Pubdate: Sun,  6 Aug 2000
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2000 The Dallas Morning News
Contact:  P.O. Box 655237, Dallas, Texas 75265
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Author: Tracey Eaton

A GROWING SUPPLY

DEA Paints bleak picture of fight against mexican heroin trade

MEXICO CITY - Call it what you want - smack, horse, white lady, junk, joy
powder. Heroin means money by any name, and Mexican traffickers who peddle
it are suddenly flush.

All they have to do is spirit the drugs to the Southwest border and after
that, it's usually pay dirt. That's because they're almost never caught,
according to a confidential Drug Enforcement Administration report.

The 15-page report, called "The Mexican Heroin Trade," paints one of the
darkest pictures yet on how the crooks are winning the drug war. Mexican
traffickers, it says, smuggled as much as 6.6 tons of heroin into the United
States in 1998, the most recent year studied. But American agents at the
border and up to 150 miles inland seized only 275 pounds - 2 percent of
Mexico's estimated heroin yield.

Federal police in Mexico didn't do any better that year, hauling in just 268
pounds, figures from the Mexico attorney general's office show.

Another troubling development, the January report says, is that Mexican
growers have reportedly developed monster, 5-foot-tall poppy plants, almost2
feet taller than average. And these hybrids don't have the usual single
bud - from which the drug is extracted - but a whopping 10 to 30.

Also, for the first time, Mexican suppliers are working with Colombian lab
specialists to make potent white heroin, a shift from their trademark black
tar variety. That, some agents fear, could lead to a new rash of heroin
overdoses like the ones that have ravaged Plano and parts of Tarrant County.

Nationally, the purity of black tar - which is black or brown and often
sticky like roofing tar - has averaged 30 percent over the last three years,
the DEA says. White heroin from Colombia can be up to 98 percent pure.

"It's scary. If the Mexicans are going to start producing white heroin and
they distribute it with the efficiency that they have cocaine and
methamphetamines, we're going to have a serious problem," said James
McGivney, a former DEA special agent and current deputy director of DARE
America, a national drug prevention organization.

Texas connection

Texas is especially vulnerable to the heroin threat, agents said, because
increasing numbers of Mexican smugglers move the drug through El Paso,
Dallas and Houston. And while much of the narcotic is shipped on to Chicago,
New York and other cities, plenty stays behind for Texans to use and abuse.

"Of particular concern is the alarming increase in the number of youth
involved in drug abuse," Francis Seib, acting special agent in charge of the
DEA's Dallas office, told a congressional subcommittee in June. "Adolescents
in the Dallas area are experimenting with - and abusing - awide variety of
drugs."

Fourteen people - most of them teenagers - died of heroin-related overdoses
in Plano in 1996 and 1997, according to the DEA. An additional 25 people
died of heroin overdoses in northeast Tarrant County from August 1996 to
August 1999.

The threat of overdoses continues. "It just isn't getting as much
publicity," said Dianna Muncy, a program manager at the Tarrant Council on
Alcoholism and Drug Abuse.

Heroin use all across the United States soared in the early 1990s. Mexican
traffickers learned they could create new markets simply by flooding an area
with drugs.

Before long, heroin was chic in wealthy suburbs. And much of it was so pure
it didn't need to be injected.

"You could snort it or smoke it, and that made it more attractive to new
users," Mr. McGivney said. "You take away the needle and you eliminate the
aura of being a junkie, at least at first."

American authorities believe there are as many as 980,000 hard-core heroin
addicts in the United States. The average age of first-time users - 27 in
1988 - plunged to 17 in 1997.

In Texas, many young users burn heroin in aluminum foil, then inhale the
fumes, a method known as "chasing the dragon," according to a confidential
February report by the National Drug Intelligence Center, jointly operated
by the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.

"There are also reports of 'shebanging,' a practice in which heroin is
dissolved in water and then either sprayed up the nose using a bottle or
squirted up the nose using a syringe," the 30-page report says.

Heroin's history

Heroin is made from the milky substance found in poppies. Man discovered the
poppy plant at least 6,000 years ago and called it the "joy plant." Heroin
was created in 1874 and made illegal in the early 1900s after doctors found
it was addictive and deadly.

In Mexico, poppies are grown year-round. And they are considered "the only
significant cash crop for most of the population" in such impoverished
states as Guerrero, the DEA says.

Guerrero farmers often plant poppies on steep slopes and in ravines. The
average plot is surprisingly large, about half the size of a football field,
agents said.

Other important states for growing include MichoacC3A1n, Sinaloa and
Durango.

The Herreras - considered the country's premier heroin merchants - are based
in Durango. The clan is thought to be made up of six to 15 families related
by blood or marriage and has operated with little interference since the
1950s.

One brush with the law came in 1987 when police jailed family patriarch
Jaime Herrera Nevarez in Guadalajara.

Another came in October 1997 when Mexican agents swept into a Durango drug
lab located in a municipality "named after the infamous Herrera trafficking
family," the DEA says.

Stunned agents found three Colombian chemists and 371 pounds of opium gum,
used to make heroin. They also arrested an alleged member of the Herrera
family, Leonardo Herrera Corral.

Evidence of an alliance

In October 1998, they seized another Durango lab and found a scrap of paper
explaining the Colombian heroin-making process, further evidence of a
Mexico-Colombia alliance.

The South Americans' cooperation probably carries a price, according to the
winter 1999 issue of Connections, published by the San Diego/Imperial County
Regional Narcotic Information Network. "Mexican drug lords are probably
allowing Colombian smugglers safe passage through Mexico in exchange for
heroin purity manufacturing know-how," it says.

The Mexicans also get something else out of the deal - the prospectof
expanding into "the lucrative, high-purity white heroin market in the
northeastern United States," the DEA says.

White heroin from Colombia goes for up to $75,000 per kilogram, equal to 2.2
pounds. Asian white is even pricier, at up to $120,000 per kilogram.

Black tar is the cheapest, costing as little as $18,000 per kilogram, agents
said. But even at that price, Mexico's heroin trade is a multimillion-dollar
business.

If Mexican gangs smuggled 6.6 tons of heroin into the United States in
1998 - as some analysts estimate - that would fetch $108 million at the
lowest wholesale price.

Mexican authorities said they are doing their best to stop smugglers and run
one of the world's most successful drug-eradication programs.

In 1999, for instance, the Mexican army reported wiping out 12,136 hectares
of poppies, enough to make truckloads of heroin - more than 13 tons - by one
estimate.

Savvy traffickers counter that by overplanting.

They also know a thing or two about getting heroin across the border, hiding
it in some of the most unimaginable places - in condoms that they gulp down,
in car batteries, even in electronically controlled dashboard compartments.

Agents guarding the border said they're having a hard time keeping up,
especially as trade between the United States and Mexico continues to climb
and the number of people entering the country grows by the millions.

Drugs are like "a needle in the haystack," said Dean Boyd, a drug-trade
specialist at the U.S. Customs Service, "and the haystack's getting much
bigger."
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