If you're a parent of a teenager, this next story could be one of the most important you'll ever see.  Heroin deaths are exploding across our area, and it's no longer affecting just people on skid row.

It's in suburbs including West St. Louis County, and even in high schools. Its purity is as high as 90 percent, and police say it's easier to get than marijuana.

This is a look at how heroin has destroyed lives and how you can spot an addict.

"I was addicted to meth, I was addicted to cocaine," said Heather Helton of Jefferson County. "Heroin was the one thing that was so hard for me to get away from, so hard."

"Hard" describes 22 year-old Heather life. She's been doing drugs since 12 and first started using heroin at 17 to please a boyfriend.

"I wanted to make him happy and I thought that would be one way to make him happy," she said.

Once a cheerful and friendly pom-pom squad student, on heroin she dropped out of high school, turned manipulative, defiant.

"It's all about the attitude. I went from being bubbly, outgoing, confident, to being angry," said Heather. "I fought a lot more, about little petty things, I was much more secretive."

She eventually stole from her own family, and started stripping, even begging, to pay for her habit.

"I didn't call for days, weeks at a time, and that's because I was high," said Heather. "There's things I've done that people just shouldn't do at all."

At the time of this interview, Heather says she'd been clean for 31 days, and had just checked herself out of a 13 month residential treatment program after just one month.

She says red flags your child or someone close to you might be using heroin include changes in attitude, and manipulative behavior.

"Once I realized how well I can manipulate my own family, it went outward," she said. "I manipulated men beyond belief at an age when men shouldn't be on your mind."

Changes in clothing and grooming habits can also be a sign of heroin abuse.

"If they're hiding their arms from you, or they used to wear flip-flops and they're not wearing flip-flops, and they wearing pants all through the summer, you probably have a problem," Helton said. "You should probably sit down and ask about it."

Mirroring the heroin crisis are heroin deaths that have doubled-even tripled-in some counties. Valerie Butler, Jessica Eberhardt, and 17-year-old Shannon Gaddis are just a few of the dozens of heroin fatalities so far this year. Twenty-eight people have died in St. Louis County thus far in 2011, up from 13 at this same time last year.

"It can happen to anyone," said Pam Jones, a St. Charles mother of two. "If it can happen to Andrew it can happen to anyone."

May 12 will mark the one year anniversary of her son's death from a heroin overdose.

"He came home and said goodnight and used and died," said Terry Jones, Andrew's father.

It happened in a bathroom in the home he lived in with his parents. His fatal overdose was even more shocking because Andrew was supposed to be sober and in treatment at the time.

What started as prescription drug abuse as a college sophomore led him to try heroin the summer before his junior year.

"He sweat a lot, slept a lot, just withdrawn," said Pam. "Just very agitated, long sleeves, stayed in the basement a lot."

Hopelessly addicted, Andrew Jones dropped out of college during the first semester of his junior year and returned home.

"The friends change, the attitudes change, when it got full blown there was the stealing, looking for any way to get that," said Terry. "It's cheap, 10 dollars a pill, and high grade."

They took away his keys, cell phone, access to money. The Jones' resorted to doing things they never thought possible.

"When he OD'd and they dropped him off in the street, I went after the drug dealer," said Terry.

"This is probably the biggest epidemic St. Louis has ever seen," said Pam. "Why didn't we know about this? Why weren't they talking about it?"

Here's how to recognize a user: along with changes in attitude and friends, look for unexplained sweating, sleeping at odd hours, irritability, manipulation, lying, valuables or spoons missing from your home, and black marks on counter tops.

Forty-eight hours after checking out of rehab, Heather wanted to talk publicly about her addiction, hoping to save just one life. Wishing that life could have been her brother, Cody, defiant and dead from a heroin overdose at just 17 in January 2009.

"He said he was going to die getting high, and nobody could change it, and he did," Helton said.

"Everybody asks me how can you find your brother dead and go out and still use? How couldn't you? I have a substance right here in the palm of my hand that allows me not to feel anything and that's what I want at this point in time."

Helton said she wants to go back to rehab. If she does, she faces daunting odds. The success rate of treating heroin addiction is only about five percent.