DRUG SCENE

Portland gets smacked

By Noah Bruce

Forget Las Vegas, there’s plenty of fear and loathing going on right here in Portland, according to a new underground publication called Heroin Café. Written by an anonymous author, copyrighted under the name Port City Freaks, the 27-page booklet bound in a red, soft cover has been distributed in small numbers to local clubs and other businesses that would not be embarrassed to have such a publication lying around.

According to Mike Moore, an employee at Bull Moose Music, “We’ve had a copy laying around for two weeks or so.”

“It just appeared on our bar,” says Mellow Lomba, co-owner of the Skinny. “I don’t know how it got here.”

The author, who changes the names of local entities — Portland is called Port City, Old Port is the Old Wharf, and Chief Chitwood is Chief Sherwood — devotes one chapter to the ganja scene in Portland and another to the city’s police force, but the thrust of the publication is about heroin and Oxycontin, a highly addictive pharmaceutical drug, with effects similar to heroin.

“What’s up is after you eat one pill,” writes the nameless narcotics journalist about Oxycontin, “and experience 12 hours of divine opiate ecstasy you want more. You NEED more.”

The author also claims, “Recently, in one week six people have died of heroin overdose and it’s all been kept out of the news. This was back in December.”

According to Lieutenant Joseph Loughlin of the Portland Police Department, this is not true. “If we have a surge of deaths — three deaths in a two-day period or so — I do a press-release,” he says. Nevertheless he does say heroin use is on the rise.

“I can think of three heroin overdose deaths in the recent past,” he says, and “once a week I’d say someone is rushed to the hospital [due to an overdose].”

Loughlin also says Oxycontin is a “big time” problem.

“Oxycontin is a very powerful narcotic painkiller that is extremely popular among heroin users,” he says. “There have been lots of manipulations of pharmacies . . . There have been two home invasions associated with the drug. Users will look in the [obituaries] in the paper and find someone who has recently died of cancer and go rob their house. Users are very resourceful.”

They’ve got to be because though it is sold legally to those with a prescription, according to Loughlin the street price for Oxycontin is “80 bucks for one friggin’ pill.”