Trend features are some of the most interesting stories in the media. Finding and reporting on trends provides a valuable service to readers. Trend features generally follow a formula: start with an anecdotal lead that illustrates the trend, identify the trend fairly high up in the story and then further examine the trend through the feature with quotes, information and descriptions while explaining how people feel about the trend. (Below are two trend features. Read both features and tell me which story you like better and why. Which story more clearly defines the trend and explains it better to the reader? Which story had better quotes and pick your favorite).
Haley Flores grew up poring over history books
at the Santa Ana Public Library while her little brothers built up their
vocabulary there and read tales about alien attacks and outer space.
But
a visit to the downtown library has become, on many days, a walk through a
gantlet of misery: Homeless men and women sleep in the lawn while others plead
with visitors for change.
Inside
the building, signs warned people to avoid restrooms where some homeless use
sinks and even toilet water to bathe themselves and wash their clothes.
Some
of Santa Ana’s down and out used the study carrels to look for jobs
— others shot up drugs, with syringes found discarded in planters and even
a box of toilet seat covers.
Security
guards carry syringe disposal kits on their tool belts.
“It’s
a great place to hang out. You get something valuable,” Haley, a 14-year-old
high school freshman at USC College Prep, said. “Now, it’s just uncomfortable.”
The
growing debate over homelessness in Orange County has found a crucible in
a library that this year was named one of five winners of the 2016 National
Medal for Museum and Library Service, the nation's highest honor given to
libraries and museums for community service.
Libraries
around the country, including in downtown Los Angeles, have long been safe
spaces for transients.
But
Orange County’s homeless population has been increasing sharply in recent
years, and the Santa Ana civic center, where the library is located, is now
home to an encampment of more than 400 people that the City Council earlier
this month labeled “a public health crisis.”
The
situation got so severe that in August, officials closed the library for two
weeks for “a reconfiguration” aimed at better dealing with the homeless
population.
Cubicles
in upper floors were removed to reduce certain kinds of activities, and seating
for adults is now concentrated on the ground floor, facing the entrance, so
that library staff can better monitor what’s going on.
The
number of full-time security guards stationed inside and outside the
40,000-square-foot library was increased from two to four, and a “day porter”
was hired to travel between the library and Santa Ana City Hall to clean
heavily trafficked bathrooms.
Additional
electrical outlets were installed by digging below the ground floor so that
patrons, including the homeless, could recharge their phones.
Heather
Folmar, library operations manager and a 25-year veteran of the main
branch, called it a balancing act “that allows us to try and serve
everyone — those with or without a home.”
But
at recent council meetings, residents have complained that there are too
many homeless people at the facility, causing other patrons to stay away.
“It’s
outrageous. The homeless are an epidemic in the city, and it’s
preventing families from using our award-winning library,” said Peter Katz, a
retired postal worker and 50-year resident of Santa Ana.
Libraries
around the country have long been sanctuaries of knowledge for the youngest and
the oldest, for the poorest to the most well-heeled — places to keep cool in
the summer and warm in the winter.
This
is no less true for the homeless, who have long benefited from relative succor
that libraries offer. Nationwide, at some libraries, officials distribute cards
offering access to services including food banks and employment offices.
Others
provide bus passes and resumé classes, or even hire mental-health experts to
help transients who show up, according to Julie Todaro, president of the
American Library Assn.
"A
library can be a haven. Public libraries have always tried to leverage their
service with their sense of community,” Todaro said.
As
she waited for her sixth-grade daughter to use materials to finish her homework
in the children’s section, Mili Martinez said being in the library feels
increasingly unsafe. She said she instructed her child “never to touch the
toilet. No fingers. We flush with our feet.”
Some
of the homeless people who spend time of the library, like Keith Cowan, 52,
said they tried to stay out of the way. He has been living on the streets for
10 years. The former cement worker said he mostly goes into the building to use
the restroom.
“I’ve
tried my best not to be a bother. I’ve never talked to library customers, and I
know that this place is for families only,” he said. “The guards remind me to
be conscious of my manners.”
