Heroin making a comeback with teenage girls and boys

By Andrew Moulton

KnightRidder Newspapers

WASHINGTON Federal officials are scrambling to head off what they fear
may become an epidemic of heroin addiction among America's youth.

While overall illicit drug use among younger teens declined recently, the
proportion of eighth graders who said they've tried heroin doubled between
1991 and 1996. And last year, about a quarter of American teenagers said
heroin is easy to obtain, according to a survey by the National Institute
on Drug Abuse.

Young people don't understand heroin's lethal effects, experts told
healthcare providers and social workers gathered here Monday at a
conference to plan an attack on the drug.

To limit heroin's impact, experts are spreading information about the
drug's uses, effects and symptoms among educators, parents and others
likely to encounter young people daily. They're hoping the educational
effort will turn young people away from heroin before its use becomes
endemic.

``What we are doing here is a preemptive strike,'' said NIDA Director Alan
Leshner. ``We're not a crisis yet, and we're trying to stay ahead.''

Conference speakers attributed the increase in heroin experimentation to
several factors.

Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said the glamorization of
heroin use in popular culture has contributed to use by young girls. She
said the number of teenage girls admitted to publicly funded centers for
heroin treatment increased by 20 percent between 1992 to 1995.

``Too often today, when girls open a fashion magazine, instead of seeing
pictures of health, they see pictures of heroin chic,'' Shalala said.
``Models with drawn faces, eyes rimmed in black smudges, almost
deathlike.''

Conference speakers also said teenagers are also more likely to try heroin
because purer forms of the drug can be smoked or snorted rather than
injected. Some teens think wrongly that only injecting heroin is
deadly.

Intravenous heroin use has declined nationally. Among heroin users admitted
to treatment in New York City in 1995, 41 percent injected the drug,
compared with 71 percent in 1994.

``The use of noninjected routes makes it more attractive to youth and more
frightening to adults,'' Columbia University psychiatry professor Marian
Fischman said. ``The fact that using heroin this way is just as risky is a
message we have to get out if we're going to discourage younger users.''

Drug Enforcement Agency officials attributed higher rates of heroin use in
some East Coast cities to the increased availability of highpurity heroin
from South America and Southeast Asia.

The DEA said worldwide opium production is up, with an estimated 4,157
metric tons produced in 1995, compared with 3,409 metric tons produced in
1994.

Posted at 9:09 p.m. PDT Monday, September 29, 1997