Mexico's heroin industry has had a bullish few years thanks, in part, to the drug's emergence as a popular choice of teenagers.

Mexican traffickers have expanded from hubs in California and Texas into the Midwest and the Atlantic Seaboard, narcotics experts say.

And more heroin is coming into California from Mexico this year, say law enforcement officials, who already have confiscated more of the drug in six months than they did in all of 2010.

One traffic stop in Fresno County alone yielded 24 pounds of black tar heroin, the single-largest heroin bust in the Valley in years.

Mexican traffickers have revamped heroin's image from the inner-city drug of yore, with its junkies and needles, into a narcotic that can be snorted or smoked, appealing to high school youths.

A coincidental factor has given the drug gangs a tail wind: The epidemic abuse of painkillers has ebbed in the United States, and youth now hunger for a cheaper high.

"We've heard around the country of changes away from prescription drugs, because they are either more expensive or more difficult to obtain, and a movement toward heroin, which is less costly," said Gil Kerlikowske, a former Seattle police chief who is the White House drug czar.

From Oxy to heroin

Cameron Hicks, 25, is an example of someone who followed the path described by Kerlikowske. Hicks was introduced to painkillers when he was prescribed Oxycontin for a sports injury as a Buchanan High School sophomore, but eventually he became addicted to heroin.

By the time he graduated from high school, Hicks said, he had used heroin. He was an addict ("Death is not enough to keep someone from getting high for even a moment," he says) but lost access to Oxycontin prescriptions after rehabilitation stints.

The street price for heroin is about one-third of the $40 to $50 that an Oxycontin pill costs.

"You have to use [heroin] because there is nothing else available," he said.

And he almost did die from a heroin overdose at a Los Angeles gas station. He was taken to an emergency room where he was revived.

He has been clean for three years and lives in Boise, Idaho.

Drug treatment centers locally are seeing slight rises in heroin users, but often as a secondary drug to methamphetamine, which is the primary addiction.

Statistics provided by WestCare California, a local substance abuse treatment center that has more than 1,000 clients in the Fresno area, show that 11% of its admissions in 2010-11 were for heroin or other opium-based drugs, compared with 9.6% for 2009-10. For both years, methamphetamine abusers represented more than 40% of WestCare's Fresno clients.

Most often, heroin is the second drug of choice to methamphetamine, said Lynn Pimentel, deputy administrator for WestCare.

She said some people using prescription painkillers revert to heroin, but "they minimize the heroin because it's not their drug of choice."

Even though Valley numbers for heroin use are not sharply rising, nationally a a different trend is evolving.

A federal study found that California had up to 45,000 heroin users in 2008-09. Seven years earlier, the number was about 6,000 on the high end, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Nationally, there were 180,000 people aged 12 or older who used heroin for the first time within the previous 12 months, a 2009 federal report on substance abuse admissions says.

The number of first-time heroin users was significantly higher than the average annual number from the previous six years. Estimates from 2002 to 2008 ranged from 91,000 to 118,000 per year, said the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.