HOUSTON'S OVERDOSE DEATHS 'THE WORST'

DEA Chief Cites Lethality, Swiftness

WASHINGTON -- As chief of operations for the Drug Enforcement
Administration, Joe Keefe is an expert on illicit drug use. But the cluster
of 15 narcotic-related deaths in Houston earlier this month was something
new in his experience.

"I don't know of any other case anywhere in the country where you had this
number of deaths in so short of a time," said Keefe. "As far as I know,
Houston, thank God, has been the worst."

The Houston overdose deaths case continued to unfold Monday, as two more
men suspected of involvement in distributing the fatal drugs had an initial
court appearance.

The rapid accumulation of drug-related deaths over the weekend of Aug.
11-12 has drawn the attention of national anti-drug experts.

DEA officials can rattle off lists of other multiple drug-overdose deaths:
a case earlier this year in the Buffalo-Rochester, N.Y., area; one in Plano
in the mid-1990s; clusters in Baltimore and Pennsylvania in the early 1990s.

The lethality of the drugs, and the swiftness with which they moved through
a community of users, put the Houston overdose epidemic in a special
category, Keefe said.

It appears so far that a mixture of heroin and cocaine killed those who
overdosed in Houston, officials have said.

At a bail hearing Friday for one of those held in the deaths, an FBI agent
testified that the deadly mixture of drugs found in one victim was 53
percent heroin, 36 percent cocaine and the rest cutting agents like talcum
powder or baking soda.

"We can only speculate about what was going on, how the drugs got mixed
together," Keefe said. "It doesn't make sense that it was intentional.
Killing off customers is bad for business."

Officials in the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office, including chief
toxicologist Ashraf Mozayni, have said most of the victims apparently
thought they were ingesting cocaine, not a mixture of drugs.

Narco-traffickers in Mexico moving large shipments of cocaine into Texas
sometimes also smuggle a few kilograms of heroin in the same load, Keefe
said. One possibility is that somehow those drugs mistakenly were intermingled.

"The quality control is nonexistent on this stuff," Keefe said. "It is
possible someone just accidentally mixed the drugs together."

Keefe said it is unlikely cocaine and heroin would have been mixed together
intentionally by the sellers because profit margins are higher on each drug
sold in a relatively pure fashion.

And drug users who choose to mix the two -- a practice called
"speedballing" -- usually are a small percentage of a city's drug-user
population.

"Speedballing has been going on since well before (comedian) John Belushi
died doing it (in 1982)," Keefe said. "But normally people buy heroin and
cocaine separately and mix it. I'm not familiar with dealers selling it as
a mixture."

The DEA has been helping Houston police, working on the drug overdoses
through a regional office in Houston and monitoring the unusual case from
its national headquarters in Northern Virginia.

A DEA laboratory in Dallas is analyzing the drugs, trying to learn as much
as possible about the mixture of substances that proved fatal.

That analysis will be one of the factors that will go into a DEA effort to
identify the "signature" of the narcotic-trafficking cartels, probably in
Mexico and Colombia, that wholesaled the drugs.

"We'll add what we learn from the lab to other intelligence, previous cases
in the area, things like the package wrappers of the drugs and other things
and hopefully trace this stuff from the street to the source," Keefe said.

Those arrested so far are likely well down the food chain and unlikely to
take investigators very far, Keefe said.

"They probably can't take you much past Houston right now," he said.

Seven men have been charged in the Houston drug deaths.

Two men arrested late last week, Benito Almaguer and Baldomero Guajardo,
had an initial federal court appearance Monday, a federal official said.
They are charged with drug distribution counts. Both men were ordered held
until a detention hearing Wednesday.

"We think we've gotten the majority of the people involved, but more
arrests could follow," said Bob Stabe, assistant U.S. attorney in charge of
the case.

Along with Almaguer and Guajardo, four other men are charged with federal
drug distribution counts in the case: Jose Colunga, 19; Charles Martinez,
22; Roman Gabriel Juarez, 23; and Lucas Martinez, 23. All are being held
without bail.

Andy Gonzalez, 25, faces state charges of possession with intent to deliver
a controlled substance related to the deaths of three of those who overdosed.

Stabe said Monday that decisions on whether the charges can be upgraded
because the alleged drug distribution resulted in deaths are on hold until
lab results on the drugs and autopsy findings on the victims are returned.

"So far we have no evidence that any of the deaths were intentionally
inflicted," he said.

If those alleged to have sold the drugs are charged with the additional
crime of causing serious injury or death through drug trafficking, they
could face life in prison, Stabe said.

Clusters of drug overdoses have occurred in a few places in the past
several years.

In 1993, the DEA busted two men in Kansas and shut down two laboratories
that had been producing a synthetic drug with heroin-like properties called
fentanyl.

In the previous two years, fentanyl from those labs had killed 126 people,
the DEA said, including 35 in eastern Pennsylvania within a period of less
than a year and another 28 in Baltimore over several months. So far, there
is no evidence of a synthetic drug or other toxic material mixed with the
powder that ravaged Houston-area drug users, DEA officials said.

The Dallas suburb of Plano saw 17 deadly heroin overdoses between 1994 and
1998, when 29 people were arrested and charged with selling the heroin and
cocaine linked to several of the deaths.

More recently, seven people died in six days from using heroin in the
Rochester area early this month.

Federal law enforcement officials have said that so far there is no reason
to believe the Houston and Rochester cases are directly linked.

But there is a long-established drug route through the Rio Grande Valley
from Reynosa, Mexico, into McAllen, then up to Houston, DEA experts said.
From there, the drugs are shipped to Chicago and a number of East Coast
cities, Keefe said.