Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 5, 1994 TAG: 9404050160
SECTION: NATIONAL/INT PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Short
``In the past five years, there has been a steady increase in the flow and purity of heroin to the U.S., suggesting that the taste for the drug is growing,'' the State Department report said.
It said this was a logical consequence of more than a decade of cocaine abuse because it is normal for a depressant drug such as heroin to succeed a stimulant such as cocaine.
The implications are serious, the report said, because heroin can hold its prey for decades while the staying power of cocaine usually is limited to five years.
Economics also are contributing to the revival of heroin.
``While at U.S. street prices, cocaine and heroin are competitive, at the wholesale level heroin has a strong advantage,'' the report said.
``With the likelihood that heroin will be to the 1990s what cocaine was to the 1980s, Latin American trafficking organizations are poised to cash in on a heroin epidemic,'' the report said.
Colombia was cited as a country where cocaine traffickers are diversifying into opium and heroin. Incipient poppy cultivation also is under way in Peru and Ecuador.
It added that heroin brokers in Southeast and Southwest Asia collaborate with Nigerian drug enterprises to emulate the marketing success of the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels.
by CNB