HEROIN'S NEW IMAGE HOOKS TEENAGERS
Dealers' techniques have had alarming success, reports Richard Ford
Drug-pushers have changed the image of heroin ... successfully that its use has reached epidemic ... in many British towns and cities, a government report said yesterday. Even teenagers from affluent middle-class families are ... a drug that their counterparts would have dismissed 15 years ago as only for older junkies. The ... of the drug-dealers are teenagers who regularly take «recreational» drugs such as cannabis and Ecstasy.
Children ... young as 14 are smoking and injecting heroin, many of them unaware that it is addictive. In some areas, children as ... as 10 had taken the Class-A drug.
The drug-... also use mobile phones to deliver the drug to users' homes or to a car park or pub.Most heroin users were socially excluded and lived in disadvantaged districts,but they also included some affluent and middle-class people who frequently indulged in "recreational” drugs..
It is the success of dealers in changing the image of heroin over the past 15 years ... is the most remarkable finding of the study. In the 1960s and 1970s, heroin ... were people in their twenties, seen as pursuing a hippy way of life; but in the 1980s they were viewed as social inadequates.
These days, in an attempt to change its bad ..., dealers are selling heroin as a powder that can be smoked, like cannabis, at a cost of about &10 a bag, much the ... as the price of Ecstasy tablet. "The message, of course, is that heroin is apparently ... more expensive and little different from other 'recreational' illicit drugs,” the Home Office study, New Heroin Outbreaks Amongst Young People in England and Wales, said.
"The heroin outbreaks spreading across Britain are Britain are primarily a product of purposeful supplying and marketing. The ... to all of this had been the strong, sustained availability of pure, inexpensive heroin primarily from southwest Asia.”
Keys:1) so 2) proportions 3) using 4) target 5) as 6) young 7) dealers 8) that 9) users 10) image 11) same 12) precursor
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