[Harlow:] It is being called a nationwide epidemic, and for voters in New Hampshire, they rank it as a greater concern than even the threat of terrorism. In part two of a CNN series "Primary Concern: Heroin," Dr. Sanjay Gupta tells the story about a Massachusetts police chief who refuses to throw addicts in jail.
[Gupta:] It is a mystery, why exactly in this tiny fishing community of Gloucester, Massachusetts, has heroin addiction become an epidemic. It could be the long and lonely winters. It could be the stigma of addiction, and lack of resources for treatment. Whatever the exact cause is unclear. One thing Gloucester has is pills. Lots and lots of pain pills.
[Chief Leonard Campanello, Gloucester Police:] A lot of this addiction came from a very legal and very accepted way to deal with pain. And that's a big problem.
[Gupta:] Now, chief of police, Leonard Campanello, tells me we could leave the station, walk anywhere, up the north shore and come back with heroin in just ten minutes.
[Campanello:] We're finding it in teenagers, all the way up to legislatures, police officers, sons, daughters, you know, family members. This has no boundary.
[Gupta:] So, the chief decided on a radical approach, probably best described as the opposite of a war on drugs. He used Facebook to make an offer to the citizens of Gloucester.
[Campanello:] If you're a user of heroin or opiates, let us help you. We know you do not want this addiction. We have resources here in the city that can and will make a difference in your life. Do not become a static.
[Gupta:] We won't arrest you. We will help you. He had no idea if it would work, if anyone would listen. He didn't even know if it was legal. [on camera]: Did you hesitate? I mean, did you have any concerns about this sort of strategy or putting it out there so boldly?
[Campanello:] No. I think the worst thing they could do was fire me.
[Gupta:] Did you talk to your wife or anybody else before you hit "send"?
[Campanello:] No. This was, you know, plausible deniability for everybody sometimes.
[Gupta:] I want to give you an idea of how this remarkable program works. We're here at the Gloucester Police Department. If you're someone who's addicted to heroin, you would walk through these doors over here and right away, you would notice something is different. First of all, would you pick up the phone and tell them that you're here because you're a heroin addict. And that would start the whole process of getting an angel assigned to you. But also, take a look over here, your needles, your sharps container, your paraphernalia, your drugs, they go over here. When you start to walk through these doors now, you're not going into the police station to get arrested but to get help.
[Campanello:] When we first started this program, it was an end of the war on drugs. As we started thinking about it, was it really ever a war on drugs? Was it a war on addiction? And I think that we made a statement at least for our Gloucester residents that seems to have resonated in a lot of different places that we are back to working for people who need help. So, they will come in here.
[Gupta:] And the people are showing up. So far this year, almost 300 people have come through the doors and are now in treatment. And the patients aren't just from Gloucester. Unable to get the help he needed in California, Steven Lesnikoski got on a plane and came knocking on the chief's door.
[Steven Lesnikoski, Recovering Heroin User:] I showed up here at 3:30 in the morning and the officers, they treated me with respect and dignity and like I was a normal human being, not any kind of stigma that society has attached to addicts and I got the help that I needed.
[Gupta:] The story that led Steven here was all too familiar pills. [on camera]: Did you break your ankle?
[Lesnikoski:] No. I tore my Achilles heel.
[Gupta:] It was very painful I imagine.
[Lesnikoski:] Yes, it was pretty painful. I couldn't walk for a couple of weeks. I was I don't have a cast, but, you know, I had to prop my leg up and that just kind of persistently got worse. I was prescribed Vicodin painkillers for that.
[Gupta:] How long after you first got that prescription to Vicodin before you were taking heroin?
[Lesnikoski:] Eighteen months.
[Gupta:] Eighteen months?
[Lesnikoski:] Give or take a month or two, less than two years.
[Gupta:] I want to make a really important point. These are FDA- approved doctor prescribed pills. This is heroin. They both virtually have the same effect on the brain. The most typical course is someone starts with pills like this, they get caught off, they turn to heroin, which is an illegal drug but it works fast. It gets you high and it is very, very cheap. We now know that 20 percent of heroin users started off with pills like this. The question always arises I think with these sorts of programs, does it enable people to keep doing heroin because they think, look, I'm not going to be criminalized, I've got a safety net, I can keep doing this?
[Prof. David Rosenbloom, Boston University:] Nobody wants to keep doing it. They want to get better. They haven't had the help to get better. This is a chronic, relapsing condition. People need help lots of times. We have, as a society, told them that if they relapse, they fail. We send all the wrong messages. So, people don't want to continue to suffer.
[Gupta:] The chief knows this because he lives this. [on camera]: You were a plains-clothed narcotics detective for sometime. You saw this people. I mean, you still see this people, but you really saw them up close, people who are addicted to heroin who were living that life.
[Campanello:] We had a mom that was a heroin addict for years. She had a 2-year-old son in her care. We routinely did search warrants if we knew that she was selling out of her house. We came in one night, and in the corner was a crib, and it was the 2- year-old and walked over just to check if that kid was all right. And he immediately put his arms out and grabbed me around the neck and he would not let go. And he stayed like that for three hours. And so, here is this guy coming in, you know, back in the day when, you know, armed to the teeth, ready to go, ready to sniff out drugs with a team of law enforcement who spent the night, you know, cradling a child, and that stuck with me for a very long time in terms of, you know, where is that child now? You know, the atmosphere that they grow up in, can something be done to stop this next generation? And where do we stop?
[Gupta:] Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, Gloucester, Massachusetts.
[Harlow:] An eye-opening series. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thank you so much. We'll have part three coming up in the next hour. Straight ahead, though, fresh terror threats aimed at the West. We'll tell you where and how imminent the threat is. Stay with me.