HEROIN FIGHT STALLS AS MORE DIE

Just 17 months ago, the nation's drug czar congratulated the Orlando area
for stemming its rate of heroin deaths. Today, such praise would be dead
wrong. Heroin killed twice as many people last year as it did in 1997. The
death toll is expected to break 50 when final lab results are completed. In
just five years, the drug has killed 136 users in Orange, Osceola, Seminole,
Volusia and Brevard counties. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others are
living fix to fix. Nothing tried so far has stopped the flow of heroin into
Central Florida or done more than temporarily suppress the rising number of
deaths. A new task force is arresting drug dealers, but heroin with a purity
and addictive power unheard of 10 years ago is easily available to teens for
$10 a dose. The federal government has provided only part of the
drug-fighting money promised to the area. School drug-abuse talks and other
programs pound home the dangers of heroin, but most new users are at least
20 years old, untouched by typical anti-drug efforts. Worst of all, even
though someone dies of a heroin overdose almost every week, few people seem
to care. "Nobody gets involved unless they know the people who have died.
They don't think of them as people," said Tinker Cooper of Orlando, whose
son died of an overdose in 1996. On Friday(1/22/99), Congress will take a
look at the problem. The U.S. House Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human
Resources subcommittee, represented locally by U.S. Rep. John Mica, R-
Winter Park, will hold a public hearing from 10 a.m to 2 p.m. in the
auditorium of Lake Howell High School near Casselberry.

Witnesses will include former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez, the nation's drug
czar from 1991 to 1993. Also expected to testify are law enforcement
officials, heroin users, parents of drug victims, educators and drug
treatment experts.

The rising number of heroin deaths in Orlando continues to mystify
drug-treatment and law enforcement officials. A Sentinel review of 1998
police and medical examiner records shows the fatalities largely were
confined to Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties, with victims ranging from
age 18 to 45. Four were 18 years old. One was 19.

"You think, 'It won't happen to me. I'm only going to do a little bit. I'm
not going to get sick using it,' " said a Central Florida man in his mid-
20s who works as an undercover drug informant. He recently overdosed after
using heroin for seven months.

"I'm tired. I'm really tired of it all," he said, adding that he has 30 or
40 friends who are users.

Police theorize that most users like him are simply out of reach of
mainstream drug prevention. They don't read newspapers, watch TV news or
listen to anyone but their friends. And it's still hip to be high, even in
Central Florida's best public and private high schools.

"On the street, this is something cool to try," said Orange County Sheriff's
Lt. Mike Miller, a supervisor in the drug unit. "And when they try it for
the first time, they're [already] high on GHB, roofies, powder cocaine."

Autopsy after autopsy has proved that mixing heroin with other drugs can be
a lethal formula.

Deaths continued to rise after Orlando imposed a curfew for teens in
downtown nightclubs. Authorities blamed the club scene for easy access to
drugs and the rising popularity of heroin.

Drugs still trade hands in nightclubs. But the scene has grown. After- hours
house parties go unregulated in the suburbs. And heroin changes hands in
garages and offices now, just the way cocaine spread through the working and
middle classes in the late 1970s.

Not just in city

A map of Central Florida drug busts shows how drugs have moved outward from
Orlando.

Old haunts remain along South Orange Blossom Trail and Oak Ridge Road. But
teens are getting arrested for buying heroin on the outskirts of Hunter's
Creek, a community of walled neighborhoods in south Orange County, along
Semoran Boulevard in east Orlando and at tourist hotels.

The 1998 death toll would have been even higher, except for the quick work
of Orange County paramedics and emergency room doctors. They saved 21 heroin
overdose victims last year.

Orlando's heroin problem came to light in 1996 after six teens overdosed and
died within 10 months.

The drug that everyone thought had died with inner-city junkies in the 1960s
and '70s quietly arrived in Florida's family-friendly vacationland. The new
sources -- Colombian drug groups -- peddled a cheaper, more potent brand of
heroin processed in remote South American labs.

Alarm over the deaths and increased numbers of drug-trafficking arrests
triggered town meetings and civic and school plans to educate the public.

Congress responded by designating a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area
stretching from St. Petersburg to Daytona Beach. Headquartered in Orlando,
the local-federal partnership would combat a variety of drug problems, but
its primary mission was to target heroin traffickers.

With great fanfare and speeches by Mica and Sen. Bob Graham, D- Fla., they
announced $1 million in funding to form the unit in January 1998. But the
money didn't show up in Central Florida until August.

