers. Mourners would gather in Charlestown's churches for funerals of the young, nodding solemnly - and knowingly - when told the family had a history of heart problems.
In truth, it was another death by heroin. As the drug seeped across the neighborhood, it caused dozens of overdoses, devastating hundreds of families. Starting in 2003, the signs of crisis were everywhere - the neighborhood parks that addicts colonized, the fast-food restaurants that locked their bathroom doors after finding discarded needles, and on one raw afternoon, the pizza parlor where Michael Charbonnier took his children. As the family settled into a booth, two men at another table pulled out a stash of heroin and prepared to shoot up.
"This wasn't a seedy bar," said Charbonnier, a Charlestown native and Boston police officer who tossed the men out. "This was a family restaurant at 2 o'clock in the afternoon on a Sunday. And I said: 'What has it come to here?' "
That same question was being asked in homes all across Charlestown, a 1-square-mile neighborhood where the newly- and near-wealthy dwell next to generational poverty. The response represented an unprecedented call to action - and showed that one of America's oldest neighborhoods still had the mettle to confront a deadly threat.
Amid a massive effort that began in 2004, drug overdoses in Charlestown have plummeted by two-thirds this year compared with 2003. There has not been a single death attributed to drugs so far in 2007. And a crime wave that peaked as heroin grabbed hold of Charlestown subsided.
Over the past four years, grand gestures and small measures have united Charlestown like never before. Residents who once observed a legendary code of silence started calling one another, as well as the police, to report suspected drug dealing - part of 51 block-by-block campaigns created to thwart the spread of heroin. Neighbors scattered their children's plastic toys across a park, symbolic proof that they had reclaimed the land from drug users. Opposition to a treatment house melted away.
Massachusetts General Hospital and Partners HealthCare, already a major presence in Charlestown through a clinic and research complex, committed more than $3.5 million to the cause, while government agencies pumped in fresh resources, too - including $12 million from the city for a new police substation.
"It used to be every time I turned around, there was somebody getting high," said Shannon Lundin, a 28-year-old mother who survived a heroin overdose and has been sober for nearly four years. "Now, every time I turn around, there's somebody getting sober."
To appreciate where Charlestown is now, it is important to consider where it had recently been. At least 123 drug overdoses and 13 deaths were reported from 2003 through 2006, most attributed to heroin or OxyContin, a prescription painkiller, according to Police Department figures. A map of Charlestown propped against an office wall in the Boys & Girls Club shows a tide of red dots, one for each overdose, washing from the Navy Yard with its downtown vista to the edge of Sullivan Square - an epidemic unbounded by class or race. At its worst in 2003, overdoses in Charlestown happened at a rate three times the citywide average.
The crisis landed inside the warm home of Carol Powers-Morrissey, where the walls hang heavy with portraits chronicling the growth of her family. In many ways, her house became a microcosm of Charlestown itself.
"The hardest thing to do is to come to the realization that your son or daughter is an addict," said Powers-Morrissey, a nurse with an air of keen determination.
For her, that realization dawned the day she looked at a family portrait and all her unspoken suspicions about her 19-year-old son came to fruition. She realized his entire face had changed. "I noticed the weight loss and the eyes looked funny," she said.
Seeing that picture convinced her she had to do more - and not just for her family. She joined the Charlestown Substance Abuse Coalition, created in 2004 to bring together disparate efforts around the town. She distributed magnets and fliers about substance abuse to places like the Knights of Columbus hall.
"This isn't a secret," she would tell people. "I know who's doing it; you know who's doing it. Say it out loud, let's just say it out loud."
The campaign to educate parents and youths about heroin and other narcotics became part of the fabric of life in Charlestown, but in ways that were intentionally understated. "If you say, 'Come down to the Knights of Columbus next week, we're going to talk about drugs,' no one's going to show up," Charbonnier said.
