PAKISTAN'S DRUG OF CHOICE

Nation is regarded as world's leader in heroin use

Karachi, Pakistan --
Raees Khan sleeps most nights on a pillow of dust. His home is a
median strip along busy Liaquadabad Road, across from a mosque. A
little before dawn, a loudspeaker announces the first call to prayer,
a reminder to the holy that before Allah, all men are naught.

This noisy summons fails to awaken Khan. Though a Muslim, he does not
pray five times a day. Other rituals command him: emptying a tiny bag
of heroin into a plastic bottle cap, adding water and heating it on a
small flame, drawing the hypnotic broth into a syringe, hunting for a
plump vein and feeding into it the fluid warmth.

After a decade of addiction, locating the vein is the hardest part.
Most of those conduits have long ago collapsed. One recent morning,
Khan, 30, and a helpmate searched his arms, hands, feet and groin
before settling on a faint line in his right biceps.

The shot was transporting. His head lowered sideways as if he were
laying it on a platter.

But a few moments later, he was up again and grumbling
dissatisfaction. He scavenged in his pocket for another bag of the
brown powder, and this time he inhaled it.

``I am flying now,'' he said, though this was merely the view from
within. Actually, he was staggering toward the street, just another
Karachi dope fiend on open display.

Pakistan, which does not lead the world in much, is most likely No. 1
when it comes to heroin addicts. The United Nations estimates that 1.5
million heroin addicts live in this nation of 150 million, the
unfortunate result of geography, geopolitics, corruption and poverty.

``I think we can be quite definite that Pakistan has the largest
heroin population,'' said Bernard Frahi, who heads the U.N. drug
program office for South and West Asia. ``And whatever the total is,
it seems to be getting quite a bit worse.''

Karachi itself, a city notorious for lawlessness, political killings
and gargantuan slums, has 600,000 heroin addicts, according to the
nation's anti-narcotics officials. And while that total seems
exaggerated, the city is replete with the dope-addled in each section
of its troubled sprawl.

Addicts are everywhere and nowhere, easy to overlook from a car, but
impossible to miss on foot. They are huddled together on the sidewalk,
under the bridge, behind the truck, against the fence, along the prime
begging space beside the shrine.

``Heroin is written in my fate,'' said Mohammad Aslam, 40, who had a
needle in his arm and a prayer cap on his head. ``No one can change
the decree of fate.''

A dose of heroin, known as a token, costs about $1 -- about a tenth of
what it costs in Brooklyn. The quality is bad, with barbiturates often
mixed in. But with the price so cheap, a three-bag habit is affordable
to anyone whose hands can beg small change or steal an item off a shelf.

A syringe, heroin's most efficient conveyance, sells for 10 cents.
Addicts reuse them until the point becomes painfully blunt. They know
the sermons about hepatitis and HIV, but many still share needles.

The more favored practice, though, is referred to as panni, or what in
America is called chasing the dragon. The heroin is spread on a strip
of tin foil and heated from below. The addicts, most of whom are male,
inhale the fumes through a straw, sniffing at the curl of smoke like
an excited hound following a scent.

At the steps around Aurangzeb Park, in the oldest part of the city,
100 or so addicts gather each evening. From a distance, they appear to
be in prayer, kneeling over candles or matchsticks, entering a trance
in the delicate sadness of nightfall.

Mixed among the bedraggled are a few addicts who have clean clothes
and barbered hair. They work at jobs and go home to families. And
while their normal lives have yet to be entirely forfeited, they seem
without illusions about the eventual surrender.

``There are more of us every day,'' Faeez Hussain said a little
boastfully, ``and people from good families, too. You'll find
university graduates among us.''

The police do not arrest the addicts, though the constables of Karachi
are very much feared by them. They extort cash. Two with machine guns
walked toward an older addict with one eye, Sharif Uzzaman. He
prudently scurried away.

``Most days, they rough us up and take our money,'' he said. ``They
tell us: If you can afford to pay 50 rupees for heroin, you can afford
to pay 20 more as a bribe.''

Drug enforcement is usually left to Pakistan's Anti-Narcotics Force,
which is largely a military operation. Its focus is on major busts,
and its chief, Maj. Gen. Zafar Abbas, cites record seizures: ``Our
force is small, but 1999 was a very good year.''

Addicts scoff at those efforts, for heroin is as available as air.
Even the bigger amounts are easily obtained in well-known spots such
as the Ilyas Goth shantytown, a tight cluster of wood and concrete
shacks. An extraordinary percentage of the residents -- men, women and
sometimes children -- are hooked, entire families pulled under.

Hashish and opium claim another 2 million addicts in Pakistan, the
government says, and for many users, heroin is but the next step.

A ban on alcohol is commonly cited as a reason for Pakistan's heroin
problem. In 1979, as part of his so-called Islamization program, the
military dictator Mohammad Zia ul-Haq declared drinking a ``heinous
crime,'' punishable by public flogging. For many, drugs became the
substitute for drinks.

That same year, geopolitics turned this part of the world upside down.
A strict Shiite Muslim government took power in Iran, and many of that
country's drug kingpins found Pakistan a refuge. Then, in December,
the Soviet Union invaded neighboring Afghanistan, and the region
became a hot spot for the Cold War. The Americans and Saudis financed
the Afghan resistance through Pakistani intermediaries, who sometimes
found synergy between the heroin and weapons trades.

Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, Pakistan was a world
leader in the production of opium, from which heroin is derived. That
distinction has since passed to Afghanistan, which last year grew 75
percent of the global yield.