The gentle tones of an electric piano provided a mournful backdrop for the sad silence filling the auditorium at the Passavant Hospital Foundation Conference Center in McCandless. As a spring night outside effortlessly embraced nature's renewal, those inside hoped for a similar transformation. All had suffered personal winters of despair, watching helplessly as a loved one fell victim to the allure of drugs. A baby cried. Adults cried, too, as more than 40 people walked in single file to the front. Each lit a candle while speaking of the suffering of sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, lovers and ex-spouses, relatives and friends -- some now clean, some still struggling, some departed. Handed white roses, they carried their candles back to their seats. [continues 1563 words]
Their smiling photos conveyed youth's bright hope. Accompanying newspaper stories blared addiction's blind hopelessness. One of them, a 24-year-old full-time substitute teacher at the city's Creative and Performing Arts high school, was charged late last month in a bank heist with her boyfriend and with stealing more than $22,500 in laptop computers from CAPA to feed the couple's $100-a-day heroin habit. The other, a 20-year-old student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, was killed early last Sunday in McKees Rocks when a deal to trade his iPad for $200 worth of heroin went bad, police said. [continues 1021 words]
In was early June when it blared from Pittsburgh newspaper headlines and over the airwaves that a potent batch of heroin laced with fentanyl was causing overdoses, some fatal, at an alarming rate. A 22-year-old heroin addict heard the news one morning as he was getting ready for the job that funded his $100-a-day habit. He called his addict friends, not with a warning but an entreaty: They had to get some of that "really good stuff." [continues 669 words]
'Spiked' Drug May Have Killed 14 In May-July The explosion of drug overdoses and deaths in the area this summer has dissipated, indicating fentanyl-laced heroin suspected in the spike is no longer on the streets. While there's no longer an immediate public-health threat posed by the extra-strong fentanyl-boosted heroin, believed to be responsible for as many as 14 deaths between mid-May and mid-July, there remains a heroin-addiction problem that shows no signs of abating. [continues 1179 words]
The Pittsburgh region has never been known for being on the cutting edge of trends, but that's not always a bad thing. Graphic: Meth lab incidents on the rise (http://www.post-gazette.com/popup.asp?img=http://www.post-gazette.com/images3/20050731methlab-stats.gif) Just ask area law-enforcement officials who are dreading the arrival of methamphetamine and its attendant health, crime, public safety and environmental ramifications as the highly addictive drug moves eastward from Western and Southwestern states. [continues 1269 words]
As President Bush wages war on Saddam Hussein half a world away, his "drug czar," John Walters, will bring the war on drugs to Pittsburgh today and tomorrow. Walters, director of the National Drug Control Policy, will be the keynote speaker today at the PRIDE 2003 World Drug Prevention Conference at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown. It is expected to draw more than 3,500 young people. Billed as "the world's largest youth drug prevention conference," the 26th annual gathering is sponsored by Michigan-based PRIDE Youth Programs, a nonprofit organization that provides violence, alcohol and drug prevention training for young people. [continues 216 words]
On Jan. 28, John D. McMahon returned home from his tour of duty as Pittsburgh police commander of the North Side station and began taking off his uniform. And then it hit him. He would never again put on that uniform. Moreover, he realized, there would be no McMahon on the force for the first time since 1941, when his father, the late Lt. John F. McMahon, first donned his police blues. For a moment, the thoughts were unsettling. But then McMahon thought about why he is officially retiring today and he was excited by the prospect of what he views as a "new adventure." [continues 779 words]
Donald Geraci, reputed head of an extensive cocaine distribution ring in the Penn Hills area, knew he was in trouble. So when Geraci, 37, was called in May before a statewide grand jury investigating his operations, he decided to talk about his relationship with Springdale District Justice Gigi Sullivan, who he said supplied him protection in exchange for drugs. Geraci, of Hamil Road, Penn Hills, bluntly said yes, he was a cocaine dealer, and one with a powerful ally. Sullivan had been his friend for about three years, he testified, but toward the end of the summer of 1997 theirs became a quid pro quo relationship. [continues 923 words]
Head of city FOP tells officers not to submit to lie-detector tests The FBI has launched an investigation into the apparent theft last week of 15 large pieces of suspected crack cocaine from a locked safe in the East Liberty police station. Pittsburgh police Chief Robert W. McNeilly Jr. said he asked the FBI to begin an independent investigation so there would be no questions about the thoroughness of the Police Bureau's internal probe. "We want to be able to show that we're doing a very thorough investigation . . . and they can verify that," McNeilly said. [continues 961 words]
