USE OF HEROIN IS ON THE RISE IN AUSTIN AREA

She sips iced coffee, her blue eyes sparkling. Wearing a sleeveless dress
with matching necklace and earrings, she has a healthy glow that makes it
easy to believe she hiked the Grand Canyon.

But deep indentations in her arms tell another story. This 29-year-old
Austin resident spent years shooting up heroin.

She's sat on a corner at 2 a.m. near East Seventh Street looking for
heroin. She has given rides to drug dealers who laid their guns on her
car's dashboard. She's injected in her bathroom before going to work as a
waitress.

The woman, who asked that her name not be published, spent $150 a day on a
habit that, a year ago, made her so sick she finally quit.

So far, she's one of the lucky ones. She survived.

Ten people have died in Travis County this year from heroin-related
overdoses. That's almost half the 22 overdose deaths from all drugs this
year. The deaths -- four in one week in April -- are one of many indicators
that the illegal drug -- most associated with dark alleys and death -- is
once again on the rise in Central Texas.

Most of the heroin in Texas comes from Mexico. Officials have noticed that
traffickers are starting to stockpile the drug at the border, said Nicholas
Nargi, resident agent in charge at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
office in Austin.

"Some are smuggling larger kilogram quantities in tar and powder form from
the interior of Mexico," Nargi said.

The amount of heroin seized by the DEA nationwide has increased in the past
few years. The federal agency seized 1,177 pounds in fiscal 2000, compared
with 873 pounds in 1999 and 815 pounds in 1998. That's an increase of 44
percent in two years.

One week, four deaths

In Travis County, the four deaths from April 22-28 ranked as the highest
number in any week in Travis County in the past five years.

Although it's too soon to tell whether the county will set a record this
year, the jump in the number of heroin users seeking treatment has alarmed
officials. A few years ago, about five a week would seek help at Austin
Recovery, a nonprofit rehabilitation clinic. Now the clinic is seeing about
five new addicts a day.

"It's just a tremendous increase that I haven't seen ever, and I've been
doing this for 13 years," said Bud Hibbs, the director of admissions at
Austin Recovery. "Heroin just seems to be at this point very cheap and very
readily available, whereas many years ago it was more of an underground drug."

The number of heroin abusers seeking treatment at the clinic has jumped 17
percent since 1997, Hibbs said.

Other drug-abuse professionals say they've noticed the same thing.

Three years ago, teen-agers at Phoenix Academy, which provides substance
abuse treatment in Austin for adolescents, rarely mentioned using heroin.
"Now they are reporting trying it one or two times, and most typically they
are smoking it," said Laurie DeLong, the center's director.

On average, heroin users seeking help in Austin are in their 30s, treatment
professionals say. Income levels vary widely, from the wealthy who can
easily pay about $40 weekly for methadone and counseling to those who can
barely scrape together a few dollars.

The problem is hard to measure precisely.

Austin police say they haven't noticed any appreciable increase in the
supply of heroin on the street. But then again, it's more difficult to
catch people with heroin than with other drugs, investigators say.

"They shoot it up and don't keep it around, so it's harder to hit them on a
search warrant," said Austin police Detective Richard Burns.

In fiscal 2000, Austin police seized 367 grams of heroin -- about 13 ounces
- -- and filed 107 heroin-related cases. From Jan. 1 through May 1 of this
year, police filed 95 cases. During the first two months of 2001, the
latest period for which data were available, investigators seized 95.5
grams of heroin -- one-third more than during the average two months of
fiscal 2000.

The four men who died during those seven days in April all injected heroin.
The drug kills when an overdose causes a user to fall into a deep sleep and
stop breathing.

Investigators don't think the men bought the drug from the same source. In
fact, the men seem to have had little in common other than using both
heroin and cocaine.

Howard Morgan was a house painter. Wade Wootton was a technical writer who
also wrote a small-town newspaper column. Orlando Ortega was an illegal
immigrant who endeared himself to an Austin church congregation, and Lee
Brundrett came from a wealthy family and never held a job.

It's not clear, in some cases, whether they were new users or old hands. To
their families, they were people with hearts and souls, loved ones who felt
pain.

Debra Guy knew her brother, Morgan, had used heroin as a teen-ager, but she
didn't know if he had become addicted. He called her from jail a few months
before he died and said he had stolen things while in a blackout from
drugs, she said.

She used the $6,000 refund from his bond to fly his body home to Baton
Rouge, La.

"I brought him home . . . I had to see him and kiss him goodbye and rub his
chest and his face," Guy said.

Margaret Stevens, the mother of Wootton, said she was shocked to learn her
son had overdosed and was found dead in a park. She had worked hard to try
to help him, and now she focuses on the good things about him.

"He could engage in a conversation about anything with anyone. So very many
real heart talks we had about his desire to help others, how he desired to
be a good dad to his son, things he taught me about life, people and God,
to be genuine, his love of the outdoors, his sensitivity, his heart. . . .
I am a proud mother," Stevens said.

Years of addiction

For the 29-year-old woman in treatment, the road to addiction started nine
years ago. She began snorting and smoking heroin as a University of Texas
student.

At the time, she said, she was so overwhelmed with university life that she
seldom left her house except to attend class. One night a friend persuaded
her to go to a club, where she met a musician who later became her
boyfriend. He was injecting heroin, and she eventually let him inject her.

"It was my escape emotionally from a bad relationship, from a bad life,
from UT," she said.

How did it make her feel?

