(originally published © 1998)
The Changing Face of Heroin
"New" drug is purer, cheaper; the users could be the teen next door.
By Jenny Altick
Today's heroin is completely "new and improved"--a drug of such purity that even former users, sober for 20 years, hearing word on the street that there was heroin like there never was heroin before, could not resist its lure.
But heroin did not just grip the old "junkies."
Easy to buy, easy to use and easy to overlook at times (especially if you are a parent or educator), it has grabbed youth throughout the country and taken them down an inevitable path towards death.
Plano never imagined that rehabilitation centers and morgues would be riddled with young heroin victims in their affluent North Dallas suburb, that such an evil (and historically taboo) thing could seize their town.
But it did.
Heroin is not a biased drug; rather, it's omnipotent.
It can hook anyone, anywhere.
The "war" on heroin is not new. It has been waged in many countries, in many centuries. And typical of drugs, heroin's use has fallen in and out of favor. But this time, as Plano discovered recently, heroin has gained an entirely new popularity and an entirely new cohort of users largely because the drug cartels are more sophisticated than ever pushing their product like a fine-tuned team of advertising executives meticulously choosing their markets.
Heroin, the most abused and addictive opiate, is a synthetic derivative "processed from morphine, a naturally occurring substance extracted from the seed pod of certain varieties of poppy plants," according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Opiates have a history as long as history itself and have often been regarded as a paradoxical substance--a panacea and a poison. It has always been around, there have always been users--people like Edgar Allen Poe, Billie Holliday, Janis Joplin, William S. Burroughs--and it has always claimed lives.
But never before have the users been so young and never before has it been available in the form it is today.
Until 1993, a user's dosage of heroin at street level was impure, ranging in purity levels from three to seven percent. These levels forced users to inject or "mainline" the expensive drug. Junkies were scourges of the city, "strung-out," dirty criminals.
Today heroin is more potent and addictive than ever. Higher purity levels, hovering at 30 to 70 percent, are the key factor in the resurgence of heroin.
"It used to be the Southeast and Southwest Asian produced heroin, your 'China Whites', were the strongest heroins out there," said Paul Villaescusa, Special Agent with the Dallas division of the Drug Enforcement Administration. "A kilogram would sell for $175,000 to $220,000."
According to Villaescusa, the Colombians entered into the trade in 1993, bringing the heroin here to the U.S. and greatly increasing the amount of heroin available on the streets. Heroin is at an average purity level of 90 percent upwards to 99 percent and it is selling anywhere from about $80,000 to $120,000 per kilogram.
"The Colombians had influenced somewhat what had occurred here by re-inventing the drug" he said. "The Colombian cartel will recruit the best of the best whether it's communications people, whether it's chemists, they have untapped resources, unbelievable amounts of wealth to where this is a business for them."
While drug trafficking isn't a legitimate business, it's a business, nonetheless--a business that requires strategic marketing and other techniques to push the product, especially a "new and improved" product.
In comparison, it is like a hamburger place throws an extra patty on their burger and drops their price down to a buck. "What do their competitors have to do? They have to increase their purity and lower their price," said Villaescusa.
In effect, the Colombians created a newer, purer and cheaper form of the drug that "allowed the administration of the drug in an entirely different method," said Villaescusa.
Heroin is now cheaper and easier to use.
It's cheaper because it can be smuggled in small quantities by human "mules" who carry it right across the border in backpacks or who pack the heroin tightly against their body or swallow it in rubber bundles, often in condoms, known as "fingers" or "balloons."
"The heroin that was coming into Plano was a lot of the time coming in hollowed-out boots," said Villaescusa. "They were just walking right on across. Heroin is such a small, concealable drug." Approximately two ounces of heroin can be concealed in the boots and on the street that amount yields about $2,200 per ounce.
Then the drug is "cut" or mixed with other substances such as antihistamines and sleeping aides (that also mask some of the symptoms of abuse, such as watery eyes and a runny nose) to yield more profit per pound and still be at a relatively high, but safer, purity level.
