The new heroin
It's more available and dangerously potent

07/07/97

From January to midMarch of this year, 21 people, mostly teenagers,
overdosed on heroin in South Boston. Five died.

In Orlando, Fla., more than 30 people, again mostly teenagers, died from
heroin overdoses in the last year.

In January, a 12yearold girl in Tucson, Ariz., died of an overdose of
heroin and cocaine.

Locally, at least three teens in Grapevine, Bedford and Plano
fatally overdosed on heroin within the last several months.

Heroin is back. And it's more potent than ever. Only this time around,
it is claiming the lives of more than innercity junkies and strungout
rock stars like Kurt Cobain.

Heroin is working its way back because its purveyors are trying to
increase their market share by giving a better high for less money. The
heightened potency of the drug is contributing to the addiction and
death of a much younger generation of drug abuser.

Mistakenly, teens think that heroin is less dangerous than other drugs.
Because today's heroin is so pure it can be smoked as well as injected,
the teenagers think smoking heroin is not addictive. That's dead wrong.

The heroin that's hitting the streets today is more powerful than the
"horse" of the 1960s and 1970s. And if longtime addicts are overdosing
on the 1997 vintage, which they are, unsuspecting kids, who aren't
knowledgeable enough to query their sources about the potency of their
purchases, run grave risks.

Ever the master marketers, drug dealers also are making the new heroin
more "abuser friendly." At one time, cops could spot addicts by their
runny eyes and noses.

But dealers who have experimented with ways to squeeze more dollars out
of a single gram of heroin cut it with an overthecounter sleep aid
called Dormin. The new adulterant prolongs the strength of the heroin
and the "high." And since Dormin contains an antihistamine, it also
dries up runny noses and eyes, eliminating the most visible symptoms.

But the message must get out that the "new improved" heroin is still a
tragically bad choice. A little history is instructive:

Heroin is an opiate, a relative of the opium that has been milked from
the opium poppy for several thousand years. Opium medicines were
mentioned in early Greek and Egyptian cultures. The drug was traded
extensively in Arab cultures and foisted by the British on the Chinese.
During the 19th century, British literary figures like Samuel Taylor
Coleridge became addicted to opiates like laudanum. During the Civil
War, many soldiers became addicted to the opiate morphine that was used
as a painkiller.

Heroin, a more potent and fasteracting variation of morphine, initially
was marketed in 1898 by the Bayer Co. of Germany. Yes, the same company
more commonly known for its aspirin. It was used as a cough remedy.
Because clinicians thought it to be more effective but less addictive
than morphine, doctors were encouraged to use heroin for pain
management.

But by the early 1900s, American doctors began seeing heroin addicts
here. And by 1925, heroin was branded as a dangerous drug nationally.

Like alcohol, heroin is a depressant that slows down all the body
functions. But heroin differs from alcohol in two very significant ways.
First, it is not "organotoxic." It doesn't destroy body organs, like the
liver or kidney, the way alcohol does. That's why heroin dependency can
last for years.

Second, an abuser usually does not die from the symptoms experienced
from withdrawal, although the violent wretching is so unpleasant it
drives many addicts back for more.

These socalled good differences are now being peddled to a new
generation that has been bombarded with the negative effects of other
addictive drugs like alcohol and cocaine.

But the word needs to get out about the "bad" side of heroin:

Tolerance can occur rapidly with opiates like heroin, so users might
need 10 times their initial dose within a month of beginning use.
Because withdrawal may start within three to four hours, a heroin user
might have to shoot up four times a day.

Withdrawal results in violent nausea that can last for several days.
Side effects of regular use can include chronic constipation, menstrual
delays in women and lower testosterone levels and sexual desire in men.

Pregnant heroin users have a greater risk of miscarriage, stillbirths
and seizures. A child can be born addicted, and unlike adults, a child
in withdrawal can die.

Overdose can occur when so much heroin enters the brain that the nervous
system shuts down. Blood pressure drops, the heart beats too weakly to
circulate blood, the lungs fill with fluid. The user can slip into a
coma and die.

Those who "mainline" the drug risk contracting a disease from unsanitary
needles. It is estimated that 50 to 80 percent of all needleusing
addicts in the New York area test positive for the HIV virus.

In the past, switching heroin addicts to a longeracting opiate like
methadone has been the only effective means of treatment. Other drugs
like Darvon and Clonidine also are now used to wean users from heroin,
but the transition to detoxification and recovery is still highly
difficult.

The swelling number of heroin drug users means more research needs to be
done for more effective treatment of heroin dependency, especially where
there may be polydrug use. According to experts in the area, current
research funding on drug abuse is a quarter of that for cancer,
cardiovascular disease or AIDS.

One new type of research on heroin dependency appears particularly
promising. Researchers are beginning to clone the receptor sites in the
pleasure pathway of the brain to study how heroin attaches to the sites.
Perhaps by breaking that code, they may be able to develop means to turn
these sites off, or make them less attractive to heroin.

Yet until there is a breakthrough, the best hope for youngsters is to
keep them away from heroin altogether. Nothing drives that point home
harder than the comment by a Bostonarea police chief: "I've seen people
get off cocaine. I haven't seen many people get off heroin. They either
keep taking it, they replace it with another drug, like methadone, or
they die."

If ever there were a rallying cry for a renewed, more sophisticated war
on drugs, it should be: We must not let our youngsters be tricked and
ruined by the new heroin.

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