CHICAGO'S OPEN-AIR HEROIN MARKETS

Curbside Business Begins At 4 A.M.

If computers could cry, the one holding my e-mail would have been weeping
this past week because of the messages from all kinds of people who know
the horror of heroin.

Last week I described sitting on a corner on the West Side of Chicago in
plain sight of dope dealers as they peddled heroin as openly as vendors in
ice cream trucks sell Popsicles.

Though many people still see heroin as an inner-city problem and its users
as poor and black, the fact is many buyers of heroin are white and come
into the city from the suburbs to score "blows," a $10 hit that is so pure
it can be snorted like cocaine.

One of the first letters to arrive came from beyond the suburbs. It was
from a mother who said, "I just wanted you to know heroin is not just a
big-city problem." She lives in Spring Valley, a small town 100 miles west
of Chicago. She wrote about her teenage son, "an average, pretty good kid,"
and his friends, who all in the past year came to Chicago to buy heroin.

Her son got hooked. She didn't know until he told her. Her words are as
anguished as they are understated: "I consider myself a watchful mother and
I didn't know he was doing this."

Right now, she says, he is clean.

"It has been a good month," she writes "but a day does not go by that I
wonder if he can stay off it."

Four in the morning is the time that the street-corner heroin markets open
in Chicago. By 6 a.m. it's rush hour. That's because heroin users, contrary
to another myth, are often employed. The Vice Lords, who sell it on the
West Side, and the Disciples, who control it on the South Side, see a wide
variety of customers, many of whom are white, working-class people who need
to get to their jobs on time. They are delivery people, bus drivers, postal
workers, house painters, students, and here and there, a professional
person on his or her way downtown.

Phillip Cline is the new first deputy superintendent of police in Chicago.
The bulk of his 33 years as a police officer has been spent tracking
narcotics, especially heroin. "Over the years," he says, "I've seen heroin
users go from junkies to the middle class."

By any standard, heroin is an epidemic in Chicago.

And it has been for some time, according to Cline.

So why not just arrest all those gangbangers on all those corners and be
done with it? Wouldn't the lawbreakers get what they deserve and the
decent, law-abiding citizens whose neighborhoods they infest be helped in
so doing?

This is a crisis that requires a longer lens.

Seven thousand miles from Chicago is Afghanistan, where opium production is
soaring this year. Heroin comes from opium. And the biggest traffickers in
Afghanistan, according to a recent Newsweek report, are the U.S.-supported
warlords who helped us overthrow the Taliban. That deserves repeating: The
biggest opium traffickers in Afghanistan are our allies.

These warlords are the international equivalent of the "generals" who run
the Vice Lords and the Disciples. Meanwhile, desperately poor Afghan
farmers have one way and one way only to feed their starving children in a
country without jobs or infrastructure: They grow opium and sell it.

Have we put the warlords out of business?

No.

Have we brought economic redevelopment to Afghanistan and with it jobs?

Not nearly enough.

Have we stopped the flow of opium out of Afghanistan?

No. In fact, the U.S., according to Newsweek, has just two Drug Enforcement
Administration agents in that country. You'd have to be delusional to
believe in drug raids in Afghanistan.

Which takes us back to Chicago.

The story of heroin is the story of money. It's global, not local.

What stops it from coming into this country?

What stops it from overtaking this city's poorest neighborhoods? The same
thing that will stop poor farmers in Afghanistan from growing it:
opportunity, jobs, education and economic development.

As Jesse Jackson might say, "Hope not dope." I know that it is easy to say
and hard to do. But just consider what is at stake.

Families in the inner city, the suburbs, in small towns like Spring Valley
that have met the scourge of heroin in their homes know just how fast
heroin can siphon hope, worse still ... it can kill.

Kevin Renauer of Naperville just marked the first anniversary of his
21-year-old son's death.

His letter speaks to a parent's agony and heroin's deadly power.

"My son fought hard for three years to stay clean and sober and while he
had experimented with heroin a few times in high school, he had not used it
years. But in a moment of weakness he relapsed big time. He thought he knew
what he was getting into."

And then there's that kid from Spring Valley. He's still alive. But it's
doubtful he's clean anymore. Within hours of this column going to press,
his mother sent a new e-mail. Her son has just been arrested, she wrote.
The charge: possession of heroin.