Diesel. Dynamite. White Death. They’re new names for an old enemy making a dangerous comeback. While there are no reliable national statistics, local authorities report increases in heroin-related arrests and hospital admissions. In New York City, emergencyroom visits involving heroin were up 34 percent in 1992 and arrests were 16 percent higher. In Seattle, methadone centers are filled for the first time in years. Customs officials say smugglers are thriving because demand is now flourishing.
These statistics may just be a storm warning. Certainly, the conditions are right for a heroin epidemic reminiscent of the 1970s. A worldwide opium glut has pushed heroin prices to a 30-year low; the drug now costs about as much as crack. Today’s heroin is purer–and more insidious. Twenty years ago the typical sample was only 3 to 4 percent pure. Now agents are turning up samples with purity levels as high as 80 percent. The drug is so potent that users can get high by snorting or smoking–eliminating messy, HIV-carrying needles. Now, everyone from street kids to Yuppies “[feels] they’re safe from AIDS, so they generalize to thinking that heroin’s safe,” says Dr. David R. Gastfriend of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
The mellowness of a heroin high is appealing, especially after a decade of crack-induced anxiety. “People are getting tired of the roller-coaster high,” says Ed Fresquez of Cenikor Foundation, a Houston drug-treatment facility. Many of today’s users are too young to remember the strungout junkies of the ’70s, so they don’t see the ugly downside of heroin until it’s too late. The 31-year-old New York screenwriter still has fond memories of her first night. “I was dancing alone in the middle of a cluttered living room with the lights on bright and I couldn’t have been happier,” she recalls. Two years later, her habit is costing her hundreds of dollars a month.
Counselors say drug-education programs concentrate too much on crack, neglecting heroin’s dangers. As a result, the drug has acquired an almost romantic mystique, especially on campus. “If you take someone who likes the movies of Quentin Tarantino, listens to Kurt Cobain and reads William Burroughs, it’s almost automatic he’s tried heroin,” claims a former Bennington College student.
He could take a lesson from Angel, a 20-year-old Chicago street hustler, who must feed his habit several times a day to ward off the “sickness”–waves of pain and nausea as the high wears off. He usually buys at a house on the city’s West Side, where armed gang members watch over desperate junkies waiting for a hit. Angel says the heroin-hungry lines grow longer every day. “I see pregnant ladies snorting,” he says. “There’s people who look like they’re dying of AIDS. I see it eating the younger minds like me.” Heroin may be cheaper and purer in 1993, but it’s just as devastating.
