Death By Design

They look like heroin, they act like heroin, and they satisfy an addict's urge just like the real thing. But when subjected to a chemist's scrutiny, the narcotics that have been flooding California turn out to be something else. They are "designer drugs"--designed, that is, to get around the law.

The drugs are created by underground chemists who tinker with the molecular structure of illegal narcotics to produce variants that are not explicitly banned by federal law. Thus it is legal to make and use designer drugs. But it is by no means safe, as those who toyed with MPTP have learned.

Police in Orange County, Calif., first encountered designer drugs in 1979, when they found two young addicts lying dead near samples of a heroin-like powder. Thirteen more users had died before Forensic Chemist Donald Cooper of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration managed to identify the substance. It was a designer version of the anesthetic fentanyl, which is widely used during prolonged surgery. The variant was many times as powerful as heroin; just a little could be an overdose.

The drug was outlawed in 1981, but another modified fentanyl instantly appeared on the streets; when the second drug was banned, a third popped up. So far, six fentanyllike drugs have appeared, one of them a thousand times the strength of heroin. All told, they have killed at least 90 people.

California authorities believe that 20% of the addicts in the state have used designer dope. And, says Pharmacologist Gary Henderson, an expert on designer drugs at the University of California at Davis, the drugs are now favored by affluent cocaine users as a way of taking the "edges" off coke.

Experts suspect that the designer fentanyls are the work of a single evil genius (who must now be very wealthy; some $2 million worth of drugs can be produced from $200 worth of chemicals). Cooper says that the lab work is so sophisticated that "I just don't think more than one person could be doing it."