"It's the most amazing calm," she said. "Nothing can bother you; you're
just blank, and you have no thoughts. You're in a dreamy, nodding-off sort
of state."

She said it helped her fight recurring anxiety and depression.

A few years later, she moved to New Orleans and later lived on the south
rim of the Grand Canyon, managing restaurants and staying off heroin.

But when she returned to Austin three years ago, she started again because
she was lonely. She quickly got hooked and couldn't get up in the morning
without it.

She lost 30 pounds, battled nausea and chills daily and waited tables seven
days a week to support her habit.

Her family still doesn't know she was a user. "I would end up sick all
weekend when I would visit them, because I wouldn't take any drugs home
with me."

Withdrawal symptoms can start a few hours after a fix. The flulike symptoms
can be severe and include chills, vomiting, diarrhea and muscle and bone pain.

"I would wake up deathly ill," the woman said, describing how she felt just
before she went into treatment.

"I was so emotionally exhausted from trying to lie and remembering all the
lies I'd told about where I was going and what I was doing. I wasn't paying
a single bill, and I stole money from my brother."

Finally, a year ago, she went to the private Addiction and Psychotherapy
Services clinic in Austin and was placed in a methadone program. That drug,
which is itself addictive, blocks the craving for heroin and reduces
withdrawal symptoms. Opinions differ on how long methadone should be taken,
ranging from a few months to a year or more.

Another former heroin addict, also under methadone treatment, said the
clinic saved his life. Doctors and counselors understood what he was going
through, the 36-year-old said.

The man, who also agreed to talk only on the condition that his name not be
published, said he smoked heroin as a youth in Houston when a man renting a
house from his father left some lying around.

By high school, he was hooked and shooting up before, during and after
school with dope he easily scored from his father's other renters. He said
heroin made him feel "bulletproof."

He came from a wealthy family, so money to support his addiction was no
problem. "I looked good, I wore nice clothes and I made good grades." He
hid the track marks by shooting up in his feet.

In his 20s and early 30s, he kept using, even through two years of medical
school and months touring the United States with a rock band. At times, he
slept 23 out of 24 hours.

"You are like the living dead. Things like food and sex and love are all
secondary to you," he said.

Now he holds a steady job.

Many of the people seeking treatment at the Addiction and Psychotherapy
Services clinic were able to keep jobs throughout their addiction, although
some resorted to petty crimes such as shoplifting and writing hot checks,
said Dr. Heinz Aeschbach, the clinic's director.

At the Austin Recovery clinic, people seeking treatment for heroin
addiction tend to fall into two categories, Hibbs said: They are men 45 and
older who hold jobs and are likely to be on parole, or they are in their
late teens to early 20s, without jobs and seeking treatment because of
pressure from their families.

`Heroin chic' marketing

Hundreds of thousands of people across America are shackled to heroin.

The addict population nationwide had remained at about 600,000 for two
decades, but by 1998 it had increased to about 980,000, according to the
U.S. State Department.

Why has the drug, which was synthesized in 1874 and initially marketed as a
safe substitute for morphine, become so popular? One factor appears to be
that in the 1990s, movies and magazines began glamorizing the "heroin chic"
look, featuring emaciated, disheveled youths living in squalor, said Jane
Maxwell, the research chief for the Texas Commission on Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

Also, more powerful heroin came on the market, she said. In the early
1990s, most heroin came from Asia, but by 1994 Colombians had taken over
the market with a stronger and more potent heroin, Maxwell said.

"They started to market it to yuppies and nightclub goers, saying, `If you
snort it, it's not addictive,' " she said. "We saw a very targeted
marketing to a young generation who didn't know much about heroin."

The drug is addictive when snorted, just as it is when used other ways.

Heroin also became cheaper in the 1990s. The price fell from between $4,000
to $8,000 an ounce in 1987 to $1,000 to $5,000 an ounce, Maxwell said.

On Austin streets, first-time users can get high for as little as $20 on a
hit of heroin sold in a balloon.

Heroin is sold in Austin mostly as a sticky substance known as black tar,
which is so strong that dealers must mix it with powered milk, sugar or
starch so it won't kill users, police said.

"Traditionally they cut it 10 to 17 times for each gram of heroin," said
Burns, the Austin Police Department detective.

Police don't know what strength of heroin the four men who died took, or
how -- even if -- it was cut, because there wasn't any left behind to test
after the men overdosed. Because the drug breaks down quickly in the body,
autopsies provide little information on amount and type of heroin used.

Generally, heroin is not sold on streets or in open-air markets like
cocaine. Heroin dealers tend to be more reclusive than crack dealers and
more suspicious of strangers, said Austin police Lt. Charles Black.

Whatever network heroin is sold through, officials say the problem is
growing throughout Austin, across the nation and into other countries.

"We have a world awash in heroin," Maxwell said.

In Austin, government agencies are trying to fight drug abuse through
prevention programs offered in schools by organizations such as Lifeworks
and in classes offered through groups such as YouthAdvocacy, which works
with disadvantaged families.

Charles Thibodeaux, an intervention specialist with the Travis County
Mental Health Mental Retardation substance abuse program, roams the streets
of Austin looking for heroin addicts.

"We know that people just can't say no, so we try to help them and teach
them to use safely so they can stay alive," he said.

Sometimes, Thibodeaux said, this involves just leaving literature on how to
clean needles.

Unlike an older generation, many younger users don't know how to handle
heroin, Hibbs said. "Sometimes a lot of kids don't even know what's just
happened to them."