4 HEROIN DEATHS IN 8 DAYS RAISE ALARM

One by one they showed up at the Austin morgue over a span of days.
First, a sad routine, then an oddity, then a mystery and finally a
red flag of danger: four men killed by heroin overdoses in eight days.

Now Austin police are trying to unravel the mystery of why, in such a
short span, eight times the usual number of people died after
injecting the illegal drug into their veins. And they're warning the
netherworld of drug users to beware of a killer high.

The four died April 21-28. That exceeded the number killed in the
Austin area by all drug overdoses in a similar period during the past
five years, officials said Monday.

Police said they were surprised by the deaths because heroin hasn't
been as much of a problem in Austin as crack, said Cmdr. Gary Olfers
of the Austin Police Department.

In this case, the sources of the drug and circumstances of its
consumption remain a mystery.

"We'll have to see if we can look into the men's backgrounds to see
if we can track if they were supplied by one source," Olfers said.
"Maybe it was mixed with something bad."

Olfers said police haven't noticed an alarming increase in heroin use recently.

Some drug counselors, though, say they have seen an increasing
toxicity in drugs on the streets.

"What we are seeing is an increase in abscesses caused by an
infection by whatever is being injected, and we're thinking it's
something people are cutting drugs with," said Charles Thibodeaux,
street outreach supervisor for an AIDS education program of the
Austin Travis County Mental Health and Mental Retardation Center.

One heroin user's arm had to be amputated because of an abscess,
Thibodeaux said.

Since the beginning of the year, police said, 12 people have died of
drug overdoses in Austin, including the four men April 21-28. Six of
the 12 were killed by heroin, said Cmdr. Duane McNeill.

The four in eight days were ages 30, 34, 41 and 46, according to the
Travis County medical examiner's office.

They died separately at sites in South Central Austin, far South
Austin, East Austin and North Austin. Two died in parks, one in a
house and one in an apartment, McNeill said.

Heroin can be taken in several ways: smoking, snorting, swallowing or
injecting. All four men who died had injected it, said Rod
McCutcheon, the chief toxicologist at the medical examiner's office.
All four also had cocaine in their systems, he said.

Heroin kills when an overdose causes the user to fall into a deep
sleep and stop breathing.

McCutcheon said blood tests could not determine what strength of
heroin the men had injected, because once it's in the body, the drug
quickly breaks down into morphine.

Police wouldn't say what evidence they had recovered at the scenes of
the deaths.

Detectives are finding the black tar variety of heroin in most of
their investigations involving the drug, McNeill said. Black tar
heroin, which comes primarily from Mexico, can be 60 percent to 80
percent pure, police said. Other types of heroin usually are less
concentrated. Police said brown heroin, a diluted form, is usually 2
percent to 7 percent pure.

Many heroin overdoses occur when someone who has stopped using starts
again, said Dr. Roberto Bayardo, the Travis County medical examiner.
"They think they have developed a tolerance, and they inject the
usual amount and die of an overdose."