Eric Lucero, 3-Decade Heroin Addict, Becomes Hero As "Injection Buddy"
"Espanola, N.M. — Eric Lucero has been addicted to heroin for three decades and says he has known at least 100 people in this pastoral county who died from overdoses, some in his presence.
"But Mr. Lucero has recently become a popular — and, he would argue, safer — injection buddy. Seven times, he says, he has revived companions by using an anti-overdose drug, Narcan, which the state now hands out to addicts and their relatives as part of its effort to reduce the toll of one of the country’s most pervasive epidemics of narcotics use. Mr. Lucero, 48, said, 'People know I’m good at saving them.'
"Rio Arriba County, just north of Santa Fe, is a Georgia O’Keeffe landscape of juniper-dotted desert and mountain valleys populated mostly by Hispanics who proudly trace their lineage to settlers of the 1600s — and who, a decade ago, discovered that their county had the nation’s highest per capita rate of deaths from overdoses. Hundreds of families are struggling to live with a multigenerational plague of narcotics; Mr. Lucero’s own son is addicted.
"Federal data released in March showed that the county ranked first in drug fatalities for 2001 to 2005, with a death rate of 42.5 per 100,000, compared with a national average of 7.3. Heroin use in the county jumped in the 1970s, as world production soared and some Vietnam veterans returned as addicts. It zoomed in popularity in the 1980s and ’90s, abetted, surprisingly, by the tradition of close-knit extended families.
“'We start our addiction getting high with our uncles, then we turn on our own nephews,' said Manuel Anaya, who was an addict for 26 years and now runs a drug counseling program for Hoy, the county’s largest treatment group."
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