TREATMENT FOR HEROIN PASSES COCAINE

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Marilu Anderson never thought she would end up this
way, in a room filled with soft chairs and new age music, with acupuncture
needles in her ears to curb the cravings for heroin needles in her arm.

She was working as a nurse when she got hooked on smack 14 years ago,
starting a tailspin into joblessness, despair and the brink of suicide.

"For years, heroin has been thought of as something only the scumbags did,"
said the 47-year-old woman who now works at a pet shop. "But in reality, it
was working-class people like myself."

Between 1992 and 1997, the number of Americans entering treatment centers
for heroin surged 29 percent -- from 180,000 to 232,000 -- surpassing
cocaine and signaling just how pervasive the deadly opiate has become,
according to a federal report released Wednesday.

About 16 percent of the 1.5 million treatment admissions in 1997 were for
heroin and other opiates, compared with 15 percent for cocaine. It is the
first time since 1992 that heroin has surpassed cocaine.

For Anderson, recovery has been a seven-month ordeal that requires
treatments every week. She still faces continual cravings and peddlers who
roam the streets outside her downtown apartment.

"I could usually pull off the freeway in any town and find it in 30
minutes," she said, her ponytail bobbing behind her as she left an afternoon
treatment session. "A lot of teens and college kids think if they snort it,
they can't get addicted. They're wrong."

In fact, that's how Anderson got started -- by snorting, not shooting up --
and it was one of the most disturbing trends identified in Wednesday's
report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a
branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

"People who are using heroin are discovering it is, in fact, a dangerous
drug," said Dr. H. Westley Clark, director of the Center for Substance Abuse
Treatment at HHS. Fashion magazines have been accused of glamorizing heroin
through use of strung-out-looking models.

"Heroin chic -- there's a down side to it," he said.

The perception has been that heroin is only dangerous when it's injected,
Clark said, and injecting drugs does add the risk of contracting the HIV
virus or hepatitis.

Barbara Fielding, counseling manager at a treatment center in Rockville,
Md., said heroin can be even more devastating because people generally
"binge" on cocaine, using it only periodically but in great quantities.

"Once you're addicted to heroin, you have to have it every day," Fielding
explained. "Every day, they have to figure out how they're going to get the
money for that heroin."

The report offered some good news about other drugs: In that same five-year
period, the number of people seeking treatment for cocaine use declined by
17 percent, from 267,000 to 222,000.

Alcohol abuse remains the most common reason people seek help, although it
is not as dominant as it once was, dropping from 59 percent of all
admissions to about half. And while other surveys indicate marijuana is by
far the most popular illegal drug, it accounted for just 13 percent of
admissions to treatment centers in 1997.

The report, which includes data from about two-thirds of the nation's drug
and alcohol admissions, also details demographic and geographic trends.

It finds heroin treatments were concentrated in the Far West and Northeast.
Methamphetamine, meanwhile, has spread from the West into the nation's
heartland.

In 1992, only California and Nevada had more than 50 admissions. By 1997,
there were that many across the Northwest and into Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas,
Kansas, Nebraska and Utah.

"We call it the methamphetamine plague," said Alan Leshner, director of the
National Institute on Drug Abuse. "It's spreading like an infectious disease
across the country."

Oregon is already on pace for its highest number of drug-related deaths in
any year -- a dubious milestone blamed largely on an influx of purer heroin.

By the beginning of this month, 119 people had overdosed on the drug and
died so far this year, compared to just 68 over the same period a year ago.
The trend stunned Portland last summer, when two young, heroin-addicted
lovers hanged themselves from a downtown bridge, the bodies swinging in full
view of rush-hour commuters.

Anderson counts herself lucky that she entered rehab and didn't contract HIV
from sharing needles. But she's the first to admit drug addiction took her
to the edge in other ways.

"I sat there one night holding a shotgun to my face, crying. And the next
day I called the drug hot line," Anderson said. "Your life reaches a point
where it's so unmanageable and hopeless that it's just a dead-end street."