HEROIN USERS IN EUROPE DON'T SEE PRICE DROP

PARIS, Oct. 23 -- The price of Afghan heroin has dropped, but police
departments across Europe say that is unlikely to affect street prices much
and has not done so to date.

British police intelligence sources said the price at the Afghanistan-
Pakistan border had dropped since Sept. 11 to $200 a kilogram, or 2.2
pounds, from $400. Europe gets the bulk of its heroin from Afghanistan
while American dealers buy from Colombia, Mexico and Southeast Asia as well.

A spokesman for the British National Criminal Intelligence Service noted
that the border price for heroin was $100 a kilo until July 2000 when the
Taliban banned the cultivation of opium poppies. The price then shot up to
$400.

Heroin base takes a year to 18 months to work its way through the middlemen
and laboratories where it is purified and then diluted, packaged in small
doses and sold by street dealers. Even then there is little sign that a
change in base price has much affect on street sales.

The wholesale price in England is $15,000 to $20,000 a kilogram, "so the
base price isn't that big a component," the British police representative
said. "It's the Turkish gangs who control the supply routes that affect the
price most."

As long as there is no competition, he said, the traffickers are more
likely to rachet the price up.

Michel Bouchet, head of the French Interior Ministry's antidrug squad,
predicted "a measurable fall, but not an important one" in the price of
heroin in France as a result of the fighting in Afghanistan. Both the
Taliban and their opponents in the Northern Alliance are assumed to be
selling off stockpiles to raise cash for guns, he said. Neither he nor any
other European police official could confirm those reports.

The price of a gram of heroin in France is $28 to $42, he said, and has
been stable for two or three years. A kilogram is about $11,000.

In Britain, heroin is about $100 a gram on the street, down only 20 percent
or so from its $120 price in 1993, when the national record-keeping began.
Yet during that period, wholesale prices per kilo fell by more than half,
to $20,000 or less from $40,000 or more. The police assume that the rapid
expansion of the Afghan opium crops from 1997 to 2000 cut the wholesale
price, but street dealers gouged their customers by not passing on the
reduction.

A spokesman for the Berlin police declined to give prices for heroin there,
but said there had been "no change in the last few weeks and no change in
the amount of drugs on the market."

In the Netherlands, the price of a gram has remained steady at $75, said
Rob van der Veen, an Amsterdam police spokesman. "There are no rumors that
the price is affected by what's happening in Afghanistan," he said. "It's
like oil -- it takes a while for the price to change."

In Sweden, which has more drug users than other Scandinavian countries, the
price of a gram has remained steady at $80 since the 1980's, said Lars
Bjurlinj of the National Criminal Intelligence Service. He denied published
reports that it had been $120 a gram and had dropped to $50 recently.

Sweden's biggest worry, he said, is the opening of a new supply route full
of higher-potency white heroin. In the past, most of Sweden's heroin came
from Afghanistan via Iran or Turkey, the Balkans and northern Europe, and
it arrived as lower-potency brown heroin base, which is more commonly
smoked. Now a second route, from Afghanistan and nearby states through
Russia and the Baltic countries, is delivering more of the refined white
heroin hydrochloride, which can be injected.

"There are lots of hidden stocks in Afghanistan, and intelligence says
they're moving it," Mr. Bjurlinj said. "But we don't see any effect here yet."

In Spain, neither Madrid nor Barcelona have seen changes in price or
availability since Sept. 11, said Javier Hernandez, a spokesman for the
National Drug Plan. He believes that the amount of heroin consumed in Spain
has dropped by half in the last five years thanks to methadone and other
treatments, but said street prices of about $58 a gram had remained steady.