LATIN AMERICAN POPPY FIELDS UNDERMINE U.S. DRUG BATTLE

SAN ROQUE, Colombia - Colombia and Mexico have become the dominant
suppliers of heroin to the United States, supplanting Asia, in a trend that
experts and the authorities fear could offset American-backed successes in
a campaign against drugs that has focused mostly on cocaine.

Here in the lush, nearly impassable mountains of Tolima Province, rebels of
Colombia's largest guerrilla group stand watch near muddy footpaths leading
to opium farms that experts say help produce upward of 80 percent of the
heroin that reaches American streets.

From Maine to California, law enforcement authorities report small-scale
epidemics and a rising rate of overdoses from a dangerously potent and
cheap form of heroin. While total heroin use in the United States has not
risen significantly, the drug is appealing to new, middle-class users
because it can be smoked or snorted, rather than injected.

After steadily expanding its market in recent years, white Colombian heroin
now dominates east of the Mississippi; brown Mexican heroin rules to the
west. The pattern signals an alliance between Colombian and Mexican
traffickers, one American official said.

Evidence of the shift from coca to opium poppy can be found across Latin
America, which still produces just a fraction of the heroin made worldwide
- - mostly in places like Afghanistan, Myanmar and Pakistan - but the vast
majority reaching American users, the authorities say.

New opium fields have been discovered in Peru, which until recently had
made great strides against coca. Strands of poppies are also increasingly
being spotted along the Venezuelan border, according to Colombian
government officials.

The shift, experts and American authorities fear, could present a new
challenge to aggressive American-financed efforts to fight the illegal drug
trade in Colombia with aerial fumigation of coca, a lowland crop used to
make cocaine. Heroin may provide a potentially important new source of
financing for the leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups that
depend on drug money to wage war. Unlike coca, the plant used to make
cocaine, opium poppies are grown high in cloud-shrouded mountains and in
ever smaller and scattered plots, they say.

When crop-dusters arrive, officials said, traffickers or rebels often open
fire on them. Opium traffickers in Mexico have already shot down three army
helicopters this year in the southern state of Guerrero. Here in rugged
southern Colombia, a one-acre plot belongs to Fernay Lugo, rail thin and
agile, who works, razor in hand, slicing open the pods of his blossoming
poppies to collect the milky gum that is refined into heroin.

He explained how - day after day, bit by bit, in mountains 7,000 feet up -
he tries to accumulate a few pounds, enough to sell for the kind of profits
his slumping coffee plants could never fetch.

He does not ponder who his buyers are, the shadowy men who meet him at a
distant roadside, or their ultimate customers. "When we harvest and sell,
we do not even think where it goes," said Mr. Lugo, 29, the father of two
girls. Though farms here, including Mr. Lugo's own, have been hit by
crop-dusters in the past, he seemed to show little concern.

The skies are rarely clear over southern Tolima, the cloud cover often so
heavy that fumigation planes cannot come in. Farmers also disperse their
poppy crops, Mr. Lugo said, to make them harder to identify by satellite
and reconnaissance aircraft.

In this region, some of the greatest inroads in eliminating poppy plots
have been made not through aerial spraying but from programs that pay
farmers to eradicate the crop and switch to legitimate ones. Still, it is
not hard to find the brilliant lavender and red flowers of the mature opium
plants that so sharply contrast against the monotonous drab green hues of
the legal crops that peasants also grow.

Blanca Ruby Perez, 39, said she and her family lived by poppies, which can
be harvested twice a year and bring far more money than blackberries, corn,
beans and lettuce. "It is much easier to grow than the other crops," she
said, carefully tiptoeing around the small, green leaves. "Look, we have
put no fertilizer on it, and look how pretty it is."

Once it is processed into heroin and smuggled to the United States, its
effects are anything but pretty, law enforcement officials say. The heroin
is "way better, in terms of purity, both Mexican and Colombian," than in
years past, one official said.

With improving purity and lower costs has come increasing use. The number
of hard-core users in the United States rose to nearly a million last year,
from 600,000 a decade ago, said the Drug Enforcement Administration. In New
York State, 32,000 people were admitted to state-licensed drug treatment
centers for heroin addictions last year, up from 29,000 in 1997. The
government's National Household Survey on Drug Abuse also determined that
the number of 18- to 25-year-olds who had used heroin in the last month
rose to 67,000 in 2001 from 26,000 in 2000, which some experts say shows
more young people are finding the new, high-power heroin more palatable.

Many new heroin users are turning up in unexpected places, not just the
"shooting galleries" in tough urban neighborhoods where addicts found their
fix in years past.

