PEDDLING HEROIN IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

You've probably heard that Chicago is No. 1 in the nation when it comes to
murders.

It is.

You may have heard Chicago has the worst gang problem of any city in the
country.

It does.

What you may not have heard is the news about heroin.

Let's take a drive to the corner of South Kilpatrick Street and West
Maypole Avenue.

Eight minutes from the United Center, 15 minutes from the Gold Coast,
Kilpatrick and Maypole is on the West Side, in the heart of a working poor,
African-American neighborhood. On this corner, any day of the week, you
will see with jaw-dropping clarity why Chicago is No. 1 in yet another
category: heroin.

I made a trip to the intersection a few weeks ago. It was mid-June, school
was still in session and yellow school buses were making their way through
the neighborhood streets dropping kids off. Three small girls were jumping
rope. A little boy was bouncing a basketball on the sidewalk. Peoples Gas
workers were repairing a line nearby. Mail was being delivered. And an ice
cream truck was going up and down the street with stenciled warnings on the
back: "Watch for Children" and "Safety Zone."

The only thing being "watched for" on this sunny afternoon were the cops.
Out on the street in the midst of all the normal, day-to-day activities,
were gang lookouts stationed all along the block. They were there to
provide a "safety zone" for the blue Plymouth van on the northeast corner.

The van, staffed by members of the dominant gang on the West Side, the Vice
Lords, functioned like a fast-food drive-through. It's here where you stop
first to place your dope order and pre-pay. Then another Vice Lord flags
you forward and, like a ground controller on an airport tarmac with his
arms held high, motions your car left and to the curb.

He then dashes over to a tree in the parkway, pulls out a couple of foil
packets from a stash hidden there, walks over to the driver's side of the
car, hands off the dope, and the customer speeds away.

It all takes less than 60 seconds.

What's so amazing about the activity at Kilpatrick and Maypole is how
absolutely blatant the drug dealing is . Two colleagues and I sat at that
corner, in plain sight, not more than 15 feet away. The gangbangers were
unfazed as they watched us watch them. As long as we didn't interrupt
commerce, they didn't care.

Neither did the customers.

The buyers we saw were white and young, maybe early 20s, and if I'm
guessing correctly (they didn't stay to talk) were probably from the
suburbs. Open-air drug markets on the West Side draw heavily from the
suburbs, whose citizens come mostly for one thing: heroin.

Why heroin?

It's because of the quality. Thirty years ago, heroin was at best 2 percent
pure. Today, a $10 fix is 20 percent pure and all classes of people are
buying it. According to data from the respected Community Outreach
Intervention Project, customers are generally young professionals, students
and suburbanites. One of the great attractions to heroin these days, given
its purity, is you don't need a needle to get high. You can snort it like
cocaine. User-friendly, you might say.

There is a heroin epidemic raging in Chicago and it is completely
intertwined with this city's staggering homicide rate and gang crisis.

The gravity of the heroin problem was confirmed last week by the U.S.
Justice Department's release of what it calls the ADAM data. That is the
Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program, where adult males agree to be
tested within 48 hours of being arrested.

Chicago's numbers are worse than any other city, showing 26 percent test
positive for opiates, far outdistancing Miami, Detroit and Atlanta, even
surpassing New York.

Where did the Chicago heroin users score their dope? Places like Maypole
and Kilpatrick, located in the 11th Police District. There are more than
120 open-air drug markets in that one district, according to a federal
report, and even the smallest of those street corner dope stands earns
$6,000 to $10,000 a day, according to a Chicago police department estimate.

The mayhem in Chicago's drug-infested neighborhoods is not just about turf,
money and the murder rate. Guns have killed 307 people in Chicago so far
this year. But in 2002, heroin killed 399 people. Chicago Mayor Richard M.
Daley and Chicago Police Superintendent Terry Hillard can redeploy officers
and remap police districts until the cows come home but this is so much
more than a police problem and so much wider than a Chicago crisis.

"It is a social problem," says Melody Heaps, who pioneered Treatment
Alternatives for Safe Communities, a state-funded non-profit organization
that provides most of the screening and referrals for drug treatment. Heaps
argues that the U.S. hasn't had a consistent nationwide drug policy since
the Nixon administration. "We have to treat substance abuse like a
communicable disease," she says. "Treat it like the SARS virus--attacking
it, isolating it, with both prevention and treatment."

Continent by continent, not street corner by street corner.

There is so much more to say about heroin in Chicago. More to follow. Stay
tuned.