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Heroin, an Old Nemesis, Makes an Encore
Gloria Clay, one of the luckier regulars of the San Francisco Tenderloin, is in a detoxification program and says she is on her way to kicking a heroin habit she picked up two years ago.
At 5 a.m. in San Francisco's seedy Tenderloin area, the drug addicts are just about the only ones out.
A young woman with matted blond hair stumbles down the street with her eyes closed; a man in a red spandex dress and silver pumps nods out against the door of a single-room- occupancy hotel; small clusters of hollow-eyed men and women hover on corners. It is no wonder the police call this strip of the Tenderloin the heroin corridor. Everyone on the street looks either high or hung over.
Later in the day, Matt Dodman, a blond, angelic-looking 26-year-old, is sitting in a cafe in another, hipper neighborhood, the Mission. A heroin user for three years, he avoids the Tenderloin drug scene. "I'm not part of a hard- core drug clique," he said, taking a sip of mineral water. But down the block, a dozen of his friends and acquaintances - all heroin addicts in their teens and 20's, and all disheveled and homeless, as he is - sit on the sidewalk outside a community center and wait to be tested for hepatitis C. More than half will test positive, as do the larger population of San Francisco heroin users who have been taking the drug at least five years.
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Heroin was supposed to be over, yesterday's drug. But almost 20 years after AIDS made injecting it deadlier than it had ever been, it is as common in some neighborhoods here as Starbucks.
A draw for drug experimenters since the heyday of Haight-Ashbury, the city remains a place where "old" heroin addicts - those who have been using the narcotic for 20 or 25 years - feed their habit.
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But more and more young people as well are using it.
And not just here. Hospitals and treatment centers in other large cities, especially in the West, are seeing record numbers of heroin cases.
Chicago officials attribute a surge in life- threatening cases of asthma to increased use of heroin among the young.
And while H.I.V... |
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