Roosevelt Banister has his hands full. As program director for New Age Services Corp., a methadone provider on Chicago’s West Side, he practically has heroin addicts banging down his door for treatment.
Without methadone, addicts trying to wean themselves off heroin, a derivative of opium, suffer sweating, aching, cramps, and runny noses and eyes. Essentially, they can’t function normally. The synthetic opiate eliminates such symptoms.
In the last year, Banister says the center’s waiting list doubled to about 140 people. And he’s braced for more.
The threat posed by heroin is growing throughout the Chicago region, fueled largely by increased demand and aggressive marketing by dealers and distributors.
But the epidemic is difficult to track. While last year the Chicago Police Department seized more than twice the amount of heroin it had seized the year before, seizure and arrest numbers are driven by enforcement and don’t necessarily quantify the trend. Still, key law enforcement officials agree that a combination of factors shows that the prevalence of heroin in the Chicago area is rising.
“The cocaine has stayed kind of flat or even gone down and the heroin has gone way up,” says Thomas Needham, former chief of staff at the Chicago Police Department. “It’s the arrests, it’s the seizures, it’s the intelligence we get from the [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration], it’s emergency room statistics, it’s information we get from our informants. It’s definitely a problem.”
Police and prosecutors are stepping up efforts to fight the spread of heroin. And the General Assembly is moving legislation to elevate sanctions for distributing the drug. For years, penalties for heroin lagged behind those for cocaine, which gained more attention, and prosecutors believe that discrepancy created an incentive for drug dealers to push heroin.
Cocaine usage still poses a serious threat in the Chicago area. Indeed, some in the law enforcement commu-nity say crack, a form of cocaine that’s smoked, is the single largest drug threat facing the city. And the Chicago area leads the nation in cocaine-related emergency room visits per capita, according to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, an agency based at the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
But cocaine usage in the Chicago region has remained relatively stable and perhaps even subsided. There may be consistently more emergency room visits related to cocaine, according to the agency, but these visits increased only 16 percent from 6,954 in the last half of 1996 to 8,063 in the first half of last year. (The agency cautions that last year’s statistics are not yet final.)
Heroin usage, on the other hand, has grown dramatically in recent years. According to the agency, the Chicago area’s heroin-related emergency room visits increased 65 percent from 3,649 in the last half of 1996 to 6,011 in the first half of 2001. The most dramatic jump occurred between the last half of 1999 (4,988 visits) and the first half of 2000 (6,109 visits).
The agency ranks Chicago No. 3 in the nation for heroin-related visits per capita, behind Newark, N.J., and Baltimore.
“People got burned out on coke in the 1980s, although to some degree rock cocaine is still probably the most used hard drug in Chicago,” says Lawrence Ouellet, director of the Community Outreach Intervention Projects at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Public Health. “Heroin just became a good deal. You could get high without much money.”
As with arrest or seizure statistics, emergency room visits aren’t the def-initive measure of the growing heroin threat. One law enforcement official says that heroin-related visits may be up because the higher-purity heroin available now in Chicago is causing more users to overdose. In the 1980s, heroin averaged about 3 percent pure; since the mid-1990s, it’s averaged 25 percent pure. Most law enforcement officials, however, agree the statistics do in fact show that more people in the Chicago area are using heroin.
And that fuels associated problems. For one, the drug trade breeds violence. Street gangs battle each other for control of territory in which to retail their drugs — another challenge for law enforcement officials and communities. Last year, Chicago experienced 666 murders, surpassing New York City as the homicide capital of the nation. Needham, who left the police department in January for a private law practice, says one-third to one-half of those deaths were attributable to gang- and drug-related violence.
“Our murder numbers have gone steadily but slowly down through the 1990s, but our gang- and narcotic-related murders have not gone down that much,” he says. “There’s this almost intractable problem of street gang members killing each other, killing their rivals, that just seems to be almost impervious to a law enforcement solution. They’re the toughest cases to prevent and they’re the toughest cases to solve.”
