The image of quaint, New England charm, the town green stretching along Main Street begins just before town hall and runs a quarter-mile north, from Bridge Street to Elm Street.
A decommissioned Army tank sits sentry at the green's southern end. A bust of Abraham Lincoln gazes back from its northern boundary -- past the gazebo, the Episcopal church and the pickup trucks pausing to drop an envelope in the drive-up mailbox on their way through town.
A couple of blocks away, the Veterans Memorial Bridge provides a gateway from the town's nostalgic center to the more contemporary facades of big-box retailers, strip malls and chain restaurants that clutter Route 7.
But among the 307-year-old New England town's modern advancements is another that goes largely unseen -- a heroin epidemic that, as in towns across Connecticut, has become as commonplace as colonial graveyards.
"I hear of overdose deaths weekly," Erin Damato, an addiction recovery counselor based in New Fairfield, said of the state's heroin issue. "Young -- in their 20s, 30s -- people dying from this disease. It's rampant as opposed to 15 years ago, 20 years ago."
It is a scourge that has migrated from the inner cities of the 1970s to the suburbs of today, thanks in large part to painkillers prescribed by doctors for legitimate ailments that can lead to addiction to opiates.
"You heard the word 'heroin' a lot more commonly in the last couple of years," said Kevin Kwas, intervention program manager at the New Milford Youth Agency. "You think of images of the homeless people in New York City. That's what I kind of thought of and it's not the case, clearly. ... Everyone's exposed to it."
Spotlight on the problem
The problem has been percolating below the surface for years, but now the high-profile overdose death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has highlighted the deadly heroin habit touching towns and cities across the country. In Vermont, a place best known as an escape for skiing and summertime serenity, Gov. Peter Shumlin dedicated his entire "State of the State" address to the state's "full-blown heroin crisis," which "started as an Oxycontin and prescription drug addiction problem."
And even in picture-perfect New Milford -- a town where multimillion dollar mansions overlook Candlewood Lake and the median household income is more than 10 percent higher than the state's, where the public schools are good and almost 60 percent of the households are made up of families with both a mother and father present -- heroin has taken hold.
"Heroin is here -- it's not just a big city problem anymore," Kwas said. "Heroin has always been the scary one that people just don't want to think that it's here. They don't want to think that their kids are being exposed to it, but unfortunately it is here."
The problem was particularly acute in New Milford last year, when there were eight overdose deaths related to opioids, four of them involving heroin, according to data provided by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
For New Milford -- a town of just over 28,000 -- the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths per 100,000 people was more than twice as high as the rate in Danbury and Bridgeport last year and almost three times higher than the rate in Stamford, an analysis of data provided by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner found.
While larger towns and cities have larger total numbers -- Bridgeport had 26 opioid-related overdose deaths, nine of which involved heroin; Stamford had nine involving opioids, six of which involved heroin; and Danbury had 11, five of which involved heroin -- what separates New Milford is the rate among a population that is not overrun with inner-city issues like poverty or broken families.
But experts say the seeming anomaly has now become the standard for heroin users. "Most of them are middle-class," said Dr. Peter Rostenberg, an addiction specialist based in New Fairfield.
"The last heroin epidemic was in the early '70s, and that was mostly minorities using," Rostenberg said. "Today, opiates -- including heroin -- is a white person's illness."
A heavy toll
That illness took eight lives in New Milford last year.
Three overdoses came early in the year. Then, with the stifling heat of late July, a series of overdoses began that would take one more life in each of the next four months.
"There was a spike," said Allison Fulton, executive director of the Housatonic Valley Coalition Against Substance Abuse.
Scott Lovito was the first.
Lovito moved in with his mother, stepfather and two sisters on Stephanie Drive in New Milford in 2011 after finishing high school in Greenwich. He was a week shy of his 22nd birthday when his mother found him laying dead on his bed the morning of July 23.
"I knew he smoked pot and was drinking," Lovito's mother, Kimberly Lapegna, said. "I was unaware he was even doing heroin until after he passed away."
An autopsy concluded that Lovito died of acute intoxication of three substances: morphine, tramadol and fentanyl, a potent opioid painkiller that dealers will sometimes mix with heroin and which has been raising alarms across the country due to its high risk of overdose.
The next came just five days later, on July 28. An autopsy found heroin and fentanyl in the victim's system, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
A little over three weeks later, on Aug. 15, Jessica Bradley, 19, a student at Western Connecticut State University and a New Milford High School graduate who excelled in the school's theater program, died of a heroin overdose.
A month later, another New Milford High School graduate, Tyson Miller, 23, died of an overdose of ethanol and Oxymorphone, a prescription opioid, on Sept. 25.
A month later, another heroin overdose death.
"The thing is, it's not as prevalent as marijuana use," Fulton said. "It's the severity of the problem that's so scary. We're talking about when it gets you -- the same 5 to 10 percent of people that it really, really hooks -- it's potentially lethal every time you use it."
Seesaw of drug use
Experts believe the blame for heroin's growing reach across the country can largely be put on the shoulders of prescription painkillers, a common precursor to heroin use.
