LEXINGTON, Ohio - A costly struggle against heroin rages in the comfy, cedar-paneled home on West Hanley Road, and everyone inside is losing.

The adult sons of Steve and Chris Thomas have stolen more than $50,000 from their parents' business to support their heroin addictions. The Thomas home is in a lockdown state, with money and other valuables that could be traded for drugs kept away from the boys.

Last week a Richland County judge arraigned Mark, 22, and Matt, 18, on felony drug possession charges. The next day Mark Thomas was caught by his parents using heroin again and, as has happened before, was thrown out of the house. It is a war with no victory in sight.

This is but one snapshot of a rising tide of small-town heroin abuse in the Midwest, occurring in tidy little communities with town squares, bicycles on front lawns and American flags flapping in the breeze. Hospitals and drug counselors note an alarming spike in overdoses, and overmatched police agencies are scrambling to address a drug onslaught once deemed the exclusive purview of big cities.

In the northern Ohio railroad town of Willard, population 6,800, police are investigating five fatal heroin overdoses since December.

, two of them on a recent weekend.

&uot;All of a sudden it blossomed,&uot; is how Capt. Robert McLaughlin of the Huron County Sheriff’s Department described the arrival of heroin. &uot;We’re up to our eyeballs in it.&uot;

Although marijuana, sheltered among the tall stalks of cornfields, and crack cocaine, brought in from Detroit, had long been the mainstays in the tightly defined universe of illegal drug users, police officials and treatment experts say the heroin market has expanded beyond the predictable clientele.

More troubling, the price of heroin is dropping, the availability is increasing and the purity of the drug is rising. &uot;It is much stronger than what abusers are used to,&uot; said Mansfield Police Chief Phil Messer, who leads a 10-county drug task force called METRICH.

This region of Ohio, described ruefully by one undercover police officer as &uot;conveniently located&uot; amid the inverted urban triangle of Detroit, Cleveland and Columbus, is especially susceptible to drug trafficking because of easy access to several major highways. Formerly isolated and exclusively rural communities are now primarily bedroom communities. It was often considered the &uot;Crossroads of America,&uot; but many of Ohio’s small towns have lost their insularity and are now part of interstate drug traffic.

Deb Kline, a nurse in rural Crestline, said the number of intravenous heroin addicts treated at Freedom Hall Treatment Center, about an hour north of Columbus, has quadrupled. Worse, Kline said, the universe of drug abusers is expanding from hardened addicts in their 40s and 50s to people in their early 20s.

&uot;Kids who come from upper-middle class families, kids who had pretty decent high school careers,&uot; she said. &uot;I wish I knew why.&uot;

There were early signs of drug trouble with Mark, who started smoking marijuana at 14. Steve Thomas said he would occasionally smoke marijuana in front of his boys. &uot;I knew when to stop and I expected the boys to be just as responsible with drugs as I was,&uot; he said.

They weren’t.

Then teenagers, Mark and Matt would help their parents empty the coin trays from pop, cigarette, candy, pinball and other machines. Every night the Thomases would bring bags of coins home. They said they wanted to be home for their boys.

The skimming began at least two years ago _ a few hundred here and there that would soon end up in the eager hands of heroin dealers on the east side of Columbus, about an hour away. Both boys had cars and every other day would make the run to Columbus.

&uot;Steve would come home and wonder where the money was going,&uot; Chris Thomas said. &uot;We never dreamed our kids would take it.&uot;

Their sons had stolen at least $50,000, but Round 2, the in-house war, had only begun. More thefts followed _ money, alcohol, prescription drugs, keys to vending machines. After throwing the kids out of the house, they changed the locks. Mark and Matt crawled through the attic and dropped in through a ceiling entry.

&uot;We don’t keep any money here, and what we do have we hide. We don’t keep keys to anything here,&uot; Steve Thomas said. &uot;It’s like the enemy living right beside you, right under your nose.&uot;

Chris Thomas, 52, rattles off the specific dates, seared in her memory, of devastating events in the family’s war with heroin. The car accidents, multiple DUI charges, the credit card spending binges, the relapses into drug use, the days they threw their sons out, and last New Year’s Eve _ when they were arrested for possession of heroin _ are recounted, sometimes by the time of day. The question &uot;Is he alive?&uot; has worked its way into the daily vernacular.