YOUNG, RICH AND STRUNG OUT

Heroin Emerging As Drug Of Choice For Bay Area's Well-Off Kids

Oscar Scaggs may not have known it, but he rode a cresting, ugly new wave
right to his death when he overdosed in a down-and-outer hotel on New
Year's Eve.

The wave is heroin addiction -- a familiar horror come back.

Just when most experts had written the drug off as hitting a downswing, the
old granddad of narcotics known as dope, chiva and smack that has so
infamously ravaged junkies off and on for decades is on the rise. Again.

This time the drug is reaching its anesthetizing fingers deeper than ever
into the ranks of the young, middle- and upper-middle class -- kids like
the 21-year-old son of blues rocker Boz Scaggs, ones from wealthy city
districts and suburbs who have the world at their fingertips and snort,
smoke or inject it away.

This isn't the ``heroin chic'' that gripped hollow-eyed celebrities in the
mid- 1990s, killing the likes of actor River Phoenix and grunge rocker
Stefanie Sargent with overdoses. That wave was on its way out even as
President Clinton denounced it in May 1997, replaced by an upsurge in the
abuse of methamphetamine, or speed.

In the depressingly predictable way of the drug world, this wave is the
inevitable answer to the speed epidemic, experts say -- inevitable because
epidemics of stimulant ``upper'' drugs are always followed by epidemics of
depressant ``downer'' drugs.

The main difference with this latest heroin wave is that the smack on the
street these days has become so incredibly potent that users don't have to
inject it, as they do low-grade heroin. This has put a richer cut of kid
into the drug's mangy grasp.

Being able to smoke it or inhale it straight out of a bag means youths can
use heroin and still pass through their privileged worlds without tell-tale
needle ``tracks'' on their arms to give them away. At least for a while,
that is -- most, if they become hard-core junkies, eventually turn to
syringes.

Adding to the allure is the fact that heroin has become so cheap -- $5 a
hit, down from $100 in the early 1990s -- that it now costs about as much
to get high on smack for six hours as it does to buy a six-pack of beer.
Heroin that would have been about 5 percent pure a few years ago is now 60
to 80 percent pure.

Most kids-of-privilege users are in their early 20s, medical and law
enforcement officials say, but a very small and growing percentage, less
than 2 percent nationwide, are between the ages of 12 and 18.

The kids come from anywhere money is not a problem, from Pacific Heights in
San Francisco to the better-heeled pockets of suburban Marin, Contra Costa,
San Mateo and Alameda counties. They are all drawn, though, to one place.

San Francisco, the epicenter of the epidemic, is where most young suburban
users come to get their dope. With the invulnerability of youth throbbing
inside them, they don't know what they're getting into.

``We treat them younger and higher-income all the time, and it's getting
worse,'' said Dr. David Smith, founder and medical director of the
Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics in San Francisco. ``Because they can smoke it
or inhale it now, they think they can't get addicted and won't get noticed,
but they're very wrong.

``It's a killer, no matter how you do it. And it's now an epidemic.''

Oscar Scaggs, with the cachet of having the last name of one of San
Francisco's most famous musicians, wasn't a typical rich kid. But those who
knew him well say his death is emblematic of what's happening to lots of
kids of privilege -- celebrity or not.

``There's this myth among parents that it's as simple as saying good people
don't do drugs and bad people do. Well, Oscar was the kindest, sweetest
person I'd ever met in my life,'' said Maura Lynch, 21, a close friend.
''And right now I can list 10 other people I know in this city between the
ages of 19 to 25 who are involved with heroin, too. That's the drug's age
group now: It's the upper-class kids just out of high school who are doing
it.''

Oscar Scaggs was emotionally devastated when his lifelong friend, Nick
Traina, author Danielle Steel's manic-depressive son, died of a drug
overdose in 1997 at age 19. But it wasn't enough to ward him off his own
dope craving.

``We went to Nick's funeral together, and I remember him telling me how
stupid it was, the way he died,'' Lynch said. ``He said horrible things
about the drug and how he hated junkies.''

Scaggs went into a rehabilitation program last January and seemed to be
staying clean nearly up to the time of his death, friends and police said.
Exactly why and how he wound up dead in the tatty Royan Hotel remains cloudy.

``I knew he was going to the (Royan) hotel to look for a friend who was a
junkie,'' said Lynch. ``Her parents had asked for help, and he was checking
with his dealers to try to find her. I guess that's how he got back in
touch with them after being clean.''

Dawn Holliday, who books Boz Scaggs' San Francisco nightclub Slim's, where
Oscar worked as a sound technician, knows the suburban heroin explosion
with painful intimacy.

Holliday's younger brother, Norman, lived in Marin and overdosed on heroin
at the 16th and Mission BART Station several years ago. He was resuscitated
after a passer-by noticed him turning blue and called 911. Norman moved to
upstate New York, telling his sister he couldn't get clean in San Francisco.

