A famed actor dies with a needle in his arm; what killed him is all around us.

I have a friend, and in the interest of maintaining that friend’s privacy, I’ll describe him only as a local businessman. He has a wife, kids and grandkids. One of his kids, a beautiful boy now in his late 20s, has fallen so deeply into a pit of heroin addiction he can no longer see the light.

He was a professional athlete touring in an X-game-style sport when addiction first grabbed him. He traveled to Fiji and went to an opium den.

“He said it was the most amazing feeling he ever had,” his dad says. “He found himself looking for that particular high and he couldn’t get opium, so he started doing heroin.”

It started, as it often does, with smoking it. And then it morphed, as it often does, into shooting it. The first scare came when the young man was in his early 20s; he overdosed and ended up in the emergency room.

Before that, my friend says: “We were deluding ourselves.

“Things went missing from the house, jewelry and money was missing,” he says. “And I could smell something weird. There was always that weird smell.”

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The weird smell, says another friend, this one a former federal drug agent, comes from the way black tar heroin – the most prevalent kind on the Central Coast and the Pacific Northwest – is processed. It starts most often in Latin America, where growers in the extreme south of the continent sell the flowering opium poppy to cartels for pennies on the dollar. The manufacturers then take it and mix it with vinegar and acid. And then it’s muled over the border.

“They make it in bathtubs, pour it full of acids to increase the yields,” he says. “Our heroin smells like dirty socks.”

The stuff on the East Coast is more pure, derived from Asian poppies, often referred to as China White and sometimes cut with a synthetic opioid called Fentanyl to give it an extra little something – that cut is connected to the deaths of 22 users in Pennsylvania. But it’s that heroin, apparently without the Fentanyl, that killed Academy Award-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in a New York apartment on Feb. 2.

“Fentanyl is a total depressant. It relaxes everything,” the law enforcement source says. “If you give all of our heroin addicts some of the white stuff they’d die.”

You often hear of the connection between drug dealers and Salinas’ Chinatown, but my law enforcement friend says heroin dealers deliver, or work from their cars in the parking lots of big box stores because there’s so much traffic it’s hard to keep track of who’s doing what.

The product runs anywhere from $60-$90 a gram, and there are 25 grams to a Mexican ounce; “They call it a ‘piece’ of heroin, and it’s always right on the money,” he says.

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Go back to the businessman. He talks of how the addiction progressed. The young man sold everything he owned except his car. He came home, but his parents had to kick him out because he was high all the time. They spent a lot of money on lawyers when he was in his mid-20s, and begged/forced him into rehab once, but after 30 days “it was obvious it wasn’t working.”

He made his way to Southern California, where he got caught with syringes and heroin. He’ll be released from jail soon.

Many people get addicted out of their parents’ medicine cabinets, taking the painkillers or muscle relaxants or even the sedatives left in the bottle. Many get addicted from their own prescriptions – a little muscle pull or sports injury brings a bottle of pills. Remember the wave of oxycontin? The painkiller was meant for cancer patients, but at some point in the ’00s, doctors began to prescribe it for every little thing. Then the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cracked down and doctors locked up their prescription pads.

“When your oxy runs out, or you can’t afford it anymore, you go over to heroin,” the law enforcement friend says. “That’s why it’s big with kids. It left an entire population addicted.”

Meanwhile, my other friend waits for what comes next.

“I’m hoping they remand him into a program so we’re not stuck with him in our home,” he says, “because he told me he regretted to inform me he wasn’t going into a program voluntarily.”

MARY DUAN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or twitter.com/maryrduan