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."
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