It also packs more punch.
Junkies of the past could not have snorted or smoked heroin--it simply wouldn't have had the same effect. Smoking or snorting are ways of taking drugs that provide a less immediate and weaker high. This higher purity means that users can now inhale the drug by either smoking or snorting it, thus making it "a simple, clean non-invasive drug" to people who have been raised with the fear of needles and the fear of contracting diseases.
According to Villaescusa, "You snort a line just like a line of coke and it makes the drug that much more marketable. And what we found was it appealed to a whole new population."
The rise in heroin use among younger people ages 12 to 17 (the average age of a common user is 38, but that number could soon change) can be also attributed to effective marketing techniques, as well as the higher purity levels. Heroin was no longer heroin, it was called "chiva" and it was everywhere.
"Young people, didn't know what "chiva" was," said Carl Duke, Public Information Officer for the Plano Police Department. "They were saying chiva was a designer drug, chiva wouldn't hurt you, but what they didn't know was that chiva was heroin."
According to Villaescusa, "chiva has always been slang for heroin, it's Mexican slang for 'goat' which means heroin."
And kids will be rebellious kids. Many experiment with drugs.
"It usually starts with alcohol," said Duke. "They get to where they drink alcohol and it's socially acceptable--it's illegal at that age, but it's socially acceptable. And then they start into marijuana. And marijuana is also illegal, but in certain circles, it's socially acceptable."
"When you go out in your crowd and you are presented a pill that you don't know what it is and you can inhale it and people think, well, heroin is something that you inject and they said 'well, here, try this.'," said Duke. "That's basically what was happening. Their friends were giving it to them, 'Here, try this. This is a new designer drug that makes you feel great!' and it was a lot of peer pressure. That's how they really got hooked on it. A lot of times you trust your friends and they may honestly not know what it is either," he said.
Word on the street also said that people could not get addicted to chiva or overdose. "That is tragically incorrect," said Villaescusa.
The youth in Plano are trying to use heroin as a recreational drug. There may be some drugs that someone can try to use recreationally and then after a couple of times, they stop using them, but "with heroin, there's not a worse drug that someone goes to," said Villaescusa. "That is the end of the line for people using drugs. We found a bunch of kids going from alcohol and tobacco to marijuana and then to heroin."
In a drug user's world, there should have been a few more stepping stones before they turned to heroin.
After the drugs arrive in Texas through various ports of entry, the extensive highway system makes transportation effortless to metropolitan areas such as Dallas-Ft.Worth, and then on to the rest of the country.
"The Dallas Metroplex is getting 9,300 new residents a month because corporate America is moving here because we have everything that corporate America needs," he said--things like roads, airports, communication, and storage as well as leaders in international banking. "All of these factors that work for corporate America also work for major trafficking cells. And as a result of that, we're finding the Metroplex that much more of an important area for these major trafficking cells. They are setting up shop here."
"There was no competition there [in Plano]," said Julio F. Mercado, Special Agent in Charge, Dallas Field Division, DEA. "They found a market that was suitable. They came in--I'm not saying they did a study--but I think that they came in, they saw that there were other people distributing other types of drugs, they saw that there were some of these young teenagers using methamphetamine, cocaine, probably heroin also, and there was an opportunity that they could move in; and the purity--the quality was great and there was no middleman. They weren't getting any competition from other heroin dealers in the area so it was an easy area to go and deal with and distribute heroin."
With such a huge supply of heroin making its way to Dallas and its surrounding suburbs, local distributors have strategically marketed areas such as Plano and North Dallas to a young clientele who have an apparent disposable income. To local residents' great misfortune, more and more young, naÏve users are taking advantage of the vast supply offered by dealers. Usually, a sample of heroin is offered to dealers and buyers for free or at a discount with the purchase of cocaine.
"Drug dealers push free samples," said Mercado. "If I go into an area and I go to a party, if I'm a drug dealer, I'm gonna give it out to the kids and locate distributors who will sell it, the ones who already sell weed and other drugs."
