The Art of the Potentially Deadly Deal:

MARKETING HEROIN ON THE STREET

The empty glassine packets can be found in Manhattan, Brooklyn and
beyond, scattered on streets and sidewalks with only obscure slogans
or graphic images to suggest their former use. At one time they
contained heroin and the markings stamped on the packets were meant
to differentiate strains of varying purity or provenance.

To some they are crime evidence. Addicts may see them mainly as a
vehicle to fulfill a dangerous urge. For a group of artists who have
been collecting them they are cultural artifacts that are equally
unsettling and compelling.

On Wednesday a weeklong show called "Heroin Stamp Project" organized
by seven members of the Social Art Collective is scheduled to open at
the White Box Gallery on Broome Street on the Lower East Side. The
show, which will include 150 packets picked off city streets, as well
as 12 blown-up prints made from them, is meant to examine the
intersection of advertising and addiction and provoke questions about
how society addresses dependence and disease.

The origins of the show can be traced to 2001, when Pedro
Mateu-Gelabert, a sociologist researching the relationship between
H.I.V. and drug use, first glimpsed the packets in an empty building
in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, where addicts would shoot up.
Immediately, he said, he was struck by the fact that the images on
the glassine envelopes served as advertisements.

"This was the marketing of heroin," he said on a recent evening as he
stood on a corner in Bushwick. "Even something so forbidden, so
demonized, can be branded."

He began collecting the packets and about six years ago he showed
them to a friend, Liza Vadnai, who was taken by their combination of
menace and fragile beauty. Joined by others, they continued gathering
packets with the aim of organizing an exhibition.

Ms. Vadnai, who had counseled drug users in San Francisco before
moving to New York, wanted to balance the presentation of the bags as
art objects with some consciousness of the devastation caused by the
powder they had once held.

"I felt the public health message had to be very clear," she said as
she walked with Mr. Mateu-Gelabert along a stretch of Troutman
Street, where the artists had regularly searched for their raw
material. "I wasn't sure how to showcase them without it feeling exploitive."

Just over 1,800 unstamped packets -- the number a heavy heroin user
might go through in a year, the show notes -- will be arranged in
rows on a wall in an effort to make the idea of addiction seem less
abstract. Bags typically sell for about $10, Ms. Vadnai said, and may
contain anywhere from 30 milligrams of heroin up to a tenth of a
gram. Cards bearing facts about the health hazards of injection drug
use will also be distributed at the show.

In addition, Ms. Vadnai, Mr. Mateu-Gelabert and their collaborators
decided to give some of the show's proceeds to the Lower East Side
Harm Reduction Center, a counseling and needle-exchange organization
near the gallery. The collective members said such an organization
has more of an impact than groups that simply seek to get drug users to quit.

Heroin users donated some of the packets in the exhibition. Social
Art Collective members found others near drug distribution spots and
areas where addicts congregate. The artists found packets in the
rugged streets of Bushwick and in Mott Haven in the Bronx, and in the
gentrifying streets of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and the
Lower East Side. They picked up packets near the stately brownstones
that surround Gramercy Park, and inside Tompkins Square Park, where
the trade flourished in the 1980s and into the 90s and still exists.

The stamps that identify the heroin inside draw on a wide range of
references. There are names like White Fang, Time Bomb and Monster
Power, which is decorated with an image of the grim reaper with a
scythe. There are allusions to religion (Deadly Sin and the Last
Temptation), crime (Notorious and Outlaw) and publishing (Life, in
white capitals against a red background, and Daily News, along with
the old camera logo of that tabloid). There is also a packet stamped
with the words "Tango and Cash," the name attached to a
fentanyl-laced brand of heroin that infamously caused 12 fatal
overdoses in one weekend in 1991.

Several heroin brands seem to dwell on the delicate balance of
mortality that accompanies their use. Those include the Last Shot,
Game Over, No Exit and No Pain, which is illustrated with a coffin and a cross.

"Many of them are metaphors," Ms. Vadnai said. "They are saying that
the heroin is so strong, so good, it might kill you."

Mr. Mateu-Gelabert agreed, saying that such names and images were
"playing with the edge between life and death."

While collecting packets, the organizers also conducted a form of
ethnographic research, speaking with dealers, users and runners, who
serve as intermediaries in a drug sale. One member of the collective,
Ashley Jordan, interviewed a man who designed and made rubber stamps
that were used to place images on packets.

Those images may not be copyrighted but their creators still have
highly proprietary feelings. Earlier this year, Mr. Mateu-Gelabert
said, a heroin dealer in Bushwick became upset that another man had
appeared on his territory and copied his brand, Too Strong. The first
dealer began distributing a new brand, called Shooters -- one of
those in the show -- which featured two revolvers facing each other.

"It was really about sending a message to the dealer who was selling
in his neighborhood on his block," Mr. Mateu-Gelabert said. "It was
to convey the message that if you continue messing with our market
you will face the guns."