COLOMBIA, MEXICO PASS ASIA IN SUPPLY OF HEROIN TO U.S.

Cheap, Potent Drug Lures Middle-Class Users

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 authorities fear could offset U.S.-backed successes in a
campaign against drugs that has focused mostly on cocaine.

Here in the mountains of Tolima province, rebels of Colombia's largest
guerrilla group stand watch near opium farms that experts say help produce
more than 80 percent of the heroin that reaches U.S. streets.

From Maine to California, law enforcement authorities report a rising rate
of overdoses from a dangerously potent and cheap form of heroin. Although
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.

Unlike coca, the plant used to make cocaine, opium poppies can be grown
high in cloud-shrouded mountains and in ever smaller and scattered plots,
experts and U.S. authorities say. When crop-dusters arrive with
plant-killing sprays, officials said, traffickers often open fire on them.
Opium traffickers in Mexico have shot down three army helicopters this year.

Here in rugged southern Colombia, a 1-acre plot belongs to Fernay Lugo,
rail-thin and agile, who slices open the pods of his blossoming poppies to
collect the milky gum that will be refined into heroin. He said a few
pounds of the gum sells for the kind of profits his 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 Lugo, 29, the father of two girls.

The number of hard-core heroin users in the United States rose to nearly a
million last year, from 600,000 a decade ago, according to the Drug
Enforcement Administration. A government survey also determined that the
number of 18- to 25-year-olds who had used heroin in the previous month
rose from 26,000 in 2000 to 67,000 in 2001.

This month, officials from the United States, Colombia and Mexico 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 to determine how much of
the drug exists, or how much is winding up in the United States.

Seizures of heroin reported by U.S. customs officials in 2002 totaled 5,598
pounds, up from 3,521 pounds the previous year.