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Heroin
Drug's damage makes case against decriminalization

By Richard Estrada / The Dallas Morning News

If it was heroin alone that ended the life of Eugene "Big Daddy"
Lipscomb, it must have taken a lot of "smack" to kill him. The
6foot6inch, 290pound defensive allpro tackle was physically
imposing by any standard, and the news that anything short of bullets
had killed him came as a surprise to me.

Because the exBaltimore Colt was a veteran of the great National
Football League championship teams of 1958 and 1959, reports that he had
died of a drug overdose devastated this 13yearold Colts fan and former
"Balamer" resident.

I always admired Big Daddy for his toughness and his play. But I also
admired him because, unlike many of his teammates, he had become a pro
football star despite not having played college ball. High school in
Detroit was the last stop on his road to a formal education. If he was a
big dog, he also was an underdog.

Only now, 34 years after his untimely death, have I come to contemplate
trends relating to the drug that killed Big Daddy as much as I ponder
the tragedy of his death. The passing of a childhood idol who was either
31 or 34, depending on the source, was painful.

But I am sure it was no more dispiriting than the death of Billie
Holiday was to blues aficionados in 1959. Nor less so than the sudden
demise of a parade of entertainers years later that included Janis
Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison all of whom joined Big Daddy and
Billie in dying of heroin overdoses.

When Big Daddy was found slumped over in a chair at a friend's house in
Baltimore six months before the assassination of JFK, the Maryland state
medical examiner didn't consider the cause of death a great mystery. He
found at least three telltale needle marks on the big man's arm. And the
next day, on May 11, the Baltimore Sun reported that "a homemade
syringe" was found near his body. If there were subsequent rumors that
someone else had injected a needle into his arm, no one ever questioned
that it was heroin that did him in.

The latest news is that smack is back. A survey just released by the
Department of Health and Human Services finds that the use of heroin and
cocaine among people age 18 to 25 is exploding. What gives?

No issue is more important in the resurgence of heroin than the dramatic
rise in the purity levels of the drug. Where heroin purity in Big Daddy
Lipscomb's day varied from about 7 to 10 percent, purity levels in the
United States these days are 30 percent or more. Philadelphia heroin
routinely registers at an incredible 70 percent.

The inner cities of Baltimore, Boston and New York City always have seen
elevated levels of heroin abuse. But as Colombian, Mexican, Dominican,
Chinese, Russian and Nigerian gangs ply their trade, the phenomenon also
has expanded to Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and smaller cities in the
Southwest and Southeast.

As a new generation of heroin users evolves, the danger of sudden death
from the drug is greater than ever before. According to the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the purity of the new product is so elevated
that users now can get high by snorting or smoking it. That obviates the
stigma associated with "mainlining" the drug with a hypodermic syringe,
a plus in the eyes of new users who aren't poor and don't live in the
inner city.

The reemergence of heroin as a popular drug is revealing important
insights into the national debate over the war on drugs. No facet of the
drug trade more readily contradicts the argument that the natural demand
for drugs is ultimately the only major reason there is a drug trade.
Heroin purveyors have made a conscious effort to increase the purity of
the drug in order to make it more attractive to users and less costly to
smuggle and transport.

As the heroin epidemic grows, experts in the field have come to learn,
or relearn, that the marketing of heroin in order to artificially create
and expand demand is an extremely important issue. Drug consultant Wayne
Roques of Florida says that is exactly why the Colombians developed
crack cocaine in order to market it to a new customer base, innercity
blacks in this case.

More than three decades after Big Daddy Lipscomb's death, Americans are
beginning to pay more attention to heroin than before. Unlike back then,
the voices calling for legalizing drugs, while still in the minority,
are growing louder. But as heroin begins to leave the inner city and
wreak havoc on affluent suburbs, the majority who oppose legalization
may be forgiven if they dig in their heels as never before. If demand is
important to the drug trade, let's not forget that in the real world,
the pusher man bends over backward to create demand.