A New and Deadly Menace

Horse of a different color is for sale on East Coast streets

At a small party on Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side, the hostess sets two small trays before her guests. One contains the familiar white lines of cocaine, ready for snorting through rolled-up dollar bills or tiny straws. The other tray also holds lines of fluffy white powder, but they contain something new: a potent form of heroin that has begun flooding the illegal drug markets of New York and other Eastern cities.

The new heroin is cheaper (about $50 to $70 for 20 grains) and stronger (up to 20% pure) than the brown Mexican heroin that it is rapidly replacing at street-corner markets. While cocaine, which comes primarily from South American coca leaves, gives the user an instant rush that lasts from three to six hours, the effects of heroin, a morphine derivative, are stronger and last for up to ten hours. Last week Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau warned a conference of the National Association of Citizens Crime Commissions that because the new heroin is so easily available, the East Coast is "in the early stages of a massive crisis" of addiction.

The influx of white heroin is perverse testimony to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's success in persuading Turkey and Mexico to crack down on their illicit poppy growers. Succeed it has, and so the drug suppliers have turned to the Golden Crescent of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where government control is too weak to keep the poppy fields from blooming. U.S. narcotics officials estimate that the Golden Crescent is producing about 1,600 tons of opium a year, nine times the output of the rest of the world. Says DEA Chief Peter Bensinger: "It dwarfs anything we have known before."

The drug pipeline from the Golden Crescent has few leaks. Raw opium is converted in makeshift laboratories near the fields into a more compact morphine base that is smuggled aboard freighters in Syria or Lebanon for shipment to Mediterranean ports, mainly in Sicily. There it is converted into heroin in secret laboratories controlled by Mafia dons with close family and business ties to their counterparts in the U.S. Almost all of Sicily's heroin--as much as three tons a year--is infiltrated into the U.S. by couriers on ostensibly legitimate flights, usually from Palermo to New York's Kennedy Airport, a route that police have dubbed the "Godfather Line." The profits follow the same flight plan back to Sicily. Police at a Palermo airport once seized two suitcases containing $497,000 in crisp U.S. bills before they could be delivered to a mysterious trafficker known to authorities only as a "tall man with red hair speaking with a Milanese accent." On another occasion, police stopped a local gangster as he was attempting to cash two certified checks that were issued by a Brooklyn bank and totaled more than $300,000.

Heroin from Sicily frequently takes only 48 hours to reach street-corner markets in New York. According to Morgenthau, the potent new drug has caused heroin-related deaths in the city to increase from 246 in 1978 to a projected 600 this year; arrests for heroin possession and trafficking are running 85% ahead of 1978. Moreover, said Morgenthau, "the free availability of heroin is increasing the number of addicts." New York is ill equipped to combat the problem. Because of budget cuts, the city has only 325 narcotics investigators, compared with about 700 in 1974.

Most of the addicts are, as in the past, young and poor slum dwellers. Increasingly, however, heroin is proving upwardly mobile and fashionable. Says John Randell, director of a heroin detoxification program in Los Angeles' Century City: "Cocaine dispelled all the phobias about playing with narcotics, so it became acceptable to experiment with heroin." Most of the experimenters snort the drug or heat it and inhale the vapor, in the mistaken belief that they will not run the same risk of addiction as they would if they injected heroin. According to experts, frequent consumption in any form may lead to addiction. Still, says a $30,000-a-year clothes designer in New York: "You can't get hooked on it if you do it just once in a while. I used to spend $100 a week on coke; the high from heroin is even better for less money."

Because U.S. narcotics officials can do nothing to eradicate the poppy fields of the Golden Crescent, they have fallen back on what Bensinger calls the "second line of defense"--the refineries. Bensinger and his colleages have found European law-enforcement authorities eager to cooperate, for heroin is no longer the "American disease"; both Italy and West Germany have particularly serious problems. West Germany, which has about a fourth of the population of the U.S., had more than 600 heroin-related deaths last year, while the U.S. had 594. In the past eleven months, international law enforcement authorities have seized six laboratories in northern Italy, including two that were operating in a castle near Milan.

In a drab villa in Trabia, a seaside resort 19 miles from Palermo, Sicilian police uncovered a virtual gold mine: the largest heroin laboratory yet found in Western Europe. Police estimated that the lab could produce up to 50 kg of heroin a day, worth $7.5 million on the New York wholesale market. The officers also arrested two French chemists, both veterans of the defunct Marseilles laboratories that once were a link in the famed French connection, and the lab's alleged boss, a suspected Mafioso, who was wearing a wig. As it was pulled off, he announced, "Eccomi qui" (Here I am), and then defiantly refused to say another word. Bensinger believes that such raids are at least helping to stem the flow of heroin to the U.S. Said he: "It still is a major problem--more addicts, a drain on society. But the level of increase could have been far worse."

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