So far, the office of drug czar Barry McCaffrey has allocated only about $1
million of an expected $3 million for 1999.

The task force works out of three police agencies around Orlando with
borrowed equipment and manpower. Still, agents have arrested 58 suspects and
seized 5 1/2 pounds of heroin since June, when they made their first
arrests, said Drug Enforcement Administration agent Steve Collins, the
group's heroin supervisor.

Despite such efforts, heroin and cocaine continue to arrive at Orlando
International Airport on flights from Puerto Rico. The island is a favorite
stopover point for Colombian, Puerto Rican and Dominican smugglers.

The San Juan-to-Orlando pipeline is so strong that the Florida Department of
Law Enforcement says it's the reason heroin is cheaper and purer in Central
Florida than anywhere else in the state.

While South Florida heroin tests 30 percent pure, the FDLE crime lab in
Orlando routinely finds street-level doses up to 97 percent pure.

'No one seems to care'

"People are dying and no one seems to care," said FDLE drug supervisor Dave
Donaway. "Everyone is just as eager to go out and sell it -- and people are
just as eager to use it as before the deaths came to the forefront."

Donaway and his squad of agents made 25 heroin trafficking arrests in 1998
in joint investigations with Orange and Osceola counties. They seized two
pounds of heroin, equal to at least 10,000 street-level doses. FDLE plans to
move a second squad to Orlando to target heroin cases, he said.

Orange County deputies made 171 heroin arrests from January to November
1998. They seized about 11/2 pounds of heroin. Osceola County authorities
made 48 arrests and seized nearly a half-pound of the drug.

The results of these and other efforts can be seen most weeks in federal
court: gaunt-looking heroin users and dealers doubled over in pain, fighting
the effects of drug withdrawal. Defense attorneys sometimes delay bail
hearings for weeks to let the junkies withdraw in jail.

Concern about heroin overdoses and drug use prompted the Orange County
school district to introduce a heroin awareness program in the 1996-97
school year. Discussions about the drug and how to deal with it start in the
fifth grade.

Annual drug-use surveys suggest that the percentage of high school students
who experimented with heroin has dropped -- from 1.6 percent in 1996 to 1.2
percent in 1997.

But the percentage of regular users remained steady, said Marge LaBarge,
senior administrator for the district's Student Assistance and Family
Empowerment program.

"The school district will not be able to stop a heroin addict. They have to
go into treatment, and that is beyond our realm," LaBarge said. "Our only
role there is to try to get help for them."

Tinker Cooper, who lost her 26-year-old son to an overdose on Jan. 3, 1996,
said many Central Florida residents tend to blame the families of addicts
and treat them as outcasts. It angered her to discover that many people
don't care if heroin users die.

"These are not scumbags," Cooper said. "These are good kids from good
homes."

Becky Cherney, a spokeswoman for the Central Florida Health Care Coalition,
said heroin abuse is becoming a forgotten epidemic because of the difficulty
many people have dealing with long-term social and health problems.

Last spring, the coalition's corporate members, who provide health insurance
to 750,000 Floridians, sponsored an anti-heroin campaign that distributed
thousands of T-shirts and posters in schools. Little seems to have come of
it, however.

"It seems like we have a disease-of-the-month mentality," Cherney said. "We
have a notoriously short attention span."

For those who cannot help but remember, Cooper is organizing a support group
for the families of heroin victims.

The idea came from Capt. Ernie Scott, head of the Orange County sheriff's
drug unit. Victims' families are helping the Sheriff's Office make a
16-minute video on the dangers of drugs.

About a dozen overdose victims appear in the video the way deputies found
them. Some were teenagers. Others were slightly older. Some have the pasty
look of mannequins. Others have the choked-blue look of death.

The first audience will be every member of the Sheriff's Office. Sheriff
Kevin Beary issued the order, partly to make sure his deputies understand
how families of overdose victims suffer.

"Will it make a difference? Who knows," Scott said. "But the families all
say if it saves one life, it's worth it."

Law enforcement officials say they need more money, manpower, drug treatment
and education programs to win the fight. But they say it can't be won while
public apathy remains so high.

"Imagine if a gunman was out and responsible for the death of 50 people. We
would be outraged," said Seminole County Sheriff Don Eslinger, head of the
board that oversees the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force.

"There's no difference between the heroin trafficker and someone who puts a
gun to someone else's head . . .," he said. "How we face the problem today
determines the success or failure of our community in the future."