SIX PEOPLE TREATED FOR POSSIBLE LACED DRUG REACTION

SALISBURY -- The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene is
conducting tests to see if heroin used by six people who ended up at
Peninsula Regional Medical Center on Thursday was laced with a
substance even more dangerous than the drug itself.

The tests followed an unusual day for Wicomico health officials, who
were notified of the rash of hospital cases that afternoon. Dr.
Judith Sensenbrenner, director of the county's health department,
said six people with similar symptoms arrived at the hospital between
1:30 and 3:30 p.m. Thursday, with difficulty breathing and unconsciousness.

Heroin use appeared to link their cases, Sensenbrenner said, and
medical workers suspected that a foreign substance in the drugs they
used had caused the symptoms. Sensenbrenner said she was advising
drug users specifically not to use heroin.

"Drug use is bad any time, but it's even more dangerous here because
people are not expecting the kinds of reactions they're getting,"
Sensenbrenner said. She said the DHMH tests had not yet identified if
the heroin had been laced with something else.

No deaths among the six cases were reported Friday, and the problem
appears to be limited to Wicomico County. A spokeswoman for Atlantic
General Hospital in Berlin said the health center had not seen any
comparable cases in recent days, and the Worcester County health
department concurred.

Heroin is an illegal substance which is used mostly by men, a
National Institute on Drug Abuse report states. It can be injected
into users' veins with needles or snorted as a powder. A 1995 federal
report on drug trafficking in Maryland said high-grade heroin was
about five times more expensive than low-purity heroin.

Dr. James Isaacs, who works with people seeking treatment for drug
addiction at Salisbury's Hudson Health Services Inc., said some of
his patients have reported the heroin they bought on local streets in
recent months is stronger and more potent than what they are
accustomed to. That could be the result of drug dealers tapping a new
source for their product, Isaacs said, and heroin users have no
assurances the drugs they buy illegally are not tampered with or altered.

"The FDA recalls drugs when they have problems with products, and
even if they have quality problems," Isaacs said. "People, they're
not asking quality-control questions when they buy it. It's really an
honor system with people that I'm not sure are necessarily very honest."

He said emergency room doctors often had difficulty diagnosing why
opiate users with dangerous reactions to drugs were being affected,
and the problems could not always be traced to impurities.

"With a bad reaction, it can go the other way -- that someone's got
really pure heroin," Isaacs said.

Heroin use in Maryland is concentrated in its western region, where
about 2.6 percent of the population uses illicit drugs other than
marijuana, according to federal studies, compared to 2.3 percent of
the population in central and eastern Maryland, an area that includes
Baltimore and all of the Eastern Shore. Cocaine use is higher in
central and eastern Maryland, however.