HOW SAFE ARE YOUR ILLEGAL DRUGS?

Put this in your pipe and smoke it at your own risk: Terrorists could
poison drug supplies and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
probably can't do anything about it.

Politicos have warned that dirt-cheap, high-potency heroin will soon
flood world markets and cause an epidemic of overdoses in the wake of
the Taliban evacuating opium supplies before the first bombs hit
Afghani soil. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Because the drugs are illegal, health officials are not authorized to
monitor the purity of such substances -- not just heroin, but
marijuana and ecstasy and other illicit drugs. This coming at a time
when authorities are on high alert against bio and chemical attacks.

"We can't stop all the drugs from coming into the country," said Drug
Enforcement Agency spokesman Will Glaspy. "Drugs are poisons in the
first place. You don't know what you're putting into your body --
that's why people die from this stuff."

Clearly, the war on drugs hasn't been effective. Making matters
harder for the DEA is that a chunk of its personnel has been
transferred to the Federal Aviation Administration since Sept. 11.

"The DEA wouldn't do anything about poisoned drugs unless a public
health agency beat them over the head with it. And if they actually
acted, they would do it in a slow way," said Alan St. Pierre,
executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws (NORML), in Washington D.C.

"If pot was legal, it could be monitored and regulated like all of
the other things the government protects. The first time someone
opened up a package of marijuana and they found it was not what they
purchased and that it was harmful, they would have a slam-dunk tort
case. But there's no liability in the drug trade if it's illegal."

How likely is it that people could lethally poison marijuana and
other controlled substances?

Most experts agree that users of illegal drugs might not have the
appeal of more visible targets like media and government. And killing
addicts could be tantamount to cutting off funding for terrorist
activities -- as Afghanistan is responsible for as much as 75 percent
of the world's heroin, according to reports.

But drug poisoning isn't entirely out of the question, at least among
some of the copycat pranksters that have come out of the woodwork
since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Toxicologists point out numerous paths of destruction, and historical
precedents.

The simplest may be contaminating pot with fungi like Aspergillosis,
which is still toxic when smoked. Healthy people can inhale the
spores and not get sick, but medical marijuana users can contract
skin disorders, pneumonia and other pulmonary infections, some of
them fatal. About 10 such cases were reported in San Francisco last
year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More lethal yet more complicated to engineer is botulism, which
strikes an average of 110 Americans a year, causing respiratory and
nervous system paralysis.

While best known as a food-borne germ, the contaminant has appeared
in heroin with deadly outcomes. But this toxin could be cultivated in
pot, said John Morgan, professor of pharmacology at City University
of New York.

Large quantities of marijuana are often transported in bricks pressed
tightly with a bit of fruit juice for extra stickiness, wrapped up to
hide the smell --- the kind of anaerobic environment that Clostridium
botulinum thrive in. The spores could also survive smoking, and have
withstood the cooking process used to prepare heroin injections.

The Prohibition days hold an example that toxicologists like to point
to as "what happens when you make intoxicants illegal," Morgan said.
Distillers would reformulate alcohol into "medicinal tonics" in order
to continue selling them commercially. This typically meant that more
solids had to be added to the drinks to pass muster with the Food and
Drug Administration.

In 1930 one entrepreneur added triorthocresylphosphate (TOCP) to an
elixir called Jamaican Ginger, and inadvertently paralyzed about
100,000 people. Since then, there have been only two incidents of
TOCP poisoning, when people mistook the substance for cooking oil.
Today it's used in airplane hydrolics, paints and glues --- although
Morgan speculates that the flame-resistant oil could conceivably be
used to poison marijuana.

The U.S. government itself poisoned marijuana smokers during the
Carter administration. Mexican fields were sprayed with paraquat,
which requires 24 hours of sunlight to kill the plants. The growers
quickly harvested the crops, cleaned them off and shipped them into
the United States, where they caused extensive respiratory damage on
unwitting smokers.

While the paraquat incident received a lot of publicity, that's
usually the exception, as poisoned drugs barely register on forensic
scientists' radar screens.

"People might die of another cause, but if they had an illegal drug
in their system at the time of death, then it simply gets reported as
a drug death," says Alan Clear, director of the Harm Reduction
Coalition, a national network of drug treatment organizations based
in New York.

Considering the sheer numbers of overdoses, it would take a huge
spike in activity for anyone to notice something fishy. There were
nearly 300,000 such incidents during the first half of 2000,
according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

With authorities not paying attention, consumers have to be vigilant
but they have very little other recourse in the way of testing
for impurities, thanks to DEA regulations.

DanceSafe is essentially the only option: The nonprofit offers kits
to test ecstasy's potency. The group also publishes data on the
presence of other intoxicants in the pills, but doesn't check for any
poisons or impurities. Other options are limited and likely beyond
the means of the typical drug user.

"A good laboratory can test for almost anything --- but you need to
tell them what substances to look for first, and it would probably
cost about $150 a pop," said Morgan, of CUNY. "Maybe the government
might choose to test something if they heard it was contaminated, but
they'd rather try to get rid of it altogether," which they haven't
been very successful at.

Perhaps the good news is that "the increased emphasis on security is
making it more problematic for smugglers to get into the country.
They see all of the additional security checks at airports and
harbors and think twice," said Jim McDonough, Drug Czar of Florida,
the entry point for about 40 percent of the cocaine, 30 percent of
the ecstasy and 23 percent of the heroin traffic coming into the
United States. In recent weeks, his office has seen a marked decline
in such activity.

However, these measures aren't likely putting much of a dent in
marijuana traffic. Half of the cannabis consumed in the United States
is grown domestically, with another 40 percent coming from Mexico and
Canada.

Salvation could lie in the sheer numbers of dealers, each of them
diluting their stashes before passing them on. But then a
well-planned attack could introduce a more concentrated poison at the
wholesale level, assuring that a sufficiently lethal does makes it to
all who partake.

Let the smoker beware.