HEROIN'S RESURGENCE CLOSES DRUG'S TRADITIONAL GENDER GAP

Teenage Girls Are Increasingly Falling Prey To Narcotic In Purer, 'More
Mainstream,' Sniffable Form

Simona Troisi was a high school freshman on Long Island, at 14 already a
user of marijuana and LSD, when she gave $40 to a friend to score some
cocaine in New York City. The friend returned with a powder that gave
Troisi a sickening high when she snorted it.

''I don't even know what it was,'' Troisi says. ''I just kept doing it
because I had it.''

The strange powder was heroin, and within a few months, Troisi's
recreational drug habit became a destructive lifestyle. She landed in a
drug rehabilitation program after being charged with selling heroin to an
undercover police officer. She had turned to dealing to help finance her
appetite for tiny, $10 bags of the drug.

Now 20 and nine months into rehab, Troisi symbolizes how thousands of girls
across the USA have fueled a dramatic resurgence of heroin use among
teenagers, particularly in suburban and rural areas. Not since the late
1960s and early 1970s, when a typical dose was much less potent and almost
always injected, has heroin been so hip among middle-class teens.

Heroin's re-emergence comes at a time when girls -- once far less likely
than boys to drink, smoke marijuana or use harder drugs such as heroin --
now appear to be keeping pace with them, says Mark Weber, spokesman for the
federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Weber's agency, after finding that existing drug prevention programs helped
reduce drug use only among boys, recently helped create an advertising
campaign called ''Girl Power'' to deliver anti-drug messages specifically
to girls.

A television commercial now airing features Olympic figure skating champion
Tara Lipinski and Brandi Chastain, a member of the 1999 U.S. Women's World
Cup soccer team, urging girls not to ''blow it'' by using drugs. The agency
also has begun an unprecedented effort to collect statistics on girls' drug
use.

The new surge in heroin use made national news with the overdose deaths of
more than a dozen teenagers in Plano, Texas, and suburban Orlando in 1996.
Since then, hospital emergency rooms on Long Island, N.Y., and in the San
Francisco Bay Area, the Philadelphia suburbs and several other middle-class
areas have been hit by clusters of teens on heroin.

''The picture is frightening,'' says Mitchell Rosenthal, a psychiatrist and
president of a chain of drug treatment centers who will testify before the
Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control today about the emerging
heroin problem in the suburbs. ''We've got a lot of suburban kids at risk.
I don't think the modern affluent parent thinks about heroin being a danger
in Scarsdale or Beverly Hills.''

One of four teenagers scheduled to testify today is Kathryn Logan, 19, of
San Juan Capistrano in southern California. At 9, Logan stole sips of wine
from unfinished glasses. At 13, she rifled through medicine cabinets for
prescription drugs she could chop up and sniff. She packed the powder into
ballpoint pen casings so she could get high during class. At 15, she
snorted heroin and cocaine and smoked crack.

''I felt more normal when I was on drugs,'' says Logan, who developed
bulimia, had an abortion and tried to commit suicide. ''I felt being sober
was too boring.'' To pay for her habit, she stole money from her parents
and at one point pawned her grandmother's diamond ring for $25.

Even so, she kept up her grades, made the junior varsity tennis team and
tried out for cheerleading. But she felt she didn't fit in at school, where
she thought the people were ''rich and stuck up.'' Her father, a
contractor, and her mother, a flight attendant, didn't seem to notice her
drug use. ''I was always making up excuses. I had everything under control,
the whole world under control. It was hard, let me tell you,'' says Logan,
who entered rehab 79 days ago to avoid going to jail on alcohol and
marijuana possession charges. ''My parents were clueless. I think they were
in total denial that I was doing drugs until I told them about it.''

Heroin Considered 'Super Cool'

Heroin use remains relatively rare among teens overall. A study by the
University of Michigan last year estimated that about 2% of youths ages
12-17 had tried it. However, that was more than double the rate of seven
years earlier. The same study indicated that 2.3% of eighth-graders in the
USA, about 83,160 youths, had used heroin.

Analysts continue to examine the reasons behind the surge. There are the
usual factors: teen angst, peer pressure, boredom, the attraction of
something dangerous for teens with money to spend. But analysts say it's
also clear that new, highly potent forms of heroin from drug cartels in
Colombia and Mexico have been key to attracting new users -- particularly
girls.

For years, most heroin had to be injected directly into a user's
bloodstream to be effective. Girls typically prefer to sniff or smoke their
drugs rather than inject them, so heroin was out of vogue, experts say. But
now, with more potent heroin available as a powder in small bags or gel
capsules, users can get high without injecting. That has made it more
palatable to girls. ''Young girls don't like injecting regularly. It leaves
marks. With the increase in purity of heroin, it made it smokable,'' Sen.
Joseph Biden, D-Del., says. As co-chairman of the Senate narcotics caucus,
Biden issues regular reports on drug abuse.

''We are seeing a wider range of users,'' says H. Westley Clark, a
psychiatrist and director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse
Treatment in Washington, D.C. ''We have been seeing younger people use. It
has been fairly dramatic. These drugs are becoming equal opportunity drugs.
There is no gender bias.''