There are two major components behind the surge of heroin: supply and demand.
And there’s plenty of supply in Chicago as the city is one of the nation’s three major distribution centers for heroin. Traffickers distribute heroin from Chicago throughout Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, Missouri and Wisconsin, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center.
Pat O’Dea, an intelligence supervisor at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s field office in Chicago, says it’s the only major city getting heroin from all four of the world’s major source areas. Most of Chicago’s heroin comes from South America, primarily Colombia, but producers in Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia also contribute a substantial portion. To a lesser extent, producers in Mexico contribute.
O’Dea says that makes Chicago’s heroin market harder to crack as the Drug Enforcement Administration must simultaneously run parallel investigations on several continents. In addition, having multiple production and distribution networks helps stabilize the city’s market. “Any time you get more sources of supply and more competition, you’re going to have lower prices, increased profits, higher-purity stuff hitting the streets and wider availability,” he says.
The region’s heroin market is concentrated in and around the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side, where drug dealers linger along streets selling their products to motorists and passersby. Police routinely arrest these dealers in their efforts to crush the trade, but the narcotics market in that neighborhood is so saturated that replacement dealers quickly step in.
They have plenty of customers. William O’Brien, chief of narcotics prosecutions at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, told the Illinois House Judiciary Committee on Criminal Law in February that people flock to the West Side from Cook County, surrounding counties and even Indiana.
The committee voted unanimously in favor of legislation that would make possession of one gram of heroin a Class 1 felony punishable by four to 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. The bill also would preclude someone convicted of manufacturing or delivering more than five grams of heroin from receiving a sentence of probation.
“By putting the heroin penalties in line with cocaine and ecstasy, we are removing the technical advantage that the dealers have had for a period of time,” O’Brien told the committee. Rep. Calvin Giles, a Democrat who represents Austin, is sponsoring the bill. As of mid-March, it was pending before the House.
There are additional dynamics to supply and demand. Perhaps most alarming, a fresh generation of heroin users is evolving.
Banister, of the West Side methadone center, says his patients are getting younger. He also says the percentages of Caucasian and Hispanic patients have grown in the three and one-half years since the center moved to its current location near Cicero.
“With the youngsters, it’s supposed to be in vogue now to use heroin,” Banister says. “Some of the rock stars in the papers use heroin. The kids now don’t think it’s a big deal, but usually when they become addicted we see them.”
The high-purity heroin that’s been available in Chicago for about the last decade can be snorted rather than injected. That option helps make the drug attractive to users wary of contracting HIV or other stigmas associated with intravenous drug use. Still, Ouellet, the UIC program director, and other experts say many new heroin users ultimately turn to injection in their pursuit of a more intense high.
“Snorting is how people get started and that may well be one of the reasons for this latest epidemic,” says Susan Weed, director of the Office of Substance Abuse Policy at the Chicago Department of Public Health. “They start by mixing with cocaine, which is called speedballing. And then they go to heroin and eventually nearly all of them turn to the needle.”
Ouellet says that, based on research he’s conducted and collected, whites, in the city and the suburbs, are most likely among young heroin users to start injecting. African Americans are least likely to begin injecting, and Hispanics fall somewhere between.
A short drive down the Eisenhower Expressway from Chicago’s West Side open-air markets is DuPage County. Three years ago, officials there recognized that teenagers and young adults were increasingly driving into the city to buy heroin. Then they were coming back to the suburbs to get high.
The DuPage County state’s attorney’s office convened a meeting with local and regional law enforcement officials to discuss the situation. Joseph Ruggiero, chief of narcotics prosecutions at the office, won’t discuss specific investigative strategies formulated at that meeting, but he insists that subsequent law enforcement efforts have kept the county’s heroin threat in check. Still, he acknowledges the threat continues to grow, saying there’s more heroin and more heroin-related deaths.
“They do it like a beer run,” he says. “Back in my day someone would get money, go to the liquor store and get beer. Now they collect all their money from their friends and go get heroin, like it’s no big deal.”
Illinois Issues, April 2002
