GLUT OF AFGHAN HEROIN LEADS TO UN WARNING, ODS IN ST. LOUIS

WASHINGTON - The executive director of the United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime is warning of a looming health crisis because of the
glut of cheap, highly pure Afghan heroin coming onto the market.

The U.N. official, Antonio Maria Costa, said the new supply of Afghan
opium, from which heroin is derived, is outpacing demand by record
levels. The result: widespread availability, lower prices and such
high purity that the danger of overdoses is rising sharply.

Costa has recently delivered warnings to national health ministers,
mayors and drug therapy agencies in major heroin markets such as
Europe, Russia, Iran and North America. He said many have indicated
they're already seeing the impact.

"We are ringing all the alarm bells in the world," Costa told the
Post-Dispatch last week.

Those concerns are resonating in the St. Louis area. In May, local
medical examiners and law enforcement officials said they were seeing
more heroin-related deaths from potent white Afghan heroin. Now,
they're reporting an even greater upsurge in drug use.

"We're doing cases all the time on (Afghan) white heroin now," said
St. Louis County Police Capt. Tom Jackson, who heads the county's
multijurisdictional drug task force. He said arrests for heroin sales
or possession were up to 71 through the first three-quarters of the
year, compared with 63 all last year and 30 two years ago.

Dr. Christopher Long, toxicologist for St. Louis and St. Louis County,
said laboratories should test for heroin as a possible cause of death.

"They're going to be looking to dump the stuff on the market," Long
said Thursday. "We're going to see a lot more of it out on the street."

Illinois officials, too, say they are bracing for an increase in
overdoses.

"People who would never ever put a needle in themselves end up
snorting and smoking the heroin, because it's become so pure," said
Lt. Terry Lemming, narcotics coordinator for the Illinois State Police.

Taliban concerns

The United Nations announced in September that Afghan poppy
cultivation was up by 60 percent and would produce some 6,100 tons of
opium, about 1,500 tons more than can be put on the market at present,
said Costa, who is based in Vienna, Austria.

"This will be the first time in history that (Afghan) supply exceeds
demand by one-third," he said, allowing drug traffickers to make their
product more pure and to attract new customers.

He said what Missouri and Illinois authorities feared in the spring is
now being felt elsewhere. "They have been seeing in northern Russia,
for example, a large number of overdoses that were unexplained ...
Near Rome, in central Italy, in east England, they have similar
experiences."

But it's not just the health of users that he and others are worried
about.

Tighter links between drug traffickers and insurgents in Afghanistan
mean that the Taliban could end up with $1 billion or more to wage its
fight against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, Costa said.

Patrick O'Day, an intelligence analyst with the Chicago division of
the Drug Enforcement Administration, said Nigerian groups operating in
southwest Asia buy the heroin in Afghanistan, transport it to Chicago
and distribute it from there.

He noted that terrorist groups in Afghanistan and elsewhere are
profiting from the drug trade. "The $64,000 question is, is Osama (bin
Laden) making money off this heroin being sold in the city of Chicago?
Yes, somewhere along the line he is."

The difficulties in curbing the Afghan drug trade were reflected in a
United Nations report last week charging that corruption among Afghan
officials is hampering counternarcotics efforts.

A year ago, senior State Department official Tom Schweich helped begin
an intensified campaign to limit opium production, but those efforts
have yet to bear fruit. Last week, he called the corruption
allegations "a wake-up call to the Afghan government and the
international community that we need sustained, determined political
will to solve this problem."

"98 percent pure"

Over the past six months, officials in St. Louis have been forced to
beef up their response to the mounting problem.

"A lot of dealers are moving from cocaine to white heroin," said St.
Louis County's Jackson.

By summer there already had been 60 heroin-related deaths in the
metropolitan area, a figure well above past years. Police who work
security shifts at county high schools are now speaking to students
about the issue, because of the potential spread to suburban
youngsters, Jackson said.

In one recent seizure, police netted an unusual "47 pounds of 98
percent pure white heroin," Jackson said. "When the officers made the
arrest and seized the stuff, they thought it was cocaine. That's how
pure it was. It wasn't until they had analysis done on it ... that
they found out it was Asian white heroin."

Increasingly, drugs from St. Louis and St. Louis County are moving to
outlying counties.

Jefferson County authorities, for example, say residents are going
into the city to buy heroin and bringing it back.

"We're beginning to see an increase in the amount of heroin brought
into our county," said Jefferson County Prosecutor Robert Wilkins.
"We've had a number of heroin overdoses. Many more of those types of
cases are coming out now, so law enforcement thinks there's been a
pretty severe increase. It may be a reaction to meth becoming harder
to get."

Herculaneum Police Chief Chris Pigg said crime involving heroin
addicts is up sharply in his city, although he said the origin of the
heroin is unclear.

Springfield, Ill., has also seen a rise in heroin use, police
report.

The response

Searching for a solution, U.S. officials are planning further policy
shifts that could include the first ground spraying of Afghan poppy
crops while offering large sums of money to impoverished provinces
that reduce poppy cultivation, the Post-Dispatch has learned.
Negotiations are under way with Afghan officials.

Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., has been sharply critical of what he considers
the administration's inadequate response to the growing Afghan drug
threat. Kirk's suburban Chicago district has been hit by a wave of
Afghan heroin the past two years, with a 400 percent rise in related
emergency-room visits.

He said last week that the problem has to be "a front-burner issue for
the next Congress, to focus the administration on taking down Afghan
drug kingpins and lowering the harvest."

Several little-publicized congressional actions may help, he said,
including providing more than $100 million for Afghan aid and
counternarcotics activities, adding intelligence capabilities to the
DEA and funding new transportation equipment to help interdiction and
eradication.

Last week's United Nations report criticized current policies, led by
U.S., British and Afghan officials, saying the efforts hurt poppy
farmers while doing little against those who make fortunes producing
and trafficking opium and heroin.

Schweich said he and Assistant Secretary of State Anne Patterson are
trying to help the United States, Afghanistan and other allies reach a
common "political will" to address the problem more
effectively.

Six of Afghanistan's 34 provinces are now poppy-free, and the U.S.
plan would offer eight more small-yielding provinces $150,000 for
progress and $350,000 if they get close to zero cultivation. That
would establish a "huge swath in the center of the country that's
poppy-free," Schweich said, cordoning off the troublesome southern
provinces of Helmand and Kandahar.

In dangerous provinces with flourishing drug trades, individual
districts that make substantial reductions would get larger sums of
money, while the Afghan government would take swift action against
regional governors who fail or are corrupt.