By Jim O'Sullivan

They hung around Adams Corner last week, peering into cars, looking for drivers or passengers to reach out the windows and hand them something. Just teenagers, Joe Cullen and Desmond Weathersby had the look and sound of adults before their time.

Like uncounted numbers of their peers, Cullen and Weathersby have grappled with substance abuse. Illicit drug use among Boston teens has led to an acknowledgement of an epidemic in the city, as well as the state and New England, a region, which has the highest rate of teenage drug abuse in the nation.

Unlike many of their peers, who use or are addicted to heroin or prescription drugs like OxyContin, Cullen and Weathersby have come out on the other side. Enrolled in Boston Teen Challenge, a 15-month faith-based residential program that helps young males con front substance abuse, the pair was standing on the median strip at the Gallivan Boulevard-Adams Street intersection last week to collect donations for the program, part of a fundraiser that culminated in a walkathon on Saturday.

Rev. Josh Fulton, director of the program, said a lack of recreational programs for teens leads to them "looking for love in all the wrong places."

"I don't know if we have enough for the kids to do - and that's all across the board: schools, churches, civic organizations," Fulton said during an interview in his Bloomfield St. office last Friday. "I don't know if the kids in Boston really feel a big sense of hope."

Across the city, scorning ethnic and economic preference, the epidemic has parents panicked in South Boston and Charlestown, and in Dorchester the trouble spots include Adams Corner, the Bowdoin St. area, Ashmont Station, Uphams Corner, and Fields Corner. But Fulton and others point to statewide and nationwide statistics that reveal an evident rise in illicit drug use. According to state figures, heroin-related fatalities in Massachusetts have soared 76 percent over three years, and drug-related deaths in Boston have matched that. Fulton said the Commonwealth ranks second in the nation for highest rate of drug dependency. Last week, the governors of the six New England states met in Boston with White House drug czar John Walters to discuss plans to battle the heroin business, which has been flooded with shipments from Colombian cartels.

According to Boston Public Health Commission statistics, Dorchester trailed Charlestown, South Boston, East Boston, and Hyde Park in heroin use found in publicly-funded treatment admissions during from July 2001 to June 2002, a strong measure of the drug's pervasiveness. Stacked up against other neighborhoods, Dorchester's percentage of 911 calls reporting overdoses from August 2002 to January 2003 was lower than the Back Bay/Fenway area's, Roxbury's, and the South End's.

But anecdotal evidence - of civil servants' sons and daughters addicted to drugs, of used needles found dumped in residential neighborhoods, of drug dealers idling their car engines in front of Ashmont Station or in the Staples parking lot along Gallivan Boulevard - indicates that Dorchester's drug problem strikes deeper than the numbers.

A local health care center stafferm speaking on condition of anonymity, said he has seen a "dramatic" increase in overdoses on opiates heroin and OxyContin, and a noticeable decrease in cocaine use, during the past 18 months. The source said overdose admissions represent "a small percentage to the total [population], but one is too many." He called the governors' summit last week "slow in coming."

"Death is not always the result of an overdose, but we've had a couple of people pass away as a result of heroin overdoses," he said.

"It's certainly reaching the public consciousness more this year," said Area C-11 Captain Tom Lee. "To us, it seems that it's been more of a steady rise."

Lee and Fulton both fingered availability and low cost as factors in teenage heroin use, and high "purity" as a spur toward addiction. Fulton, himself a graduate of the Teen Challenge program, said that the bags of heroin that sold for $40 in his youth now fetch a mere $4. "With the average price, young kids are really getting hooked," Fulton said.

Lee said drug deals no longer take the form of a user going to a dealer's home to buy, but, using cellphones, the customer and the retailer driving to a prearranged spot and meeting there, moving targets that are more difficult for police to stop.

In C-11, which encompasses all of Dorchester east of Washington St. and Columbia Rd., Lee pointed to the Bowdoin Street area as a busy trafficking spot for crack cocaine and marijuana, Ashmont Station for cocaine, and the Tonowanda-Waldeck-Geneva area for marijuana dealing. Heroin use, he said, is more prevalent in Adams Corner and Uphams Corner.

Lee said community assistance can help battle the problem; while the mobile dealers' shift away from harder-to-bust "crackhouses" challenges police drug units, alert residents spotting an apparent drug deal can take down the license plate number and phone it in to police, who can identify and monitor the car. Lee, who spent four years as a sergeant detective in the Boston drug control unit, said treatment and education are the companion pieces to successful policing.

Fulton, whose program claims an 87 percent rate of graduates still clean after seven years, said the police approach can work, the medical treatment approach can work, and the spiritual approach can work.

But, he said, there is no panacea that can be applied to pulling kids in trouble out of it.

"If I had that answer, obviously I'd be closer to a solution," Fulton said.

And, he said, there isn't one on the horizon.

"I don't see it going away."