As heroin makes a comeback, a different, easier-to-use form of the drug and a younger breed of user may be fueling violent crime in the area Violent crimes on N.O. streets driven by heroin

07/11/02 by Michelle Krupa
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune
 

The first time Terrence got caught breaking the law to feed his heroin habit, he was 18 and had been snorting the drug for two years. Even though the victim identified Terrence as the man who broke into his apartment and robbed him, prosecutors dismissed the charges.

Two months later, police caught Terrence selling drugs at the C.J. Peete public housing development. He ran, but police followed and recovered the 20 doses of heroin he tossed from his pocket. Terrence was charged with drug possession with intent to distribute, a crime carrying a mandatory life sentence when Terrence was charged in 2000. He was convicted of a lesser drug charge and sentenced to four years in jail.

Terrence, whose good behavior got him an early parole in January, said he rarely worried about the law when he stole or sold drugs. His main concern was avoiding the pain of heroin withdrawal -- the spasms in his lower back, the shooting pain in the back of his eyes, the stomachaches that made eating torture.

"I didn't want to get sick," Terrence, now 21, said last month. "You're scared to stop, but you can't stop, and if I don't care about you and I'm in a time of need, I'm going to get you."

Around the New Orleans area, more heroin dealers and addicts are turning to violent crime to support their habit. Police, social service workers and users themselves say that although cocaine and marijuana remain the local drugs of choice, heroin is making a comeback, especially with young people, and it is leaving a trail of bullets and blood in its wake.

Use tied to murders

Research suggests that since the mid-1990s, the number of local heroin users in New Orleans has doubled. What's more, murders in New Orleans that police think were motivated by illegal drugs, most notably crack cocaine and heroin, grew from 19 percent in 1998 to 37 percent in 2001, according to statistics provided by homicide detectives. Since 2000, the number of people in Orleans Parish jail who had heroin in their systems has increased steadily. In fact, only Chicago reported a higher percentage of inmates with heroin in their system at the time of arrest, according to a federally-financed survey of 27 cities.

New Orleans Police Lt. James Keen, a homicide unit commander, said it has become clear in the past year that heroin is responsible for a growing number of murders and armed robberies in the city.

"From arrests we make on the street, we can see we're getting more related to heroin," Keen said. "It wasn't like this when I came on the force in ‘75. Then, heroin was just phasing out, but now it's coming back."

Experts say the reasons for the drug's popularity in New Orleans are varied. One of the most common explanations is the arrival of a powdery heroin that is less scary to novice users, because they can snort it or smoke it and avoid the risks associated with needles. Also, heroin is an easily obtained substitute for popular OxyContin, a highly addictive prescription drug that gives users the same kind of high as heroin but can be hard to get.

Today's heroin users are in their teens and 20s, much younger than their 1970s counterparts and much more naive about the drug's dangers, experts say. They're likely to have rap sheets that include violent crimes. They sometimes use heroin to provide a sedative balance to the effect of stimulants such as cocaine.

"The new users are sort of a new breed," said Joseph Haddock, who researches drug use in Louisiana for the National Drug Intelligence Center. "While in the past, a heroin user would burglarize a car, burglarize a home or shoplift to feed their habit, many of these new users are resorting to armed robbery or worse."

The violence has several roots. One is competition for territory, especially among dealers who peddled at the St. Thomas and Desire public housing complexes and have been battling for new markets since those housing developments were demolished last year.

Another source of violence is the one that impelled Terrence: fear of the intense physical pain associated with heroin withdrawal, said James B. Arey, clinical supervisor of the New Orleans Police Department's Mobile Crisis Unit.

"Heroin doesn't make people violent, but there is this fear of withdrawal," Arey said. "It is so bad that if you're young and impulsive and you don't like pain -- and we all know how hysterical young boys can get about pain -- then they go out and rob and steal and get violent so they don't have to stop using the heroin."

Growing problem

The growth of violence is fed by more widespread use of heroin in New Orleans, where the drug's popularity has built gradually during the past decade, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which tracks the drug's prevalence in hospital emergency rooms.

In the last four years for which complete data are available, the number of patients visiting local emergency rooms who tested positive for heroin or mentioned that they had used it more than doubled, from 422 in 1997 to 982 in 2000.

