DOCTORS SEARCH FOR CLUES TO MYSTERIOUS KILLER

While City Tries To Halt Spreading Addiction

GLASGOW - Like many of this city's heroin addicts, Frances takes a
fatalistic view of the mysterious infection that has hit Glasgow's junkies
in recent weeks, claiming 11 lives. The sudden outbreak has spread fear
among addicts, she said, but it is unlikely to break heroin's grip on
people who already put their lives at risk several times a day to get a fix.

''The fear's with you all the time that you can overdose,'' Frances said,
adding that the risk of a fatal infection ''is not going to put you off if
you need it.''

In Glasgow, which has long had the reputation of being Britain's heroin
capital, more and more people need it these days. A surge in heroin imports
from Afghanistan combined with unemployment and family breakdown in the
city's bleakest neighborhoods have pushed the city's drug problem to
epidemic proportions. The number of addicts has nearly doubled in the last
decade to an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people. By contrast, the
Netherlands, with a population 25 times larger and no stranger to drug
problems, has 20,000 registered addicts.

The problem has spread beyond traditional drug-infested areas like
Govanhill on Glasgow's south side to other cities and rural parts of
Scotland, like the small towns in the Fife area north of Edinburgh.

A survey of 15- and 16-year-olds released last week by the Alcohol and
Health Research Center at Edinburgh's City Hospital found that heroin use
had doubled in the last five years, with 5.4 percent of Scottish girls and
6.1 percent of boys claiming to have used the drug, twice the rate of
English youths.

Gaille McCann, a Glasgow city council member and director of a community
health center in suburban Easterhouse, said many of today's recreational
users were all too likely to turn into tomorrow's addicts. ''I think it's
going to be far worse than we can imagine,'' she said.

The surge in usage is already taking a grim toll. Glasgow had a record 152
drug-related deaths last year, up from 51 just two years earlier. The
victims included the 23-year-old son of Ian McCartney, the minister in
charge of the government's anti-drug policy, who overdosed on heroin. As
many as 72 people are believed to have died from drugs so far this year.

Now the arrival of the deadly infection has focused fresh attention on the
scourge of drugs.

The infection surfaced in late April when two female addicts entered a
Glasgow hospital for treatment of abscesses, not uncommon among people who
inject drugs. Despite treatment with antibiotics, toxins generated by the
infection spread rapidly and the women quickly died from multiple organ
failure.

At last count, the infection had hit 26 people in Glasgow and left 11 dead.
There have been three other cases in Scotland, including a death in
Aberdeen. Most of the victims have been women because, their veins being
harder to find, they are more likely to inject heroin into their muscles.

Working with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Glasgow health
authorities have looked at everything from contaminated citric acid, the
substance most addicts use to dissolve heroin for injection, to anthrax
poisoning after anthrax bacteria was found in the body of a dead addict in
Oslo.

The current suspicion is more prosaic: dirt or dust introduced by careless
cutting of heroin. Why such an outbreak hasn't occurred anywhere else
before is a mystery. But Lawrence Gruer, the doctor heading the
investigation at the Greater Glasgow Health Board, said he was growing
optimistic that the infection stemmed from one bad batch of heroin and was
not the onset of some new HIV-type communicable disease.

Dr. Gruer takes a dimmer view of the city's broader addiction problem,
however. People from the more deprived parts of Glasgow, where jobs and
school degrees are rare and single-parent families commonplace, are 30
times more likely to seek emergency-room treatment for a drug problem than
people from more affluent areas. And the gap between the haves and
have-nots is widening.

''Glasgow's a divided city,'' Dr. Gruer said. ''There's been improvement in
the city in the last decade in many respects, especially the city center,
but these improvements have totally passed by huge swathes of the city.''

The Chamber of Commerce recently reported that several thousand vacancies
could not be filled because of skills shortages among the unemployed.

''The sort of people who are drug injectors, there's no way they're going
to get those jobs,'' Dr. Gruer said.

Mrs. McCann is trying to break the cycle of despair and addiction in
Easterhouse, a community of 30,000 where more than half the working-age
population is unemployed and addiction is rampant.

Two years ago, Mrs. McCann helped organize Mothers Against Drugs after a
13-year-old boy in neighboring Cranhill became Britain's youngest victim of
a heroin overdose. The group held a candlelight vigil that succeeded in
driving many drug dealers off the streets. ''You looked at that and said,
'My God, that could've been one of my kids,''' said Mrs. McCann, the mother
of four boys.

Later this year, Mrs. McCann will start a project aimed at weaning addicts
off drugs and getting them back into society. The project will offer
detoxification, education and job-training for drug users, as well as music
and sports activities designed to keep younger youths off drugs. It is a
pilot for the kind of strategies advocated by the government of Prime
Minister Tony Blair for tackling social exclusion in the many poor
communities left behind by Britain's economic boom. The aim is to provide
hope to youths whose families and communities have conditioned them for
failure.

''We have given them loads and loads of information about drugs,'' Mrs.
McCann said. ''That hasn't stopped them using them. We have to give them
back their dreams.''

Just how hard that can be is evident at the Glasgow Drug Crisis Center,
which deals with the bulk of the city's hard-core addicts. About 7,500
people are registered in its needle-exchange program, which has helped
reduce the spread of the HIV virus, which causes AIDS, and hundreds more
receive methadone treatment through the center. Director George Hunter
concedes that the center is to some extent applying Band-Aids to people
with deep-rooted physical and emotional problems.

''Our job is to keep them alive until they reach that stage where they can
make achievable goals,'' he said.

Frances and her partner, Willie, recently began methadone treatment at the
center and say they are determined to go clean to protect their
seven-year-old daughter. Drugs are rampant on their housing estate, though.

And Willie, who has lived a life of crime, drug-dealing and addiction for
20 years, has failed one previous attempt at methadone treatment. He says
he will either succeed in breaking his habit this time or end up on heroin
again.

''I'm not going to be tied to a chemist for the rest of my life,'' he said.