Heroin deaths spur effort to raise awareness of risks

North Shore law enforcement officials are renewing their efforts to boost public awareness of the perils of heroin use following two overdose deaths this week in Salem.

''In the last five days we've had three overdoses and two of them were fatalities, and the third was close to being a fatality," said Salem Police Captain Paul Tucker. ''We're not sure if we're seeing heroin that is tainted or just very high in purity. We're going to have to wait until the toxicology reports come back, but either way, the stuff is deadly enough in and of itself."

Tucker said that a 41-year-old Essex Street man died Sunday of an overdose and that a 51-year-old Harbor Street man died Tuesday night. A 22-year-old man found unconscious in the same Harbor Street apartment was revived with Narcan, a drug that reverses the effect of heroin.

Salem has had 13 heroin overdoses this year with four deaths, Tucker said. Last year, the city had five deaths resulting from 19 heroin overdoses.

Lynn has also experienced a spike in overdose deaths this year. Through June, seven people have died, while 35 others survived heroin overdoses, police said. Last year, the city had four fatalities out of 42 overdoses.

Lynn began tracking overdoses several years ago in an effort to identify where the drug was coming from and to educate the public about its deadly consequences. Victims are criminally charged whenever possible in an effort to push them toward treatment, said Lynn Police Chief John Suslak.

''We track all of them and do a brief summary," he said. ''We no longer send out notices about heroin being back or it being tainted. From our view, it's all bad, and our message is it is an inherently dangerous thing to get into."

In 2003, Lynn had 15 deaths resulting from 107 heroin overdoses. Suslak said that so far this year, he is worried ''that the percentage of fatal overdoses . . . seems to be growing."

Stephen O'Connell, a spokesman for Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett, said 170 people have died in Essex County over the past two years from opiate use or a combination of opiates and alcohol.