PSA latest weapon in fight against heroin

“Would you know if your child was using heroin?” Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice asks at the end of a new public service announcement. The PSA, along with an educational website, is the latest joint effort by the district attorney and Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano to alert parents to the growing heroin problem on Long Island.

With the prosecution of a number of high-profile heroin dealers, including a 26-person takedown in Nassau County in 2006 and the 2008 arrest of Alexander and Edward Fontanet of Queens, brothers responsible for one of the largest drug rings in Nassau's history, Rice has long made it clear that heroin isn’t welcome in Nassau.

While Rice has targeted drug rings and dealers, she is also trying to keep heroin out of the hands of young teenagers across Long Island. Heroin shot into the spotlight in 2008 when 18-year-old Natalie Ciappa, a Plainedge High School student who seemed to be an average, healthy teen, not the stereotypical strung-out junkie, overdosed and died.

Rice joined with the Nassau County Police Department and Mangano’s office to develop a “three-pronged approach" to ensure that as few teen overdoses occur as possible. The first prong is a program called Operation Heroin Abuse Location and Targeting, or HALT, which directs county money to police and the district attorney's office to combat heroin use. The second is an advertising campaign promoting awareness, and the third consists of educational outreach in schools and communities.

The PSA, a combination of the final two initiatives, leaves little to the imagination when explaining how serious a heroin addiction can be. A teenage girl is shown explaining how easy it is to hide her heroin habit from her parents, saying, “If I’m tired or don’t eat I’m just acting like a typical kid.” It closes as the girl’s corpse is shown being wheeled into the refrigerator of a morgue.