Steven
Sebreros, a trained mechanic in his 40s who grew up in Santa Ana, said people
misunderstand many of the homeless, like himself.
“Like
anyone else, we want stable work and to feel safe,” he said. “But we’re
ignored. We suffer silently.”
Folmar,
the librarian, said she and staff members started seeing a rise in the number
of homeless people showing up on the grounds of the library about a year ago.
She said their presence generates both alarm and sympathy.
“One
homeless woman told me, ‘We’re not animals’ and I felt frustrated for her, and
for us. I felt such sadness for their plight,” Folmar said. “We’ve had people
sitting on floors, lying on floors, charging phones. The study carrels were
used for purposes other than study — and for things I can’t talk about.”
As
worry increased about public health and safety for government workers and for
visitors doing business at the civic center, county officials launched staff
training on blood-borne pathogens found in syringes and on diseases that are
transmitted through bodily fluids.
The
library has won praise for services that include health ambassadors who show
patrons how to live a more active lifestyle, cooking classes, mentoring
programs for different age groups, and football and basketball activities run
by the young-adult department.
“At
this library, it’s very disturbing to have all these wonderful things to offer
people, especially young people, and to have them and their parents be afraid
to come in,” Folmar said.
Some
people have criticized a needle-exchange program that operates on Saturday from
noon to 3 p.m., saying it attracts homeless people to the civic center. Statistics
show that since opening in February, volunteers have logged 3,750 client visits
and distributed 233,065 clean needles.
Kyle
Barbour, one of the founders of the Orange County Needle Exchange Program, said
those complaints are baseless. He said the homeless encampment has grown
because of forces that allow it to.
“There’s the lack of shelters. Orange County
does not have an adequate net or enough solutions to help this population,” he
said. “No one’s going to come to the civic center seven days a week because of
a program that they access for five minutes a week.
This
month, the Orange County Board of Supervisors chose Mercy House Living
Centers Inc. to run a new 200-bed, year-round emergency shelter and
multi-service center in Anaheim — expected to open in 2017 — to serve those
without permanent housing.
The
county will also operate seasonal cold-weather shelters at National
Guard armories in Fullerton and Santa Ana.
Santa
Ana Councilman David Benavides believes that the homeless have been drawn
to Santa Ana to be closer to healthcare agencies and social services.
“The
civic center has a lot of public space and public transit is nearby. Everything
is convenient,” he said. “I’m hoping that we’ve hit our peak in terms of the
high numbers. Now, because there’s more attention on the crisis … I really
think we can work with the county to make things better.”
Teenager
Anthony Daniel, who has been homeless for six months, said he’s still learning
what’s available to homeless youth in the area. He uses some of the library’s
23 computers to search for jobs at restaurants or in retail.
“I
don’t go in there and talk to anybody,” he added. “I mind my own business.”
He
said he's drawn to the civic center “because it’s welcoming. There are really
nice people if you get to know them.”
Haley
Flores’ mother, however, isn't taking any chances with her children
spending time at the library. She has enrolled her daughter and 8- and 9-year-old
sons in boxing classes.
“My
mom really feels that we need to know self-defense,” said Haley, as she
clutched a copy of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” “It’s
kind of scary to be near shirtless people. I also worry if they drink, or maybe
they can rob you.”
HEROIN TREND FEATURE
Adam Conkey held out
the tip of his middle finger to reveal a tiny circle of black-tar heroin.
He’d scoured trash
bins, collecting cans for a couple of hours on a sweltering summer afternoon
just to earn $8 to buy this heroin — just shy of a "dime," or $10
worth.
Conkey, 39, placed the
piece, resembling a watermelon seed, on the bottom of a Natural Light beer can
he’d stashed in some weeds next to a white garage in a Franklinton alley.
He cut the heroin in
half with a pocket knife and added a few drops of bottled water to one piece,
using his middle finger to dissolve the drug. He brought a short red straw up
to his nose.
A long sniff. Then a
shorter one. And the liquid was gone. Conkey was on his way to another high.
He reserved the other
half of the heroin for his girlfriend, Natasha Long, who quickly snorted the
drug.
