By Liz Robbins

THE NEW YORK TIMES

In the last two years, the director of an Islamic funeral home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, buried six young men. Heart attacks, some neighbors said, but the whispers and witnesses said something else: heroin. The families of the men would not discuss the causes of death.

“They tell us straight up, ‘Don’t say anything,’” the funeral director’s son, Kareem Elmatbagi, said. Drug overdose is considered suicide, a sin in Islam, and therefore a source of shame for many in the Arab-American community.

Among Russian-speaking immigrants in South Brooklyn, where heroin use has raged for more than two decades, a study showed that some young addicts were pilfering pills from their grandparents, with whom they lived in multigenerational households.

The country’s epidemic abuse of opioids — heroin, or prescription pills — is often seen as an affliction of white suburban and rural communities, but it has also spread to New York City’s immigrant neighborhoods. There is no city data that breaks down drug abuse by ethnicity, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is emerging or even worsening where it already has a foothold.

Experts and those enmeshed in the fight against drugs see many possible explanations. Immigrant parents are often unfamiliar with the signs of drug abuse and may not know how to navigate the world of treatment and recovery. Immigrant families, steeped in traditions, can also have an especially strong culture of shame around addiction that discourages asking for help.

“No group has a monopoly over stigma,” said Dr. Gary Belkin, the executive deputy commissioner for mental hygiene at the city health department, who oversees the city’s addiction services. “But we need to appreciate the different ways it plays out.”

In Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, there were about 19 overdoses from opioids the last two years within the Arab-American community, according to Mohamed Elnashar, the director of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge. The drug epidemic, he said, “has hurt the whole community.”

Kathy Khatari, an activist in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who is Muslim, talks to residents about drugs. Credit Alex Wroblewski/The New York Times

When Awad Elsayed Elmatbagi, the director of the Islamic International Funeral Services home in Sunset Park, and his son prepared the bodies of overdose victims for burial, the younger Mr. Elmatbagi was speechless.

“These are kids I saw in the community,” he said. “And to see them on the tables back there — wow.”

Mohammad, 22, a recovering addict, did not go to any of the funerals. “I just couldn’t face their families,” he said recently, sitting in a Bay Ridge treatment center. “Most of them knew what I used to do with their sons.” Like the other recovering addicts interviewed, he asked to be identified only by his given name.

Mohammad’s addiction followed a familiar arc. He said he started taking prescription painkillers in high school because of knee surgery after a football injury. A couple of years later, he was in a car accident and injured his back. His doctor prescribed oxycodone.

He was hooked. When the prescriptions ran out, he turned to street dealers. Eventually that became too expensive, so he switched to heroin, which was one-quarter of the cost. He entered a treatment program in October.

In Bay Ridge, many families have arrived within the past decade from Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen unprepared for the differences in American life; schools stop monitoring students once the last bell rings, and parents are busy working.

“It’s the transformation of how you raise your kids back home and the whole village is taking care of your kids to here,” said Kathy Khatari, a neighborhood activist who is Muslim. “You’re in America; the only village taking care of your kids is the street.”

Ms. Khatari lobbied local Arab-American leaders for financial support and brought in Donna Mae DePola, the founder of the Resource Training & Counseling Center, a drug-treatment program in Sunset Park, to open a satellite office in Bay Ridge.

Connie Pentony-Brown, left, the director of the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, office of the Resource Training & Counseling Center, said she has noticed distinct cultural differences in the reactions of families to addicted children. Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times