Instead, parents were invited to lectures on how to be better a parent, with messages about the dangers of prescription-drug abuse woven in. Similarly, at Pop Warner football practices, coaches skipped tackling practices some nights, and youngsters instead learned about making smart choices in life.
When Peter Looney founded the coalition Charlestown Against Drugs two decades ago, the drugs of choice were cocaine, angel dust, and alcohol. In its early days, the group pushed to reduce public drinking during Bunker Hill Day festivities.
"I stopped drinking in '84 or '85, and people used to say to me, 'Christ, just because you stopped drinking doesn't mean the whole world has to. Why are you ruining our good time?' " Looney said.
In 1995, OxyContin began appearing in medicine cabinets nationwide. Soon enough, it made its way, illegally, onto the streets of Charlestown, foreshadowing the heroin epidemic.
"The problem with OxyContin," said police Captain Bernard O'Rourke, who for eight years has presided over the district that includes Charlestown, "is that people are falsely led to believe that it's safe because it's a pharmaceutical product."
In fact, the pills are highly addictive and steeply expensive. Users quickly develop a tolerance, requiring stronger doses to achieve the same high - and a daily habit easily becomes a $500-a-week proposition. Unable to afford such a pricey high, addicts in Charlestown turned to the drug they vowed they would never use: heroin, a drug plentiful and cheap, with a small baggy costing not much more than a six pack of beer.
There is a hierarchy in the world of drug addicts. Heroin is viewed as the narcotic of the desperate. It's bad enough to snort it. But to inject it is something else entirely, an act associated with dark alleys and sinister figures, as well as the spread of viruses that cause hepatitis C and AIDS.
For Lundin and a second recovering drug addict interviewed by the Globe, the descent from alcohol to OxyContin to heroin was swift and all-consuming. They stole and lied to support their habits, cycling in and out of detox programs, doing "horrible things," as the 22-year-old woman put it, speaking anonymously as she tries to rebuild her life.
"I didn't know how to do anything else but get high," Lundin said.
The one thing Lundin didn't have time for: her daughter. Sometimes, she would put the toddler in a bedroom, turn on a videotape, and party with her boyfriend.
"Thinking about that now, my stomach turns," Lundin said, her big, expressive eyes widening at the memory.
There's no single reason Charlestown was so hard-hit.
John Auerbach, the state's public health commissioner, who led Boston's health agency when the heroin epidemic was at its worst, suggested that in Charlestown, as in some other neighborhoods, insularity might have contributed. Perhaps, he said, youngsters growing up in a place accessible only by bridge fail to recognize the range of services available if they become dependent on drugs.
Poverty is also cited as a potential cause. Charlestown has three residential complexes for low-income families, including the low-slung brick buildings on Bunker Hill Street that form the largest government housing complex in New England. O'Rourke, the police captain, called that complex the "epicenter of the drug activity."
The Police Department decided not to arrest its way out of Charlestown's problem. Making drug arrests is difficult, O'Rourke said, and, more crucially, does little to ameliorate the underlying problem. Addicts are still addicts after their court appearance, said the captain.
At the same time, the community embraced an ethos of treatment over punishment. "It was not a 'Just say no' campaign,' " said Beth Rosenshein, whose salary as coordinator of the Charlestown Substance Abuse Coalition is paid for by Mass. General.
The hospital's single-biggest donation, $2 million, is underwriting the construction of a halfway house for recovering addicts.
The need became evident one gray afternoon last month as two young women greeted each other on Bunker Hill Street. Much as old friends might lament not getting into the college of their choice, one of them complained about how tough it was to get into drug rehab. "See," said Jack Kelly, liaison in Charlestown for Mayor Thomas M. Menino, "that's normal now as we sit here in 2007, to walk by and hear a conversation like that."
Lundin sees evidence of change, too, in the faces of old friends, clear-eyed rather than dazed. As for Lundin, she still spends her nights with people suffering from addictions - except now, she's helping them, as a substance abuse counselor.
Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.