Conkey and Long are
among an estimated 435,000 Americans who regularly use heroin, nearly triple
the number who used in 2007, according to 2014 figures from the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration.
“It’s the devil,”
Conkey said, as the couple began the 20-minute walk back to his cousin’s
backyard and the tent they call home. “Leave it alone. It’s not worth it.
You’ll piss your life away."
Every day, 78 people
in the United States die from an opiate overdose — 29 of them from heroin,
according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That's more
than 10,500 deaths a year attributed to heroin and more than 28,000 deaths from
opiate overdoses.
The number of fatal
overdoses in Ohio that involve heroin has soared from 87 in 2003 to 1,424 last
year. It was a factor in 47 percent of all fatal overdoses, higher than any
other drug.
The number of Ohioan
deaths rises to 2,590 when other opiates are considered. This includes
prescription pain medications and fentanyl, a drug often mixed with heroin that
is 30 to 50 times more potent.
The numbers alarm authorities
who see the effects of heroin on addicts — from treatment professionals to
police officers. They’ve made great efforts to slow the growth of heroin
overdoses and addiction, using education, enforcement and other tools.
Still, the crisis continues.
Heroin’s grip can be seen in many areas:
·
Ohio's child-protection system now has close to 14,000 children
in custody. That's an increase of nearly 13 percent since the end of 2012. At
the same time, the hospitalization rate for babies born with symptoms of drug
dependency has soared.
·
Because of the high death rates, many in law enforcement now
carry naloxone, a lifesaving drug that helps counter overdoses. Officers send
out public-service warnings when bad heroin hits their streets, and they’re
focused as much on intervention as arrests.
·
Even when addicts are ready to seek help, they often can't find
a treatment center that has room for them. In 2014, just 13.9 percent of
Ohioans who needed drug treatment received it.
·
Parents of heroin addicts struggle to help their children, and
in the case of fatal overdoses, parents struggle with how to cope.
·
In 2014, Ohio reported more drug overdose deaths than any state
except California, according to data from the CDC.
·
“We are in the midst of an
unprecedented epidemic of drug addiction and overdoses,” said Dr. Teresa Long,
Columbus health commissioner. “It is touching many people’s lives in so many
ways, in ways they would not have expected.”
Delivered like pizza
Ohio and the surrounding
region are ground zero for the most recent heroin upswing east of the
Mississippi River, said Sam Quinones, author of "Dreamland: The True Tale
of America’s Opiate Epidemic." His book focuses on how the heroin crisis
has devastated some towns, including Portsmouth in southern Ohio.
“Ohio is really the center of this whole
problem,” he said. “Black-tar heroin makes its appearance in 1998, and that’s the
beginning of what we’re now seeing all over the country.”
Traffickers from Xalisco,
Mexico, on the Pacific coast, chose central Ohio in an effort to avoid the
gangs and guns associated with the drug trade in cities such as New York. They
found a ready customer base in the state where Portsmouth, by the mid-2000s,
had more pill mills per capita than any other U.S. town.
Because of the pill mills —
clinics where doctors over-prescribed highly addictive opiate-based painkillers
— the traffickers built an amazing business from 2000 to 2002, Quinones said.
When law enforcement agencies
cracked down on the pill mills, the street price of the drugs skyrocketed,
giving heroin, a much cheaper opiate, a foot in the door.
Dealers delivered it just
like pizza. And often for a cheaper price.
“You have a guy that carries
it in a bag in his car, and people are blowing up his cellphone: ‘ Hey, can you
meet me?’” said detective Larry French of the Westerville police. They might
pull up next to each other on a neighborhood corner or in a McDonald's, Meijer
or Kroger parking lot and make a quick cash-for-drugs exchange.
The road to heroin
Addicts and recovering
addicts often say their drug problems began with opiate pain pills. Some used
them recreationally, but many had prescriptions because of routine surgeries,
injuries or traffic accidents.
Then the prescription
expired, or addicts couldn’t afford the pills sold on the street. Heroin
offered a similar, but much cheaper, high.
Conkey was 19 when he
dislocated his shoulder 20 years ago while helping to put up a fence at his
brother’s house.
