IN SCENIC NORWAY, FEARFUL DEATH SCENE OF ADDICTS

OSLO, Aug. 2 - It is a sunny morning, and the Oslo Fjord dances with
reflections. Festive pennants flutter from a departing North Sea ferry,
bicyclists pedal past the colonnade of the stock exchange building and
sleek trams glide by, filled with downtown workers.

Oslo, capital of oil-rich Norway, is springing to daily life, but there is
little movement from shabby clutches of people who have also become part of
this harborside landscape. They slump in a row by a derelict corrugated tin
warehouse and lie curled up on the surrounding docks. Their bodies are
emaciated, and their faces are as spent and vacant as any that Edvard
Munch, the Norwegian artist of angst, ever painted. Many are asleep, others
nod their heads listlessly.

One young man in black shirt and trousers does not stir. He is the latest
entry in a tabulation this prosperous city takes no satisfaction in
topping: Europe's drug overdose capital.

A report from the Council of Europe's narcotics-monitoring Pompidou Group
says Oslo is first among 42 European cities in seizures and deaths caused
by drugs. Oslo had 115 such deaths last year, down from a peak of 134 in
1998, but still the highest on the Continent. In Norway as a whole, the
toll is rising, with 338 deaths in 2001, up from 75 in 1990.

The figures are starkly at odds with the travel brochure image of Norway as
a land of serene mountains and fjords, and with customary survey results
like a human development report by the United Nations last month that found
it to be first in the world in income, health care, life expectancy and
education.

The overdose findings have caused a debate here that has pitted the
region's traditional notions of clean-living morality against its instincts
for protecting social outcasts.

While politicians dither, addicts by the hundreds openly buy drugs in
Oslo's central plaza and walk the two blocks back to the fjordside shooting
gallery, pull out their tourniquets and needles and get high in public.

"I've overdosed, and all these people have too, many times," said
Christian, 32, a lank-haired blond in white tennis shorts and polo shirt
who said he had been addicted for 19 years. He held a cotton swab to his
ankle where he had just injected himself with his morning hit - the first,
he said, of what could be seven shots to get through the day.

"I come here because these people are my friends, and if I pass out, one of
them will call for help," he said. "What none of us will do is shoot up alone."

As he spoke, a team of ambulance paramedics succeeded in reviving the man
in black. "That guy called them," Christian said, pointing at a man
stretched out on the pavement clutching a cellphone.

The main reason the overdose and death rates are so high here is that
Norwegian addicts inject heroin rather than smoking it, as is common
elsewhere in Europe. Norway's 14,000 heroin users then up the odds even
higher by mixing the drug with alcohol and the nervous system depressant
Rohypnol.

Asked to explain why these dangerous practices caught on here, Norwegians
refer to their particular history of hard drinking and of zealous
temperance movements, which brought a ban on alcohol in the 1920's and have
restricted liquor sales to this day.

A habit emerged during prohibition of drinking the strongest liquor
possible - and lots of it - the moment one got hold of it. Roar Staale
Alstadius, a health worker with the city's overdose team, said the parallel
between the bigger rush from injected heroin and binge drinking could
explain why Norway's heroin users take drugs intravenously.

Norway's first generation of addicts, in a market where the drug was rare
and expensive, also chose the method that produced the biggest hit from the
smallest amount.

Norway compounded the problem by being slow to turn to the heroin
substitute methadone for treatment. "Norwegians believe in self-sufficiency
and independence," Mr. Alstadius said. "The idea was always you had to
fight to get yourself off drugs; you had to work for it, not just trade one
dependency for another."

Some methadone was made available in 1997, but waiting periods have
stretched past two years. Parliament is expected to approve a measure in
October to make methadone available to more than 2,000 people by the end of
this year.

Views about how to counteract addiction vary here, as in most places. Arne
Huuse, the director of the National Criminal Investigation Service, said in
an interview that he would like to put addicts on a northern island until
they are clean. The other end of the spectrum is a group of outspoken
professors at the University of Oslo who want drugs furnished free to
addicts and their use decriminalized.

The official goal remains making Norway drug free, but the government also
tries to reduce the harm to users by providing them with housing, benefits
and clean conditions for taking drugs.

Police cameras monitor the drug trafficking in a tree-lined area of the
Central Station park known as plata (the slab). But though possessing,
using and peddling heroin are all illegal and subject to harsh punishment,
officers are sent in only when scuffles break out or obviously under-age
people appear.

Every night a "needle bus" parks at a downtown intersection to provide
users with antiseptic syringes, and this month a pilot project "injecting
room" opens in a Norwegian church mission blocks from the harbor.

"We are a very rich country," said Kjell Erik Oie, director of health and
welfare for the mission. "We have lots of money and cars, and we change
houses and flats the way some people change shirts. We can't ignore the
poor conditions under which these people live."

The city ambulance service says keeping the drug users to one area helps
protect them. "When the police used to chase them from one place to
another, we couldn't find them as easily, and when we did, it was in places
like schoolyards and playground sandboxes," said Arne Henriksen, director
of emergency medical services.

Morten Mjelve, assistant director general of the city Department of Social
Affairs, said, though, that his office opposed leaving the users in one
known place because it gave young people an easy way to get drugs. "They
all know where plata is; they go there on weekends, and while they don't
get heroin, they get what they call `party packs' - collections of things
like Ecstasy, cannabis, amphetamines, GHB and Rohypnol," the last two
associated in the United States with date rape - "and they become potential
recruits for harder drug taking."

Knut T. Reinaas, leader of the League Against Intoxicants and adviser to
the city government, said he knew addicts who had experienced 20 overdose
seizures but were still shooting up. "Remember," he said, "the crossover
world between life and death is the very place they want to reach."