HEROIN BUSTS 'HUGE'

Two major drug busts in the past week -- one in Toronto and one in
Vancouver -- have netted more heroin than Canadian police forces seized in
all of 1998. And the officer in charge of the Toronto investigation says at
least some of the illegal and highly addictive substance was headed for the
Hamilton area.

Superintendent Ben Soave, the RCMP commander of the Combined Forces Special
Enforcement Unit, said yesterday the 57 kilograms of heroin found last
Thursday in a shipment of duck eggs would have supplied the whole Golden
Horseshoe.

"This (would be) a huge quantity for just Toronto," he said after a press
conference to announce the seizure and the subsequent arrests.

Two women, Lee Sui Ping, 46, and Sun Wei Hong, 49, and one man, Huang Zhi
Yong, 21, have been charged with importing and trafficking heroin. Another
unnamed person is also charged.

The police peg the street value of the drugs -- an amount equivalent to
2.85 million individual doses -- at $142.5 million. The operation also
turned up 17 kilograms of pills that had not been identified yesterday.

At the same time as the Toronto announcement, RCMP in Vancouver told
reporters they had seized three million doses of heroin and arrested seven
men, some of whom they allege are "senior architects of an international
drug smuggling operation."

The Vancouver heroin is more pure than that found in Toronto but the value
per kilogram is lower. That's because a hit of the drug on the West Coast,
where addiction is rampant and heroin is more readily available, costs
about $30 compared to $50 in this region, Soave said.

"It's supply and demand."

Police are still trying to determine if the two trafficking schemes are
related, he said. The announcement of last week's seizure in Toronto was
held off until yesterday because "it would have spooked the people away
from (the Vancouver) investigation."

The Toronto drugs were sent by ship from China to Canada then watched
closely by police until they ended up in a Scarborough warehouse. The
heroin was stored in 1,700 plastic replicas of duck eggs that had been
packaged with 174,400 of the real eggs, a Chinese delicacy.

"We cracked the case," said Sauve, joking about the fact that his officers
had to open the eggs, one by one, to find the illegal stash in an
atmosphere where the air quality quickly deteriorated.

"It was like living in a warehouse that was constantly being bombarded by
stink bombs."

Sauve was disappointed that the Toronto investigation, which included
customs agents, Toronto police and forces in China and Hong Kong, did not
turn up "the kingpins that we would have liked."

But, he added, "We hope to have more arrests in the near future."

The police also hope that by taking such a large quantity of heroin out of
the market, the habit will become too expensive for many drug users,
particularly the younger ones. Just under 2 per cent of Toronto students
polled during a recent survey admitted using heroin in 1999.

Detective Sergeant Rick Wills, who heads the Hamilton Wentworth police drug
unit, said there is no indication students in this city are shooting up.
Nor is heroin as abundant as cocaine or crack cocaine.

But "the problem with heroin is that it's so underground and so secretive,"
he said. That makes it difficult to track.

Miranda Borisenko, a program consultant with the Addiction Research
Foundation in Hamilton, says the number of heroin users in Hamilton would
number in the hundreds.

"We probably have around 400 people who could benefit from methadone (the
treatment that is used to wean people from heroin)," she said. "And we
probably have around 200 people who are using that service."

Just last week, John David Helson, a 57-year-old Hamilton lawyer and former
head of the Hamilton Criminal Lawyers Association, was charged with
possession of heroin and other drugs for the purpose of trafficking. Police
allege he was hiding a stash during a visit to the Hamilton-Wentworth
Detention Centre.

"It's not really at the bottom end because it really is very expensive,"
Wills said.

Some heroin addicts manage to support their habit while holding down good
jobs, he said.

But even if its use is not widespread, and even if it can be managed by
some people, the drug can also be deadly. Three fatal overdoses in Hamilton
were attributed to the drug during one five-week span last fall.

In Vancouver, there were more than 300 such deaths in 1999. So police hope
this week's seizure will make a dent in the heroin trade.

"If you remove this, it's going to hurt the market for quite a while,
especially because other people will stop their shipments," Sauve said.
"It's going to have a significant impact on the quantities available."