HEROIN IS BACK WITH A VENGEANCE!

Jeffrey Alba's Bronx heroin mills had air circulators because the odor was so strong and there was a white dust fog. The windows were sealed up and lists of orders to be filled were taped to the walls.
The workers used tiny spoons to allot a half a grain of heroin for each glassine envelope - that's nearly 30,000 times for every kilo - working in shifts around the clock.

When authorities raided a fancy Riverdale building over the Fourth of July weekend, they expected to make a good-sized bust.

What they found stunned them - a half-million glassine envelopes of heroin and a drug mill the size of which no one has seen since the days of Leroy (Nicky) Barnes in the 1970s.

The find was a blunt testament to local and federal drug cops' growing concern: Heroin is back, with a vengeance.

The heroin is pure - as much as 90% when imported, and 50% to 60% at street level - and cheap. Snorting a $10 glassine envelope gives the same euphoria as an $80 OxyContin pill.

That has widened its appeal to younger, working-class and middle-class adults with no memory of the drug's havoc on a generation that injected it by needle in the late 1960s and early '70s.

"Everyone starts with the pills in the beginning," said a 22-year-old Suffolk County man in treatment at Phoenix House for a $600-a-day habit.

He started out as a high school dealer, pushing prescription painkillers and then heroin because "all the little rich kids were doing it." He started snorting it when he was 19 because he thought he could easily quit.

Heroin has gained cachet from trendy young users in the city. Downtown artist Dash Snow, whose Polaroids captured sex-and-drug scenes, died last week, apparently of a heroin overdose. He was just 27.

The demand has led to huge amounts of the white powder blanketing the city. Most of it is packaged here for sale in the suburbs, as far away as Boston and even cities near the Canadian border.

Thirty pounds - about 15 kilos - were seized in the Bronx mill, said the city's special narcotics prosecutor, Bridget Brennan. Her office grabbed 270 pounds of heroin in 2008, more than twice the 116 pounds confiscated in 2007.

"Everybody's alarmed," said Brennan.

"There is more heroin throughout New York State, from New York City all the way up to Buffalo," said Chauncey Parker, director of the federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program for New York and New Jersey.

"It is a growing threat ... the purity level is alarmingly high, so people are sniffing it," Parker said.

"There's an increased demand in suburbia, because this is not your heroin of old," said Joseph Evans, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's New York office. "It's intertwined with prescription drugs. People turn to heroin after using OxyContin."