This guarantees that the dealer will then push the sale of heroin to their customers ensuring a high addiction resulting in repeat business.
If a heroin addict is extremely careful and they know what they are doing, they could be addicted for 20 years, maybe more. William S. Burroughs, the famous Beat Generation writer, was an addict for more than fifty years and Jerry Garcia, lead singer for The Grateful Dead, was an on-again-off-again addict since the 1970s.
While overdoses do happen--and Plano is all too aware of that--a user can get an adrenaline shot that will instantly reverse the overdose, whereas with cocaine, methamphetamines, that's just not so.
"That's where part of the marketing, or part of the thought process comes in from the Colombians deciding they want to get into this trade," he said. Theoretically, a dealer could have a junkie as a customer for years.
By targeting new markets and a uncharacteristically young audience, pushers are in an unwanted spotlight. With the increase in availability, purity and a better high, many users are overdosing and some have died. Dallas County had the highest rate of heroin overdose deaths in the state in 1996.
Besides causing consuming addiction, heroin affects the pleasure centers in the brain and limits the ability to feel pain. The drug causes collapsed veins and abscesses or boils. Users also have an increased risk for bacterial infections, arthritis, liver and kidney disease, pneumonia and tuberculosis. Most users die of overdoses because their metabolism slows and their heart or liver simply stops working.
Heroin, known by many street names such as "smack," "chiva," and "junk" comes from four major sources: Colombia, Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia/Middle East, and Mexico. The South Asian heroin is commonly shipped through Dallas-Ft. Worth on its way to the Northeast and rarely is distributed in large amounts in Texas. Colombia produces 62 percent of the nation's heroin, according to the July 1997 National Narcotics Intelligence Consumer Committee (NNICC) report of illicit drugs supply to the United States. Five percent is Mexican Black Tar, a variation that resembles just that--black tar--and most of that stays right here in Texas
If one looks at the different types of heroin somewhat like cars, there are people who will only buy American-made cars and there are people who only buy foreign cars. "You kind of get that same thing going with the heroins--that the East Coast will not touch any of the Black Tar heroin, that they think it's impure, they think it's dirty, they're just not gonna do it," said Villaescusa, "Whereas, us, along the southwest border, we have always been accustomed to Mexican-produced heroin, so we're big, big consumers of that and if the Colombians tried to sell their white heroin here in Dallas: 'Oh, God, that stuff's too strong, we don't want that.' So it's different tastes."
Black Tar heroin is black because it is not very refined. "It's one of the most rudimentary reformed forms of opium," said Villaescusa. Colombian and Asian heroin is a highly processed white powder that is a much purer drug.
With black tar, "you could have a chunk of black tar heroin and all around one corner you could have a bunch of all the other junk that's in there but you could have a little flake that's just pure heroin, like cake mix that's not mixed up evenly, or chocolate chip cookies and you have all the chocolate chips stuck in one corner."
According to Villaescusa, "You are playing Russian Roulette, that you NEVER know what you're going to get."
Each batch, each capsule, each dose has different purity levels and amounts of heroin.
Purity levels in the Dallas area average at around 12.9 percent and can surge as high as 65 percent, while the national average hovers around 35 percent. In 1984, heroin purity at the retail level was less than five percent.
Prices for Mexican Brown heroin and Black Tar heroin have continually decreased, according to the DEA. Currently, Black Tar heroin sells for $800 to $3,500 per ounce at 44 to 75 percent purity. In 1987, an ounce cost $4,000 to $8,000.
Clearly, it is not the heroin of generations past.
PLANO'S PROBLEM
"There was a time and a place in the United States where you could move to the right community," said Villaescusa. "You could move to Small Town, America and pretty much hide from the problem. Today, there's no place to hide. There's not that right community that you can hide in. Small Town, America isn't the innocent place it used to be and as a result of that, with what you saw with this trafficking organization, it is no different from a shoe store looking in an inner city with shoe stores everywhere, but here's this suburb where they don't have any shoe stores. It's just simple business."