Although most users are low-income, the drug is gaining favor with adults in suburban south Louisiana, Haddock said. Some use heroin as a substitute for other opiates, such as the painkiller OxyContin, when they aren't available.

Local jailers noted a rise in heroin use among suspects arrested for violent crimes in 2000 and 2001, though its use by that population was still dwarfed by marijuana and cocaine.

In the first quarter of this year, opiates showed up in the urine of more than 20 percent of the 169 adults screened through a federally financed program by Orleans Parish deputies, reports showed. Although the drug category also includes morphine and prescription painkillers, authorities suspected heroin in most cases, said Michael Geerken, chief administrative officer for the sheriff's department.

The numbers were up from last year, when roughly 15 percent of people arrested tested positive for opiates, reports showed.

Of the 27 cities that gathered information through the federally financed screening program in the first quarter of this year, New Orleans ranked second, behind Chicago, for the highest rate of opiate use among people arrested, records showed.

Help hard to find

Officials at local hospitals and halfway houses also have seen an increase in heroin use. Rhonda Green, a registered nurse who runs Charity Hospital's voluntary acute medical detoxification unit, said 85 percent of her clients are addicted to heroin, up from about 40 percent in January 2000, when she set up one of Louisiana's two detox clinics.

Green's patients -- most of whom are poor and uninsured -- must get a referral from the state's Center for Addictive Disorders before starting a seven-day treatment that cleanses them of narcotics. The typical backlog of three days means that usually 20 to 30 people who want to get off drugs are waiting for a bed, the center's director said.

In that time, users are likely to continue committing crimes to feed their habit and might change their minds about showing up for treatment, Green said. Even after they've completed the program, she said, the dearth of free or low-cost rehabilitation centers in the region means many former addicts will go back to drugs.

"After they leave, they come back in here and say, ‘Miss Rhonda, I tried, but I live in the projects, and they was waiting for me when I got home,' " Green said. "A lot of times, the first bag of heroin will be free so they get hooked again. Then they're right back where they started with me."

Former New Orleans Police Chief Richard Pennington said the lack of longer-term rehabilitation programs for heroin and crack cocaine addicts contributes to a cycle of violence that puts the public at risk.

"We found out that we were arresting the same people over and over again," Pennington said. "It's easy to catch them, because if they don't get any help, they go back to the same places and steal and rob. . . . But I don't think that's the answer: to continue to arrest them over and over again. That drives your violence, that drives your murder rate up. They need help, but there are not enough drug treatment programs."

Kimberly Crowley, who coordinates social detoxification programs at Responsibility House in Jefferson Parish, said she usually has eight to 15 people waiting a week to 10 days to get into the organization's residential program. Crowley said about half her clients have legal problems and many are on parole after serving time for violent crimes or thefts connected to their heroin use.

"When I started doing counseling in ‘98, I only saw one person who was using heroin the whole first year," Crowley said. "Now, I would say 70 percent are using heroin."

Even for abusers who ardently wish to quit, the drug is a demon that never again fulfills the promise of that first blissful high and yet won't let them stop trying to duplicate it. Users say it tempts them to pick up guns and steal jewelry from their families, stereo equipment from electronic stores and thick slabs of steak from groceries to sell on the street for another hit. And it's always out there, waiting, when they leave jail or rehab.

For Terrence, it was Feb. 28, 2002 -- almost two years after he had last snorted heroin and exactly 42 days after he got out of jail early for good behavior -- when he bought another bag of the potent white powder and got high.

He did it to escape feelings he can't control or even explain. But after four months, he wanted to be clean again. During the last week of June, he checked himself into Charity Hospital's detox unit.

Sitting at a table in the unit's group meeting room on the fourth day of his regimen, he reflected on his battle with heroin.

"When you're on a train -- the train of addiction -- you never know where it's going to stop," he said. "Your stop might be death. Your stop might be life in jail. I don't want that. I'm going to stay off."

Even with medical detox and a family to support him at home, Terrence worried that he might make the same mistakes he has before and not concentrate on things that keep his mind off heroin: getting a job, making himself worthy of his girlfriend.

He worried about what heroin might lead him to do in the future.

"It's still out there doing push-ups," Terrence said. "And as soon as you walk out of here, it's going to be there, stronger."

Michelle Krupa can be reached at mkrupa@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3365.

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