Federal Authorities See Alarming Trends in Heroin Use, Marketing

Federal drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey warned Friday that heroin use is rising at an alarming rate nationwide and that dealers have found new and increasingly more successful ways to market the drug.

The average street price for heroin is so low and the quality is so high that new users can smoke or inhale it instead of injecting it, McCaffrey said in releasing the latest “Pulse Check”--a quarterly report on drug use compiled by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The report also found that the increased availability and greater purity is aiding heroin’s spread to blue-collar and suburban America. About three-fourths of heroin users inject the drug rather than inhale it, the study said, and this may show that inhalation is a transition phase that switches to injection after a few years.

“We’re seeing people who snorted cocaine during the mid-’80s now using heroin,” said Herbert D. Kleber, medical director for the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University in New York. “Heroin is the kind of drug that always happens after a stimulant epidemic like we had with cocaine.”

Kleber and others said trends in illicit drug use in the United States are cyclical, with drugs going in and out of fashion. After the cocaine-related deaths of a number of athletes, actors and musicians in the 1980s, cocaine use began to decline and heroin replaced it as the drug of choice.

McCaffrey said the survey also underscored the threat of methamphetamine, or speed, which has almost displaced cocaine as the illegal drug of choice in Southern California.

“It’s being called something like ‘the poor man’s cocaine,’ ” he said. “It’s an enormously lethal threat to people’s health and mental stability and their ability to operate machinery. . . . And we have to watch it.”

Most U.S. heroin came from Asia until about 1990, when Colombia began producing it along with cocaine and shipping it through the southern U.S. border. Up to 70% of drug shipments now come through Mexico, officials said.

“The Colombians are getting into heroin to diversify their market, and now they’re having their street-level people handle both cocaine and heroin,” Kleber said. Selling the two different drugs through the same dealer, or “double-breasting,” makes for a powerful marketing combination, he said.