“They dosed me up with lots
of Demerol and gave me pain pills afterward, and that’s what pretty much got my
journey started,” he said. “Vicodin was my thing for a while, then I went to
30s (30 mg OxyContin pills), but they got expensive, and then heroin was so
much cheaper.”
When he first started using
heroin about 10 years ago, he paid $10 per high — far less than the $80 he was
paying to get high on pills. Conkey guesses that he's since spent hundreds of
thousands of dollars on heroin.
Conkey and Natasha Long had
dreams. He wanted to be a police officer. She hoped to work in a veterinarian’s
office. Long first used drugs with Conkey about 12 years ago, at age 27.
Now the couple occasionally
works grouting floors at local fast-food restaurants and scours dumpsters in
Franklinton for soda and beer cans to sell. Sometimes they get lucky; at least
twice they found $20 bills in discarded birthday cards.
They were both clean
for about a year once. Then they learned that their four children, who were in
foster care, would be placed for adoption. “I just gave up," Conkey said.
"What's the use in living if I can’t have what I love?”
Once the heroin takes
hold, many users say, nothing else matters. They might ignore their children or
have them taken from their care by family or Children Services workers.
Many addicts end up
jobless and homeless, and many manipulate or steal from family members, friends
and employers to get drug money.
"I went from being
a devoted mom, wife, daughter, sister to a drug addict," said Chasity
Troyer, 36, a Hilltop resident who grew up in Marysville. "Every waking
moment was getting or using drugs. From the time I opened my eyes until the
time I went to bed, that’s what my world consisted of."
Troyer became addicted
to pain pills after they were prescribed for the whiplash and arm burns she
suffered in a 2005 car crash. She moved onto heroin when she had trouble
finding and affording the pills.
At the height of her
addiction, Troyer spent hundreds of dollars a day on heroin. She lost custody
of her children and ended up homeless, sleeping in drug houses and abandoned
homes in Franklinton and the Hilltop.
A drug-possession arrest landed Troyer in the
Tri-County Regional Jail in Mechanicsburg. When a Union County judge told her
that she could finish a treatment program and be placed on parole, Troyer
agreed. She has been drug-free for more than a year.
"I don't think
failure's an option. It's just not. I can never break that promise to my kids.
I can never take away from them what they have back," said Troyer, who
takes the anti-addiction medication Suboxone and attends counseling at the
House of Hope treatment center in Columbus, as well as 12-step meetings.
She sees her children
regularly and is trying to regain custody.
"I know that if I
go back to heroin that one time, it could be my last time."
Some addicts progress
to heroin from alcohol or marijuana.
Rachel Motil, 29, of
the Northland area, considered herself a typical teenager before she started
abusing alcohol. She soon advanced to pills, then heroin and crack cocaine.
She stole medication
that her mother needed to treat rheumatoid arthritis and jewelry from her
boyfriend's parents. She wrote herself checks from her parents’ bank account,
but they caught on.
Her mother hid her
debit card, but Motil would steal it anyway, from under her mom’s pillow while
she slept or from the bathroom while she showered.
She took her infant
son on heroin buys.
This isn’t the Rachel
Motil who is talking about her addiction today. She’s
been clean for nearly two years, after detoxing with the help of Netcare crisis
services and the Maryhaven treatment center, and she is a finance student at
Columbus State Community College.
Remorse and tears overwhelm
her when she recalls how her son knew, even at 18 months old, that something
was wrong and became more attached to his father. She tries to make peace with
this and finds joy in the little things, like crocheting and taking her
now-4-year-old son to the grocery store.
One time can kill
Heroin can destroy lives even
before it becomes an addiction.
Laura Bagot, a 34-year-old
Otterbein University alumna, died of an overdose on Dec. 28, 2012. It was the
first time she’d used the drug.
Her friend, Shannon Shackson,
40, injected her with the heroin. He was convicted of reckless homicide and
possession of drugs and is serving four years in prison.
