KILLER HEROIN STRIKES CHICAGO, DETROIT AREAS

130 Dead; Police Seek Powerful Drug's Source

CHICAGO -- Police and health authorities are struggling to track down
the source of a doctored, intensely powerful heroin that has killed
at least 130 people in and around Chicago and Detroit and sent
hundreds more to hospitals in cities from St. Louis to Philadelphia.

In the labyrinthine and often paranoid world of illicit drugs, tales
of killer heroin have come and gone before. But this time is
different, law enforcement and health officials say.

The pattern of cases is broader, involving many markets at once,
suggesting, they say, a larger and more sophisticated distribution
network. The source of the additive has been traced to labs in
Mexico, which has traditionally supplied much of the Midwest's
heroin, raising fears that other hybrid pharmaceutical street drugs
might emerge.

"The biggest new thing is the high mortality rate," said Dr. Carl
Schmidt, the chief medical examiner for Wayne County, Mich., which
includes Detroit and its suburbs.

The county has had more than 70 deaths since September related to the
altered heroin mixture, Schmidt said, including those of three people
found together in a car in April -- overcome so quickly than no one
could get out to summon help.

The additive, called fentanyl, was developed as a commercial
painkiller in the 1960s and first surfaced as a street drug compound
in the mid-1980s on the West Coast, where it killed perhaps 100
people over as many as eight years. It made waves again in the early
1990s in the New York area, where it killed dozens of people who
bought fentanyl-laced heroin under the street brand "Tango and Cash."

Fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, is
not a contaminant or filler, drug experts say, but rather a
deliberately introduced enhancement intended to improve the product.

It kills by shutting down a victim's respiratory system when too much
is taken, an easy mistake because of the potency.

Much has changed in the drug world since fentanyl first became a
killer. In many parts of the country, the use of synthetic
lab-produced drugs such as methamphetamine, or meth, has surged.

A sharp increase in prescriptions for narcotics, depressants and
stimulants has also contributed to an increase in drugs diverted for
illicit use and created drug users familiar with pharmaceuticals,
according to a report this year by the National Drug Intelligence
Center, a unit of the Justice Department.

And a national crackdown on illegal drug labs in the United States
has recently pushed more meth production to Mexico, where local
police officers and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials
say they think Chicago's fentanyl was produced.

The Chicago police superintendent, Philip Cline, said in an interview
that his officers, in working with the DEA, were looking for
connections among clusters of overdose cases, then trying to track
back from there, through undercover purchases, arrests and lab tests,
to understand the pipeline.

"Everybody is looking for a signature," Cline said. "Is it the same
here as in Philly? We're not sure on that yet."

Cline said the city has been frustrated because warnings appear to
have partly backfired. Drug dealers were even seen waving the fliers
the city distributed this year, advertising that they were selling
the very thing the police were so worried about.

"The biggest problem is that we have willing victims," he said.

Fentanyl's re-emergence has revived old fears among some experts that
underworld chemists could one day learn to manipulate opiate
molecules to produce superdrugs of devastating malevolence -- more
addictive or corrosive to society than heroin, alcohol or cocaine at
their worst.

Others say the wave of deaths proves that such a formula has not been
perfected, since the fentanyl makers are killing off their own customers.

But people who study the market say that more lab-produced drugs, of
whatever quality, are probably inevitable because the process is
cheaper than the harvesting and transport of agricultural drugs and
can be done anywhere.