Spota: Heroin destroys LI families

For Thomas Spota, the heroin epidemic is personal.

"Do you know what it's like to talk with parents who have lost their children to overdoses?" the Suffolk County district attorney said Wednesday.

The parents of heroin addicts are "pleading with us to help . . . I've had parents tell me that virtually their entire house is gone. Siblings taking Xboxes and selling for 10 cents on the dollar just to get a fix," he said.

Spota's comments came during an interview after a news conference in Riverhead where he announced the arrest of 20 people following a nine-month investigation of heroin trafficking on Long Island.

After a round of heroin arrests in December, Spota himself said that 2009 "will be marked in the annals of law enforcement as the year heroin again found its way into Suffolk County."

In Wednesday's interview, Spota pointed to the cheap price and the quickly addicting nature of heroin to explain the challenges of getting it off the streets.

"I would like to think we're making a dent," he said. "But truthfully, we're probably not."

Still, Spota hopes that by keeping the pressure on the dealers and taking as much of the drug off the streets as possible, it could drive up the price, making it more expensive and scarce.

"When I was a young prosecutor in the early '70s, you would see the heroin addicts as much older," he said. "That was the end product" for drug users. "Now it's the beginning product."

That is one of the reasons the district attorney has put heroin arrests on the front burner, and why he often speaks at public forums in the evenings to warn the public of the devastation the drug can cause.

At times during Wednesday's news conference, he strongly condemned those who sell what he called "poison" on the streets of Suffolk County and ended it by saying, "With God as my judge, we are going to commit every resource we have, especially this summer, to be here and to interrupt" the flow of drugs to the East End.

Spota emphasized that heroin addiction does not stay within the confines of a heartbroken family. He noted a marked increase in crimes, especially burglaries, committed by those looking for money to pay for the drugs.

And, he said, heroin addiction also affects the community at large, pointing to the arrest of Maureen Lambert, a Stony Brook woman accused of fatally running down an 11-year-old girl in Smithtown while high on heroin.

The effect on individual families and society has kept Spota focused on heroin as a top priority, he said. "You talk with some of these parents whose kids have died," he said, "and it starts to really get to you."