Shackson was familiar with
the dangers of heroin. Just nine months before Bagot’s death, Shackson was at a
Westerville apartment when his then-girlfriend, Emily Thacker, delivered a
heroin injection that led to the death of their friend, 36-year-old Russell
“Andy” Ronske. Thacker, 30, also is in prison, serving five years on an
involuntary manslaughter conviction.
Westerville police say the
case highlights heroin’s grip on its users.
“I don’t think people can
grasp what this does to people’s lives and livelihoods, and these two or three
cases, I think, depict that very well, just how it can destroy and take lives,”
said detective Eric Joering.
Ohio Attorney General Mike
DeWine created a heroin unit three years ago to reach out to communities about
the epidemic. He said an initial tactic in fighting the devastation has been to
have fewer people addicted to pain medications.
A state crackdown on doctors
who prescribe them unnecessarily led to the revocation of close to 100 doctors’
licenses.
About 15 years ago, DeWine
said, the medical community worried that doctors weren’t paying enough
attention to people’s pain. It became a new vital sign, with medical
professionals asking every patient to rate their pain on a scale of one to 10.
Then came OxyContin, an
opiate not initially believed to be highly addictive. Doctors prescribed pain
medication more and more often, landing in medicine cabinets in easy reach of
teenagers who shared with their friends.
But pill mills and
irresponsible prescribing aren’t the only reason for the current scourge,
DeWine said. Along with the Mexican cartel's "perfect business model,” heroin
became acceptable.
Besides injecting it, users
now snort the drug or melt it and inhale its fumes, so the needle is no longer
a barrier.
In the 1970s, DeWine said,
heroin was considered taboo, even by people using LSD or animal tranquilizers.
“That barrier pretty much doesn’t exist now,”
he said. “We have to change the culture back, that this heroin becomes
something people are scared of, that they understand how addicting it is.”
Scott VanDerKarr, a former
Franklin County Municipal Court judge, retired from his role handling heroin
cases in drug court to encourage leaders in other communities to create similar
heroin programs.
Defendants in the Franklin
County program are given a second chance, required to undergo drug testing and
treatment with the opiate-blocker Vivitrol, and must participate in counseling.
The 6-year-old program has a
70 percent success rate and is being replicated in U.S. District Court in
Columbus and in some smaller courts.
VanDerKarr said the majority
of the people who came before him in Franklin County were white suburbanites.
Their average age: 23.
The response to the epidemic
has come largely because of the skyrocketing number of overdose deaths, but
also because of who is dying.
“Yes, if you’re being honest,
it’s now hitting the more affluent neighborhoods. So, therefore, you’re getting
more people to pay attention,” VanDerKarr said. “That’s sad. It’s true to a
certain extent. But look at the positive side of that: Things are happening.”
Both DeWine and VanDerKarr
said there is reason for optimism in fighting the heroin epidemic, but it will
take community-wide, grassroots support.
They advocate for
involvement from not only cops, courts and lawmakers, but the business community,
medical field, schools and churches. A goal, DeWine said, is to implement
programs that keep addicts alive long enough to get them into treatment
programs that work.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich
also has touted state-backed initiatives, including new prescribing guidelines
for doctors, increased naloxone administration, medication-assisted treatment
options and an anti-drug program that helps adults talk to kids about drug
prevention.
"Every time we
think we’ve got something, we find out there’s four more things we need to
do," he said. "You have to win battle after battle. The war is not
going to be won in the foreseeable future."
DeWine said
communities across Ohio are taking that first step to acknowledge that heroin
is a problem, with suburban areas being the last to open their eyes, some
coming on board within the past six months to a year.
In one week,
VanDerKarr received invitations to four different anti-heroin events, including
a discussion panel in Worthington that pulled together elected officials, law
enforcement officers, business and school partners, parents and medical
professionals.
And just last month,
several faith-based leaders gathered for a Hope Over Heroin event at Dodge
Park.
Programs that work can
be replicated and used to fight not only heroin use, but also fentanyl use and
whatever is next in the drug pipeline.
“We're not gonna turn
this drug epidemic around quickly, but we know we can save lives,” DeWine said.
“We'll probably always have some drug problem. If it's not this, it'll be
something else. The question is, how do we save lives?”
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