Lynn Ponton, a San Francisco-area psychiatrist, says that just last week a
17-year-old girl she is counseling tested positive for heroin in a routine
drug screening.

''Traditional gender roles associated with risk-taking are not holding ...
for drug abuse,'' says Ponton, who wrote The Romance of Risk, a book about
adolescent risk-taking. ''Once (a drug is) available and hasn't been used
for a long time, it's deemed cool by the teenagers. Heroin is still
considered a super-cool drug, and it has high risk associated with it. It's
probably the mystique of the drug.''

Like the stimulant and hallucinogen Ecstasy, another favorite drug of the
moment, heroin plays to girls' insecurities. Users lose their appetite, and
so lose weight. The ''heroin girl'' look has been glamorized recently, from
ashen, wafer-thin runway models to anthems by grunge bands. All this has
recast heroin in a more favorable light for this generation of youths.
Troisi, who is 5 feet 5 and weighed 80 pounds when she entered drug
treatment, says she never associated heroin with images of needle-toting
junkies from the 1960s and '70s.

''Think of all the heroin-chic pictures that have been in the culture for a
number of years,'' Rosenthal says. ''Advertising campaigns show gaunt men
and women. The stigma of heroin appears to have faded.''

Heroin, a narcotic derived from the opium poppy, was developed in the 1880s
as a pain reliever and substitute for highly addictive morphine. Scientists
soon found that heroin is even more addictive. It was made illegal in the
United States in 1914. Heroin is produced mainly in Southeast Asia,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mexico and Colombia.

For street sales, heroin is mixed, or ''cut,'' with other ingredients, such
as quinine or sugar. A hit of heroin produces a rush of euphoria followed
by several hours of relaxation and wooziness. Twenty years ago, a milligram
dose with 3.6% pure heroin (and cut with 96.4% other ingredients) cost
about $3.90, says Richard Fiano, director of operations for the Drug
Enforcement Administration. Now, the average milligram is 41.6% pure and
costs about $1. Some Colombian heroin the DEA seized recently was 98% pure,
Fiano says.

Colombian drug lords used existing cocaine distribution networks to
introduce the purer heroin to the USA, Fiano says. ''They have a very, very
good marketing strategy,'' he says. ''They've come out with a new product
line. They even have packaged it with brand names, just like buying a pack
of cigarettes. They even gave out free samples.''

Emergency-Room Visits Rise

The strategy appears to be working; heroin users are younger than ever.
Surveys by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration indicate the average age of first-time users plummeted from
about 27.4 years in 1988 to 17.6 in 1997, the youngest average since 1969.

Emergency-room doctors reported in 1997 and 1998 that heroin is involved in
four to six visits out of 100,000 by youths ages 12 to 17, up from one in
100,000 in 1990. For young adults 18 to 25, 41 emergency room visits in
100,000 involved heroin, up from 19 in 1991. Among women in general, the
numbers have doubled in a decade.

Biden would like to direct more federal money to drug treatment for
adolescents and law enforcement efforts in Colombia. Sen. Charles Grassley,
R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate narcotics caucus, says that even if the USA
directs more money toward Colombia, the focus should be on sending teens a
clear anti-drug message, similar to the Reagan administration's ''Just Say
No'' campaign.

Troisi says a steady stream of information about the risks of different
drugs might have steered her away from heroin. She and her friends had no
idea how seductive and addictive the drug could be, she says. She adds that
she had no trouble finding heroin in her affluent hometown, Selden, N.Y.

''I'm not saying that heroin is the normal thing, but it is going more
mainstream,'' she says. ''When I first started, I was one of the first
females, but I've seen more and more. I've seen them come into detox.'' In
Selden, about 45 miles from New York City, there isn't a whole lot for
teens to do, and becoming a drug user wasn't too different from finding a
spot in an after-school club, she says. ''It seemed like this underground
society,'' says Troisi, who says she grew up in a stable home with three
brothers, including one who was high school valedictorian. Her father is a
high school teacher. ''Boredom played a big part of it. A lot of my friends
got involved in drugs real young. I kept away from it for a while, but I
was real lonely. When I started using heroin, I just kept going back to it.
I felt like I'd never feel comfortable with myself without it.''

Like many girls who slide into addiction, Troisi wound up taking heroin the
way she initially avoided: by injection. That way, Troisi, who sometimes
spent more than $100 a day on drugs, needed less heroin to get high.

By the time she was 15, Troisi says, she loathed getting out of bed without
a heroin jolt. ''I used to sleep with a bag of it in my bra so I would have
it first thing, so I could get out of bed and brush my teeth,'' she says.
Troisi, who after nine months of treatment now weighs a healthier 110
pounds, thinks she will get better. What she calls the ''zombie'' feeling
has faded. ''One day, I woke up and I felt good,'' she says. ''I eat now.
And I go running, five miles a day sometimes. I feel like it's a new world.
I still go through moods, but I know how to deal with those moods. I think
I have a chance.''