AS COCAINE DECLINES, HEROIN USE RISES AMONG SUBURBAN TEENS

WASHINGTON - While overall drug abuse appears to have leveled off in recent
years, government agencies and treatment clinics say there has been a
startling increase in heroin use among suburban teens in the last decade.

"Heroin is back, it's cheaper, more potent and more deadly than ever," said
Bob Weiner, an aide to White House drug czar Barry McCaffrey.

Colombia, traditionally the source country for cocaine sold on American
streets, has replaced Asia as the region producing most of America's heroin
- - 70 percent of it.

While cocaine use appears to be declining, Weiner said the number of heroin
users in the United States has increased from 500,000 in 1996 to 980,000
last year.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Caucus on
International Narcotics Control, says a worrisome trend is increased use of
heroin in the suburbs. He will hold hearings on the issue this week.

"People falsely believe heroin abuse is just an inner-city problem,''
Grassley said. "We're talking about white-collar professionals from
affluent suburbs or kids from small farm towns."

Peter Kerr, a spokesman for the Phoenix House Foundation, which operates
drug-treatment facilities in eight states, said previous heroin epidemics
were confined largely to inner cities. Now, he said, the drug has moved to
middle-class suburbs from California and Washington state, to Texas, New
York and New Hampshire.

"It's dramatic because there are intensive-use pockets up and down the East
seacoast _ areas where you did not see it outside the inner city" in the
past, he said.

Kerr said the increase in heroin abuse among teens seems directly linked to
the increased purity of heroin sold on the street, which can be inhaled
instead of shot into the arm. Another cause, he said, is increased use of
heroin at parties, where it is used as a downer to counter the effects of
Ecstasy, or speed. And in some cases, Colombian heroin is being distributed
through established cocaine dealers.

The U.S. government does not break down drug abuse statistics between
cities and suburbs. But statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services' mental health and substance abuse division
registers an increase in teenage use of heroin.

The rate of first use by children aged 12 to 17 increased from less than 1
in 1,000 in the 1980s, to 2.7 in 1,000 in 1996. First-time heroin users are
getting younger, from an average of 26 years old in 1991 to an average of
17 years of age by 1997.

Scattered studies also point to the rise.

Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal, president of the Phoenix House Foundation, says
heroin use appears to have increased in suburban New York, where he
estimates 3.5 percent of Long Island students in grades 7-12 have used
heroin - 2 percent of them in the last month.

A University of Michigan study of 10th-grade students estimated 2 percent
were heroin users.

Weiner admitted the government does not have a good sampling of heroin use.
"The numbers are wild, but we've got more eighth-graders trying heroin than
12th-graders.''

Three of four teenagers scheduled to testify at the Senate hearing on
Tuesday told committee investigators they began using heroin when they were 13.

One of the students from East Islip, N.Y., said his increasing use of
heroin cost him his baseball scholarship, and enticed him into burglary and
car theft. A girl from San Juan Capistrano, Calif., described how she began
sniffing heroin while her parents were on vacation in Hawaii. She ended up
living on the streets.