Emilio Chavez Garcia was 50 when he called his estranged wife in Puerto Rico on Christmas Eve to say he wanted to come home.
Maybe this time, she hoped, he would finally kick the heroin addiction that had ruined their family.
Rafael Diaz was 36 and had dreams too. Two months from getting off parole for peddling heroin, he carried a pledge in his day planner: “If I do not build a case against myself, all goals will be accomplished.”
Within 10 minutes of each other on Jan. 7–with the syringes next to their bodies–the Chicago men became two exhibits of what authorities say is one of America’s largest, most diverse and resilient heroin markets.
Their overdoses on heroin, thought to be so pure it was fatal, touched off a massive police search in Humboldt Park to find the lethal supply. Less than eight hours later, Angel Pantoja, 64, and Adrian Ramos, 45, were arrested after an undercover buy in front of a nail salon on North Avenue.
Chicago’s heroin trafficking long has been overshadowed by the more popular and violent cocaine trade. But it has enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade, investigators said, and is more dangerous today because the drug’s purity increased dramatically in the late 1990s.
For five consecutive years, the Chicago metropolitan area has led the nation in heroin-related emergency room visits–13,000 in 2002, an increase of 176 percent since 1995, according to the latest federal statistics available.
During the last two years, the Cook County medical examiner logged 628 deaths–six a week–from heroin and other opiate-related drug abuse. A quarter of the men booked on criminal charges in Cook County test positive for opiates.
As a transportation hub, Chicago also is the only city in the United States with a steady supply of heroin from all four global sources: Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, Mexico and South America, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
“The street gangs each have multiple sources of supply. All roads lead to Chicago,” said Patrick O’Dea, a DEA intelligence supervisor in Chicago.
That bountiful supply means street gangs can pay half as much or less per kilogram than they did in the late 1980s–for purer heroin. In the city’s open-air drug markets, the traditional $10 “dime bag” is as much as 10 times more potent than it was 20 years ago.
“From a heroin consumer’s point of view, it’s as good as it’s ever been,” said Dr. Westley Clark, director of the federal Center for Substance Abuse Treatment in Washington, D.C. “It’s a recipe for calamity.”
Police say the drug the two men used was lethally pure.
Wholesale purity reaches 80 percent to 90 percent, but dealers “cut” the heroin with other substances, leaving an average of 20 percent purity.
The deaths of longtime needle users such as Garcia and Diaz hark back to the 1960s and 1970s, when heroin mainly was the dominion of inner-city junkies.
Today’s users are more likely to be suburban teens or professionals.
They start by snorting the drug but can quickly become as addicted as needle users, authorities said.
“The cautionary tale is, your risks go up the farther down the road you go,” Clark said.
