HEROIN USE, OVERDOSES SURGING IN COLOMBIA

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Twenty years after locally grown opium began appearing
in Colombia, drug experts are seeing indications of a jump in heroin use,
overdoses and cases of HIV spread through needles.

Detected mostly among the young and poor, the surge is worrying experts in a
country with an estimated 250,000 people with "serious problems" involving
narcotics and drugs such as marijuana and cocaine, but almost no history of
heroin use.

Government officials blame the increase on traffickers trying to create a
local market for heroin they cannot smuggle into the United States, and
perhaps a 1994 court ruling legalizing the personal use of all narcotics.

The number of known cases of heroin overdoses or addiction remains small,
but officials say it is enough to cause concern in the absence of an
organized system for hospitals and clinics to report such cases.

"We don't have hard, organized data on heroin, but the anecdotal evidence
tells us to be alarmed," said Augusto Perez, appointed by President Andres
Pastrana to head a newly created agency to combat drug consumption.

Police in several cities have begun finding discarded needles in areas
frequented by drug users. They also know of three Bogota "shooting
galleries," known here in a mix of English and Spanish as chuteaderos, Perez
told The Herald.

The only hospital in the nation keeping close track of heroin cases, the
government-run Kennedy Hospital in southern Bogota, is reporting seven
overdoses per month, said its chief of toxicology, Dr. Camilo Uribe.

Beginning in 1997, Kennedy also reported the only five cases of HIV
infection transmitted through drug needles ever confirmed in the country,
said Uribe, one of Colombia's top drug-abuse experts.

Young users

Kennedy's heroin overdose patients have ranged from 13 to 26 years of age,
Uribe added, and most appear to be relatively new users, given free drugs by
traffickers to work as drug couriers or prostitutes.

One gram of uncut heroin costs $40-$60 in Colombia, compared to $700 to $900
in New York City, said Uribe, and its mere presence here constitutes a
qualitative shift in the country's drug consumption scene.

It was Uribe's father, a government toxicologist also named Camilo, who 20
years ago began spotting balls of opiates -- opium and opium-marijuana
mixes -- produced by Colombian peasants when they first moved into poppy
production. He found the opiates among the people he treated.

Only in 1990 did authorities get evidence that producers had advanced to
making a type of heroin known as "black paste" that was too impure to be
injected but was smoked or snorted in a mixture with cocaine and marijuana.

Much of the heroin shipped from Colombia to the United States in the late
1980s and early 1990s was in fact brought in from Southeast Asia by European
smugglers as payment for cocaine shipped to Europe, Uribe said.

But Colombian producers continued to refine their heroin to get it into the
U.S. market, and now their product is considered more pure than the drugs
coming out of Southeast Asia, Mexico, Iran and Afghanistan.

Colombia now produces some six tons of high-quality heroin per year and
accounts for about half the heroin seized in the United States in recent
years, according to U.S. government reports.

Uribe and Perez said a 1994 Constitutional Court ruling that the government
could not restrict Colombians' right to use narcotics probably fueled heroin
use, but they admit there's not enough data to link the two.

Fighting problem difficult

The government acknowledges it is ill prepared to deal with heroin abuse,
with the Health Ministry's drug abuse branch already underfunded and facing
budget cuts that would reduce its staff from 500 to 170.

Colombia has no detoxification centers specifically serving heroin addicts
and no methadone programs to replace their heroin habits with drugs that
allow them to function normally.

"We have long known that we were producing heroin. But in our country it is
[difficult] to accept that we have become a heroin consuming country as
well," said Uribe.

And while Perez has been trying hard to design a program to educate
Colombians on the rising dangers of heroin, he is also concerned that a
massive publicity campaign could make things even worse.

"We have to use a `silent campaign' to reach the right people," Perez said,
"but keep it low key to avoid awakening an interest among people who haven't
tried it but might be tempted if we give it too much publicity."