Nation: Kids and Heroin: The Adolescent Epidemic

Doctor: Do you think you'd like to die, Ralphie?

Ralph: No.

Doctor: Then why do you want to go home?

Ralph: 'Cause I want to.

Doctor: Are you going to shoot more heroin?

Ralph: I dunno.

An ex-addict, 16: You gonna shoot dope, Ralphie. You gonna be in jail or you gonna be dead. The pushers ain't gonna disappear just 'cause you comin' home, Ralphie.

RALPH DE JESUS is twelve years old, a 60-lb. wisp of a boy barely four feet tall, with gentle eyes and pale arms so thin that it is almost impossible to believe that they could take a needle. But Ralphie is a junkie. He has not only used heroin, but he has also taken part in muggings and sold drugs to his friends in order to support his habit. Last week Ralphie was in Manhattan's Odyssey House, in a group therapy session with a psychiatrist and a dozen ex-addicts aged 14 to 18. Ralphie wanted to go back home to The Bronx. The doctor, Judianne Densen-Gerber, founder of Odyssey House, and Ralphie's young friends there were trying to make him recognize that if he left them, he would have no chance to break out of the vicious circle of heroin addiction. Ralphie stayed for two more days. Then he went home.

The Odyssey House branch on Manhattan's East 87th Street, one of the few public or private facilities for treating young addicts, is a grubby tenement from the outside. Inside, it is crowded but neatly kept; the kids have replastered falling ceilings, and they do all the work of cleaning, cooking and asking for food from neighborhood merchants. Though discipline is strict, they are cheerful and friendly. The members huddle in frequent bull sessions and gather regularly for group therapy with a trained psychologist. In those agonizing meetings—the one with Ralphie is typical—the kids are by turns affectionate and caustic with one another. Whatever the mood at any one moment, they show a passionate seriousness and a deep mutual concern that is overwhelming to an outsider.

From Ghetto to Suburb

Ralphie got to Odyssey House from a hospital, where he had been seriously ill with hepatitis, contracted from a dirty needle he used to mainline heroin by injecting it into a vein in his arm. He is probably the youngest addict to surface for treatment in a terrifying wave of heroin use among youth, which has caught up teen-agers and even preadolescent children from city ghettos to fashionable suburbs, from New York —where the problem is still most severe —to the West Coast. One 17-year-old at Odyssey House knew Walter Vandermeer, 12, who died in Harlem of a heroin overdose last December (TIME, Dec. 26). He asks Ralphie what he thinks of Walter's death. "That's his business," Ralphie mutters, staring grimly at the floor. It is plain that the ideas of death or imprisonment are beyond the twelve-year-old's grasp.