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Heroin is a highly addictive drug. It is illegal to manufacture, possess, or sell heroin in the United States, and its use is a serious problem in America. Popular street names for heroin include black tar, smack, junk, skag, horse, brain, chaw, chiva, and others. These are specific references to heroin and not used to describe any other drug.

The heroin available in the USA is brought here from four main sources: South America (Colombia), Southeast Asia (principally Burma), Mexico, and Southwest Asia (principally Afghanistan).

At the present day and since mid-1990s, the most outspread heroin in the USA is South American heroin. Prior to it the dominant types were Southwest Asian, Southeast Asian and Mexican heroine, as following:

Although the Southwest Asian heroine is not the prevailing type in America it still could be found in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Atlanta, and New York City, and in recent years, availability appears to have increased just a little bit.

South American heroin (SA) is produced in Columbia and is most available in the Northeast part of the country and along East Coast. The heroin is of high quality and is of purity frequently above 90 percent. The SA heroin is smuggled into America through couriers traveling aboard commercial airlines from Colombia to Miami, New York City, San Juan, and other U.S. cities. Each courier usually carries from 500 grams to 1 kilogram of heroin per trip. Lately has increased the trafficking of SA heroin into the USA from Colombia through Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Panama, Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela.

Because American authorities improved law enforcement on the east coast, the traffickers searched for other ways of smuggling SA heroin into the country. One of them is bringing heroin through the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport before it reaches its final destination of New York City's LaGuardia Airport. The heroin is transported by the couriers being sewed into the cloths. Sometimes the drug reached the destination but there were a lot of cases when the heroin was seized. Thus in February 2002 New York policies seized 18 kilograms of SA heroin. A way to bring SA heroin in big amounts in America is the maritime way. This way also doesn’t end successfully for the traffickers all the time.

The retail market of the SA heroin in the northeast part is held by the Dominican criminal groups. To obtain such domination they always sell high pure SA heroin, purchased from the Columbian criminal groups which dominant the wholesale market of the SA heroin.

Mexican heroin is being smuggled and distributed into the USA market by large Mexican criminal organizations. Their distribution markets are the metropolitan areas of the midwestern, southwestern, and western parts of the country. Although they smuggle big quantities of cocaine and marijuana they limit the trafficking of Mexico heroin into the US to one kilogram or smaller amounts. Thus minimizing the risk of loosing big amounts of heroin. Nevertheless big amounts of heroin are smuggled annually in America.

Other ways of trafficking Mexican heroin are the illegal immigrants and migrant workers. They usually bring from one to three kilogram of heroin.

The availability of Southeast Asian (SEA) heroine was predominant during the late 1980s and early 1990s and its accessibility since 1992 has decreased significantly. Bringing SEA heroin to the USA is a chain of criminals and traffickers. First, independent brokers and shippers in Asia commercial it to overseas Chinese criminal populations, which at their turn sail it to ethnic Chinese criminal wholesale groups in the USA. Chinese wholesale traffickers distribute the SEA heroin to retail local criminal organizations.

The Chinese traffickers distribute the product in the Northeast and along The East Coast.

Southeast Asian heroine is also smuggled by West African criminals into the USA. Their supplying markets are the cities like Atlanta, Baltimore, Houston, Dallas, New York City, Newark, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

Southwest Asian (SWA) Heroin is smuggled to the USA through ethnic groups of Lebanese, Pakistanis, Turks, and Afghans. Because heroin traffickers don’t collaborate with persons not of Southwest Asian or Middle Eastern ethnicity, SWA heroin is most distributed and has a greater prevalence in areas with large Southwest Asian populations.

In the USA there are two Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) major programs that provide indicators of the geographic origins of heroin available at wholesale and retail levels in the United States: Heroin Signature Program (HSP) and the Heroin Domestic Monitor Program (HDMP). The DEA Research Laboratory analyzes heroin samples primarily from port of entry captures, as well as a random sample of other captures and purchases submitted to that laboratory, to determine source areas. Speaking about the function of each program in particular, it is to be said that HSP examines the wholesale level of the trade, while HDMP is a heroin purchase program designed to identify the purity, price, and source of origin of retail-level heroin available in 28 major U.S. metropolitan markets.