Nick is now one of the first fatalities believed to be linked to cheese. Cheap, addictive and often deadly, the new drug has spread virulently in the Dallas area. Since 2005, the year of the first confirmed cheese death, an estimated 21 people have died from the drug. Most of them were young, white or Hispanic males. Cheese arrests among students in the Dallas Independent School District jumped from 90 in the 2005-2006 school year to 145 so far in 2006-2007. The drug’s surge in Dallas bucks the national trend in heroin consumption, which declined from 94,000 users age 12 to 17 in 2002 to 60,000 in 2005, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Now the Drug Enforcement Administration is worried that cheese will spread to other parts of the country. The agency is investigating a few possible cases, including one in California.
Cheese is made by grinding up cold medication and mixing it with black-tar heroin, which is typically smuggled in by Mexican drug cartels. A $30 purchase of heroin can yield 40 to 50 cheese hits, each costing about $2—more affordable for users and more profitable for mixers. The drug, which is snorted, derives its name from a supposedly Parmesan-like appearance, though in reality, it looks more like coarse sand. Because the amount of heroin in cheese is sometimes small—as little as 3 percent—the drug rarely shows up in field tests. But the heroin quantity can be inconsistent. “Kids will be scoring 3 percent and all of a sudden, they get 9 or 10 percent, and you are dead,” says James Capra, Special Agent in charge of the DEA’s Dallas field division.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the cheese phenomenon is the users’ age. Dallas police have arrested kids as young as 12—and in one case, the Dallas school district nabbed an 11-year-old. In fact, dealers use the drug’s inoffensive moniker to market it to youth, says Capra. “Put yourself in that kid’s mind,” he says. " ‘It’s got a funny name, and it’s only a couple of bucks’." The users’ youth also complicates treatment. “Cognitively, they don’t understand consequences,” says Michelle Hemm, director of the Phoenix Academy of Dallas, a residential treatment facility for teens that’s seeing a growing number of cheese cases. “This age group is developmentally hard to deal with.”
Authorities are responding aggressively. The DEA and Dallas police have arrested low-level dealers and say they’re working on several investigations targeting suppliers higher up the trafficking chain. The cheese craze recalls a trend that nearby Plano witnessed in the 1990s, when users mixed heroin with sleep aids. But “in less than two years, Dallas has exceeded the number of deaths that took Plano five years to get to,” says Jeremy Liebbe, a narcotics officer with the Dallas school district. Law enforcement eventually stamped out the Plano problem with a series of high-level busts. Residents in Dallas—and communities beyond—can only hope authorities are as successful this time around.
