Heroin Shooting War

To the Detroit police, the deaths are variations on a theme. Some of the victims have been executed, gangland style, shot either in the head or the back. Some have been kidnapped, tortured and beaten to death. Others died suffocated with pillows or with plastic bags over their heads. All had one thing in common: an affiliation with heroin.

The horrors of addiction have hit Detroit, once relatively heroin-free, with a force beyond the usual tragic toll of broken lives and deaths by overdose. Since last August, there has raged an all-out war for control of the booming $350 million drug market. So far this year, it has claimed 40 lives, an average of one every four days. The dead: penny-ante pushers and some major dealers grabbing for a larger piece of the action and killed by their peers.

The city today has an estimated 20,000 addicts, most of them black, many of them concentrated along either Mack Avenue or Twelfth Street on opposite sides of the city. At one time, three loosely knit gangs regulated the distribution of Detroit's limited drug trade. But as the number of black users increased, along with the number of street pushers, organization began to break down. The gangs still control the flow of heroin into the city, but once it is cut, it is every man for himself.

Tip Overs. What has evolved, and is at the root of the drug war, is a system of distribution unique to Detroit. Heroin is peddled not on the street but from countless rundown apartments known in the drug trade as "quarter houses" and "shooting galleries." Quarter houses act as warehouses, where "caps" or bags are sold to owners of shooting galleries, of which some 2,000 are thought to exist. Along Mack Avenue there are 25 to 30 in one block. Drugs bought in galleries must be used on the premises so that the seller knows the buyer is not an undercover cop.

All that is needed to go into business is an apartment and an ounce of heroin (average price: $800), easily purchased at a quarter house. The pusher then sells part and gives the rest away to addicts in return for their bringing in customers. As the number of customers increases, the purity of the heroin is decreased, leading to bigger volume and bigger profits for the dealer. In less than a year, a diligent pusher with a $100-a-week business can be netting $10,000 a week. What started the killings in Detroit was a surfeit of aspirants for $10,000-a-week businesses.

Detroit police are at an impasse. Until November of last year, they did little more than harass heroin dealers. Standard procedure for closing down a dope house then was called a "tip over": acting on tips, the police would raid a house without a warrant, demanding entry in hopes of scaring the pusher into flushing the dope down the toilet or tossing it out the window. Many arrests resulted--9,143 in 1970--but only 1,500 ever reached trial.

In November, newly appointed Police Commissioner John Nichols changed tactics. The 75-man narcotics unit was supplemented by an additional 75 undercover agents, and the police began gathering information that would stand up in court. Statistically, the new approach has been a success. Since November, more than 300 quarter houses and shooting galleries have been closed, and 1,600 arrests have resulted in 1,432 cases brought to trial. Still, as Sergeant Sam Campbell, chief of the Fifth Precinct's narcotics squad, admits: "We haven't begun to control heroin."

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