In Portland, Me., a city of 64,000, the number of people dying from
overdoses rose to 28 last year, most of them heroin users, Detective Sgt.
Scott Pelletier said in a telephone interview. In 2001, 16 died.

The police in Portland say heroin has become readily available, with the
price of single-dose bags as little as $15. They were once sold for at
least $35, and sometimes up to $50 in the late 1990's. "It's our No. 1
priority, as far as drug investigations go," said Detective Pelletier, who
oversees the city's narcotics unit. "It's everywhere. We're just beginning
to see, over the last year, what we call raw heroin, where people buy it by
the gram, rather than in a single dose."

Soaring seizures of Colombian heroin in Panama and Nicaragua point to the
growing importance of those countries as corridors in the northbound drug
pipeline, in which smugglers use every method available to move their
product, from welding kilos into the drive shafts of cars to soaking the
powder into coat linings or swallowing it in condoms.

Couriers carrying Colombian heroin commonly hopscotch Central American
airports to Mexico. From there, they drive or carry both Colombian and
Mexican heroin across the border into the United States, usually less than
10 kilograms at a time, an amount that can be worth as much as $1.5 million
wholesale.

The heroin may also be brought to the United States by air and sea across
the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The transportation and sales are not
always controlled by the powerful kingpins and established drug gangs, but
by what one official called "mom-and-pop operations that are hard to
penetrate."

Law enforcement officials say that in the northeastern United States, a
Colombian system that for years ran cocaine is now increasingly reliant on
heroin, which is easier to smuggle and brings much more profit.

"The Colombian traffickers have had their distribution networks in place,"
said Bridget Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor for New York City.
"They've already been dealing in cocaine. It was a market that was ripe for
the picking."

This month, officials from the United States, Colombia and Mexico say they
will meet to seek new ways to combat the heroin trade. But the same factors
that make heroin poppies hard to eradicate also make it hard even to
determine exactly how much exists, or exactly how much is winding up in the
United States.

"It is difficult to detect, and difficult to fumigate," explained Klaus
Nyholm, chief representative in Colombia of the United Nations Drug Control
Program. "So, to sum it up, we don't know."

Optimistic reports from the White House drug control office estimate that
the size of opium fields was reduced last year by 25 percent in Colombia
and 40 percent in Mexico. But using new research techniques, the same
American drug enforcement analysts say the amount of Colombian heroin
produced last year is three times the 4.3 metric tons previously assumed.

Drug enforcement officials agree now that Colombian and Mexican supplies of
heroin "pretty much satisfy the market in the United States," as one
law-enforcement official put it. Despite the unknowns, officials in all
three nations cite the same evidence for the new dominance of Colombian and
Mexican heroin: rising seizures, higher purity, falling prices.

Seizures of heroin reported by the United States customs officials in 2002
totaled 5,598 pounds, an estimated 80 percent of it from Colombia, up from
3,521 pounds the previous year.

As for refining the drug, both American and Mexican officials say they
suspect Colombians have taught Mexicans new techniques for creating purer
and more valuable heroin powder from opium gum.

"We see more sophisticated processes of refinement and deeper knowledge in
the chemistry of production" in Mexican heroin, said Jose Luis Santiago
Vasconcelos, Mexico's top organized-crime fighter. "It's very similar to
the Colombians' techniques."

The price of heroin on the street, meanwhile, has dropped sharply, from as
much as $220,000 a kilogram for Asian heroin a decade ago to as little as
$60,000 now, said law enforcement officials in New York and elsewhere.

"It's outrageously low compared to what it used to be," Anthony P. Placido,
the agent in charge of the D.E.A. in New York, said in a telephone interview.

In December, Congress held a hearing in which a host of drug experts and
law enforcement officials warned of the threat of Latin American heroin.
But conservatives in Congress are complaining that little has been done to
eradicate opium poppies.

"A miscalculation in our strategy was to obviously ignore the poppy
cultivation, and we paid for it with an increase in supply," Representative
John L. Mica, Republican of Florida and a member of the House subcommittee
on drug policy issues, said by telephone from Washington.

American antidrug officials who work in Colombia, however, defend their
spraying as extensive, and say it will be more aggressive this year. In
2000, pilots sprayed about 22,000 acres of opium poppies in Colombia,
according to Congressional testimony in Washington. In the next two years,
the number of acres sprayed fell, with 4,900 acres eradicated in 2001 and
8,100 last year.

One leading counterdrug official said in an interview in the Colombian
capital, "We essentially sprayed all we could find."