"The problem with heroin is it's cheaper than prescriptions," said Kwas, who also coordinates the New Milford Substance Abuse Council. "A lot of kids start on the opiates or things like that and their prescriptions run out ... and (heroin) is very similar chemically to a lot of the opiates, similar effects. A lot of times it's easier to get and cheaper. Cheap and accessible."
Prescription drug abuse remains a public-health crisis in its own right, but after years of growth in the number of users a slight decline has begun. Meanwhile, the use of heroin has seen a drastic uptick.
Where the number of people who used heroin in the last year rose by nearly 80 percent to 669,000 between 2007 and 2012, the number of non-medical users of pain relievers dropped from a range of 2.2 to 2.5 million between 2002 to 2009 to 1.9 million in 2012, according to the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
And heroin has been taking hold of more and more users in the last decade. The number of people with heroin dependence or abuse more than doubled between 2002 and 2012, from 214,000 to 467,000, according to the survey.
"This is a public health crisis," Rostenberg said of opioid abuse. "We're losing some of our best people at a very early age."
Its affluence and postcard-ready town green aside, heroin is not entirely new to New Milford.
In 2007, police discovered that a house on Candlewood Lake Road served as the home base of a group trafficking large amounts of heroin and cocaine up and down the East Coast. The operation was disrupted by federal authorities, and four of the five men involved have since either pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial. A fifth was murdered in Guatemala before he could be charged.
But that drug history is unrelated to the current epidemic, locals say.
The affordable opiate
Heroin does not so much grip users on its own as prescription painkillers -- Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet -- hand them off to the increasingly available alternative.
"I don't so much find young people just jumping out and experimenting with heroin," New Milford Police Lt. Larry Ash said. "There is some of that, but I think in our experience a lot of people are using heroin as a result of pain medication."
And once the body becomes addicted to an opioid, the craving is all-consuming.
"Opiate addiction is like nothing I've ever seen," said Damato, the addiction recovery counselor.
Fulton described a woman who came to HVCASA, a regional action council overseeing substance abuse treatment agencies in the northwestern part of Connecticut, seeking treatment for her heroin addiction.
She was an older woman who had become addicted to the drug by way of painkillers prescribed to her after a car crash, Fulton said.
"She just had to function and the only way to function was to get the opiate one way or another," she said. "These are people that didn't need to get addicted. ... It's a real hook."
Addicts will continue using prescription pills as long as they can find them. But over time, with their ailment resolved, doctors will discontinue prescriptions and "you can only do so much doctor-shopping," Damato said.
There is an illicit market for prescription pills, though eventually the price differential forces users to the more severe alternate -- "heroin can be purchased less expensively and there's no co-pay," Rostenberg said.
Where a day's worth of heroin might cost a user only $30, just one OxyContin pill can cost more than double that amount, Damato said.
"Thirty dollars and that can last you the entire day, where one pill you have to keep taking, so it becomes a lot," she said. "Once they've burned all their bridges, the only option left is heroin, and it's a lot cheaper and available. ... A friend knows a friend who knows a friend, and you start buying pills on the street and then the dealer's out of pills but has heroin."
For some, taking the final step from pharmaceuticals to heroin can prove fatal.
Unlike the pills that started their addiction, measured in strength by milligrams, every bag of heroin a user snorts up their nose or shoots into their veins is a mystery. A particularly strong batch or one that has been tainted with another drug can turn a user's typical dose lethal.
"People can use 10 to 20 bags or 10 to 20 doses a day," said Rostenberg. "If there is fentanyl in there they can overdose and expire or die."
Fentanyl-laced heroin has become a significant issue for law enforcement as the number of overdoses related to the drug mount across the county.
Fentanyl-laced heroin has already been linked to 17 deaths in the Pittsburgh area and another 22 in Rhode Island this year, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Young and addicted
While the patients treatment providers typically see tend to be in their 20s, heroin can affect people from all ages, from teenagers up through adults.
"You can't really look into a crowd of people and know who's using heroin and who's not using heroin or know who's got an opioid addiction and who doesn't," Fulton said.
In 2012, the average ages of a first-time heroin users and painkiller users were 23 and 22.3, respectively, according to the national survey.
Ash, the police lieutenant, said the youngest heroin users officers usually see are in their 20s but they also see users as old as their 40s. Teenage users are more rare.
But Fulton said she had heard rumors that heroin had started to reach younger teens in the area. It is a fear among treatment providers, Kwas said, that what 20-somethings are doing will spread to the teenage population by way of younger siblings and friends before long.
"Our fear is always with seeing these trends is that if it's popular with that group, it will trickle down," he said.
And though New Milford's spike in overdose deaths late last summer opened some eyes to the issue there, to Fulton it is only one more example of an issue that affects every corner of the state.
"It doesn't really matter to me, doing what I do. ... where it's more prevalent," she said. "Town-by-town across Connecticut, the issue seems to be pretty much the same. ... It doesn't matter if it's Bridgeport or Hartford or Danbury or a small town ... there are incidents of young people in particular that are coming to our attention that are becoming addicted to opiates via prescription drugs."