LATIN AMERICA SUPPLYING HEROIN

Former Coca Growers Now Cultivate Poppies

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 U.S.-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 at least 80 percent of the
heroin that reaches U.S. 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. 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 U.S. 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
- -- most comes from places like Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar) and Pakistan --
but the vast majority reaching U.S. users, the authorities say.

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

The shift, experts and U.S. authorities fear, could present a new challenge
to aggressive U.S.-financed efforts to fight the illegal drug trade with
aerial plant-killing sprays. 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 can be 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 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 will be 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 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.

Though farms in the area, including Lugo's, have been hit by crop-dusters
in the past, he seemed to show little concern.

The skies are rarely clear over southern Tolima, where the cloud cover is
often so heavy that fumigation planes cannot come in. Farmers also disperse
their poppy crops, Lugo said, to make them more difficult 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 government 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
mature opium plants, which strike a sharp contrast against the monotonous
drab-green hues of the legal crops that peasants also grow.

Once it is processed into heroin and smuggled into 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, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

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

In Portland, Maine, a city of 64,000, the number of people who died from
overdoses rose to 28 last year, most of them heroin users, police officials
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 low as $15. They were once sold for at least
$35, and sometimes up to $50 in the late 1990s.