GLOBAL MARKETING OF HEROIN IS CLAIMING OUR TEENAGERS

AUSTIN The parents who had to arrange funerals for their teenagers
probably didn't think much about the global marketing trends that led to
those sad days in the Texas suburbs.

But Jane Maxwell thinks about those trends a good bit. She's convinced that
changing international politics, along with global marketing competition,
is one reason so many kids in prosperous greenlawn neighborhoods are dying
from heroin overdoses.

"Heroin's back," she says. "And it's back big time."

Maxwell charts worldwide drug trends from Austin, where she's research
director for the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse and a member of
the National Institute on Drug Abuse community epidemiology work group.
She also holds a research fellowship from Australia's National Drug
Strategy program.

From Brisbane to Plano she sees the effects of a new kind of heroin many
times more pure than in the past. It's so pure and potent that users snort
it rather than injecting. The highquality, noneedles angle is supposed
to reassure "yuppies and kids in the suburbs," the newest consumer base.

Heroin is far from being the state's biggest substance abuse problem.
Alcohol and cocaine are still way out front by just about any measure. And
middleclass addiction is far from being the biggest heroin problem.

But Maxwell and others in her field are convinced that as cocaine wanes,
marketers have made the entirely logical decision to cultivate heroin
customers in the fastgrowing suburbs.

As the world knows by now, Collin County, dominated by prosperous Dallas
suburb of Plano, had 16 heroin overdose deaths in 1997. The dead were very
young, some of them just barely adolescent. The stunned and grieving
community recently staged a major conference to focus on the question: How
could it happen here?

The father of a young Plano heroin addict who made it to treatment told a
reporter that the pervasiveness of drugs in the community was "mindboggling."

Looking at the supply side of the problem, Maxwell says most Texas heroin
comes in from Mexico. San Antonio, now the nation's No. 6 hot spot for
heroin use, "has been a heroin town since WWII," she notes. But drug
trafficking has reportedly increased in tandem with the general trade
increase resulting from the NAFTA agreement and with shifting economic
conditions around the world.

The opium poppies used to make heroin are an important cash crop for
farmers in parts of Asia. The breakup of the Soviet Union has stirred up
exports. Myanmar, formerly Burma, is a major heroin exporter, most likely
with government and corporate assistance, the State Department says.

But South American sources, such as the Columbian cartel, and to a lesser
extent Mexico, are upandcomers and dominate the Texas market.

The druggedout "heroin chic" look recently popularized in fashion
photography has been a sort of free advertising for the heroin sales, along
with publicity about drug use by sports and film stars and other celebreties.

But to get to the root of why kids who look like they "have everything" are
easy marks for drug dealers, what it is that draws them to experiments
that, in their hearts, they must know are flirtations with death, is a more
complex story. It boils to the fact that something in the culture is
encouraging oblivionseeking and selfdestruction. That's difficult to
explain and even harder to face.