And the kids in Plano do have money to "buy the shoes."
Plano's problem with heroin began in late 1996 when Plano's burglary detectives "started arresting people and noticing that many of them were addicted to heroin and that's the reason they were committing the burglaries," according to Duke. "There was a time later when we started having a couple of overdoses that we started linking it to heroin overdoses."
The Plano Police Department assigned an officer to investigate only deaths involving heroin.
"The reason we did that is because, historically, we haven't had any laws--if you overdosed on drugs it was your own fault, basically is the old way of thinking," Duke said. "We were thinking that there had to be something more that we should be able to do so we started looking at ways to prosecute the people who sold the drugs to the people that overdosed."
After Plano had three or four deaths, "we determined we were really having a serious problem and decided to go public and let people know it was a dangerous situation," Duke said.
"When we first really started working with the media, we wanted to tell people, 'OK. Yeah, Plano has a problem and if Plano has a problem, then, beware, because your community has a problem whether you realize it or not.'," said Duke. "Plano is this middle- to upper-class residential area and has this 'seedy' heroin problem. Unfortunately the second half of that message never really got out. The whole media focus became 'Plano has a problem.' So we lost a little bit of control there, but our purpose of going to the media was to educate, not only our citizens, but people throughout the country."
And the education has helped. About 1,800 people showed up to a community meeting.
"It was a really big event," Duke said. "I think they learned a lot and actually the overdoses slowed, almost stopped, after we came out and tried to educate the people."
Also, a multi-jurisdictional task force was created, including federal and local law enforcement agencies that used aggressive action on dealers. And then they found their "savior" with a little-known sentencing enhancement for a federal conspiracy conviction law.
"It was a form of conspiracy for someone to conspire to bring drugs into the country and sell them and if it causes a death then that's a federal violation so we wanted the resources of the federal government," Duke said. The dealers knew the drug they were selling was a powerful substance and that it could kill and they sold it anyway. Now, some could be facing life sentences.
The drug traffickers' marketing tactics backfired in July when a federal grand jury, after a year-long investigation, issued a 36-count indictment to 29 suspected drug dealers alleging that Plano was specifically targeted as a new market for heroin distribution. The defendants were charged with smuggling heroin into the U.S. as well as distributing the drug directly to Plano. The resulting deaths linked the drug dealing to overdose deaths.
According to Duke, aggressive enforcement and education has virtually eliminated Plano's problem. The arrests have definitely sent a warning to drug franchises targeting the Dallas-Ft. Worth market.
"It's still here but it's not anything to the magnitude that it was," he said. "But we're not going to foolishly say we won the war on drugs. We haven't done that."
TABLE RELATED ITEMS -- THE HISTORY OF HEROIN The seemingly new face of heroin does, in fact, come from a long, cultivated history. To fully understand the potency of this highly addictive and self-destructive drug known today, it helps to examine the evolution of the opiate through the many variations of opium.
GOVERNMENT SITES:
The Drug Enforcement Administration--Publication: Drugs of Abuse
The Office of National Drug Control Policy "Pulse Check"
ONDCP Drug Policy Information Clearinghouse
The National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information 1998 National Control Strategy
The National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information--Substance Abuse and HIV/AIDS
The National Institute on Drug Abuse
Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse--Trends in Texas June 1998
Partnership For A Drug-Free America
The National Household Survey on Drug Abuse statistics
Pulse Check: Trends in Drug Us
MEDIA:
TEXAS NAMED HIGH-INTENSITY DRUG ZONE
Dark, Nihilistic Chic Snakes Into Pop Culture
Heroin Ring Targeted Dallas Suburb
Health Officials Alarmed by Heroin's Resurgence
Huge Heroin Bust May Cut Area Supply
OTHER INFORMATION:
Buzzed--The Straight Facts from the Duke University Medical Center