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| Actor's death underscores surging |
| Actor's death underscores surging heroin trade
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 4-February-2014
10:6:31 AM |
| Detectives found dozens of small plastic packages in the West Village apartment where actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died on Sunday. Most were branded, some with purple letters spelling out Ace of Spades, others bearing the mark of an ace of hearts. At least five were empty, and in the trash.
Each package, which sell for as little as $6 on the street, offered a grim window into Hoffman's personal struggle with a resurgent addiction that ultimately, the police said, proved fatal. And the names and logos reflect a fevered underground marketing effort in a city that is awash in cheap heroin.
Heroin seizures in New York state are up 67 percent over the last four years, the Drug Enforcement Administration said. Last year, the agency's New York office seized 144 kilograms of heroin, nearly 20 percent of its seizures across the country, valued at roughly $43 million. One recent raid, in the Bronx last week, netted 33 pounds of heroin and hundreds of thousands of branded bags, some stamped "NFL," a timely nod to the Super Bowl.
From 2010 to 2012, heroin-related overdose deaths increased 84 per cent in New York City to 382, according to the Health Department statistics. Staten Island, where prescription drug addiction has been especially virulent, has the city's highest rate of heroin overdoses, though a connection has not been established.
Bags bearing different stamps turn up in raids of large-scale heroin mills around the city.
They are named for popular celebrities or luxury products, or the very thoroughfares along which the drugs travel: Lady Gaga. Gucci. I-95. They reflect an increasingly young and middle-class clientele, who often move from prescription pills to needles: Twilight. MySpace. And they often indicate little about the quality or purity of the product, which is diluted with baking soda or, in some cases, infant laxatives, officials said.
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