``He said he couldn't even take a bus from SFO to Sausalito without
copping,'' Holliday said. ``His friends were rich, white Marin deadheads.
They started smoking it, then shooting it. It got to the point where he
told me he wouldn't be surprised if half of Marin County woke up one
morning with a heroin habit.''

The National Drug Control Policy Office reports that the number of heroin
addicts nationwide has shot up from 500,000 in 1991 to 810,000 today --
more than 200,000 of that total being added in the past year alone. And
just in California, heroin seizures by the state Bureau of Narcotic
Enforcement went from just 87 pounds in 1995, the height of the ``heroin
chic'' period, to 148 pounds last year. Police say the figure only reflects
a fraction of what is really out there.

Perhaps most sobering of all, San Francisco has the highest rate of
heroin-related deaths of any city in the state: One every three days,
double the rate of the early '90s, and far more than from any other drug.

However, tracing heroin's specific injection into the lives of the rich or
even the merely comfortable is much harder. Those with enough money tend to
take their kids to private doctors when they overdose, keeping them off the
public medical records.

But the trend is standing out like neon among those who must deal with it,
like Smith -- who helped Scaggs, and whose wife was Scaggs' chief drug
counselor.

``The drug culture is like the tobacco industry,'' said Smith, who attended
a private memorial service for Scaggs on Tuesday night at Slim's. ``They
market to youth, and to where they can get the money. They don't care who
they destroy.''

Wave or no wave, it's not like heroin ever really went away.

The first big heroin epidemic swept San Francisco in the late 1960s and
early '70s, and others have ebbed and flowed like a dirty tide ever since,
with a hard core of steady users remaining no matter what. Even when the
``chic'' trend died down, celebrities kept right on using and dying.

The chic phenomenon itself was actually a follow-up wave to an earlier
infusion of heroin into San Francisco's and other urban populations of
indigent street kids in the late 1980s. So the epidemic now reaching into
the middle and upper-classes is the third wallop of smack in the past decade.

``Mary,'' a 22-year-old San Franciscan from a privileged home who was
hooked on heroin and got clean more than a year ago, said the drug's
come-on draw for the just-out-of-high school crowd is purely recreational.

``It's not so much a party crowd thing, because when you're high on dope
the last thing you want to do is dance,'' said Mary, who spoke on condition
of anonymity. ``You start out just experimenting with your friends, you
know, as something different from pot or acid, and then it just gets ahold
of you before you know it.''

Another part of the appeal is purely generational. In a world of aging baby
boomers, upscale potheads and ex-hippie acid casualties, heroin is
emblematic of a younger generation, as intricately linked to its music and
fashion scene as an iron-on Marijuana leaf patch was to that of its
parents. It may be the most dangerous drug, but at least it's theirs --
which isn't really accurate, but that's the thinking.

Dave Kaplan, who runs the Easy Action music booking agency in San
Francisco's Mission District, figures that heroin's fashion rating has
little bearing on what happens on the street.

``All I know is that whenever I walk down 16th Street it looks like a scene
out of `Night of the Living Dead,' '' he said. ``If anything, the Mission
corridor has gotten worse. People outgrow drugs like acid, but it's hard to
get over being strung out on heroin.''

Parts of the Mission and Haight- Ashbury districts serve as the city's
principal dope supermarkets. Dealers use addicts as their front men,
sending them to the sidewalks with batches of smack to sell and paying them
off with hits for themselves.

While police and doctors are scrambling to stem the addiction wave and
handle the overdoses, drug pushers gleefully say times have never been better.

``Orinda, Marin, the Marina -- you name it, we get 'em,'' said one drug
dealer at 16th and Mission who spoke on condition of anonymity. ``Just in
the last year or so, it seems like every other buyer, or more, who comes
here is some rich white kid.''

This is where Scaggs at times came to get his dope; the hotel where he died
is just two blocks away. Dealers and junkies alike are easy to pick out on
the sidewalk -- for those who are looking, at least -- as they troll for
each other from midday deep into the night, avoiding the frequent police
patrols.

``The kids start out on pot, acid, stuff like that, in the Haight, and when
they want the chiva they come here,'' said the dealer. The big thing for
sale right now is a ``one on one,'' also called a speedball, a tiny
combination bag of heroin and cocaine that goes for about $10 and is good
for one or two highs.

``You sell them for $15 to the rich kids, telling them they're getting the
coke for free, until they start using heavy and finally figure out they're
paying too much,'' the dealer said with a laugh. ``Some people also cut the
stuff with shoe polish or powdered sugar, and the kids never know the
difference.''

Asked why heroin would boom among the comfy set, he shrugged. ``I guess
because chiva's cheaper than just about anything else right now,'' he said.
''It doesn't make no difference if you're a millionaire -- everyone wants
to spend $1 to get $10 worth of something.

``And if there's anyone who knows a bargain, it's rich people.''