DANGEROUS `STREET'; `BLACK TAR' TAKES A STARK JOURNEY INTO ADDICTION DARKNESS.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

In 1995, heroin made a big comeback in San Francisco. And not just any heroin. It was black tar heroin, cooked from poppies grown in the Michoacan province of Mexico, a cheap, minimally processed form of the drug that was widely available and particularly noxious.

The influx caught the eye of filmmaker Steven Okazaki, who lived nearby and won an Oscar for his 1991 documentary ``Days of Waiting.'' He began accompanying needle exchange workers as they made the rounds of San Francisco's many junkie havens.

After months of handing out muffins to addicts and helping the workers swap needles, Okazaki parlayed his relationships with the young addicts into an extraordinary up-close look at their lives, and their fall into prostitution, petty crime, drug dealing, jail, physical deterioration, emotional devastation and AIDS.

The result is a remarkable - and remarkably painful - documentary, ``Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street,'' being shown at 11 tonight on HBO.

Okazaki initially followed a dozen of the young addicts, before settling on five of them during more than two years of shooting that gives you an intimate sense of what their lives are like.

When we meet them, Jessica, Jake, Oreo, Tracey and Alice are all young, newly into heroin, still articulate, relatively healthy, attractive and interested in the world.

They're interested in books (though books by junkie authors such as William Burroughs and Arthur Rimbaud), they have dreams about their futures, they don't think heroin is a big deal.

But during a dismayingly short period, things start to fray for several of them. Jessica takes up prostitution, soon ending up in the worst streetwalking neighborhood in the city, and begins taking crack cocaine and other drugs to help juice up the dream state of the heroin.

She contracts AIDS, which is diagnosed after she's arrested for hooking. Another arrest on prostitution and she can be charged with attempted murder, but Okazaki soon shows her back on the street.

Tracey, after spending six months in jail, falls back into heroin within eight hours of her release, while her Ohio mother sends money to try to stabilize her life. Soon enough, she is dealing to feed her habit.

Both Jake and Oreo work as male prostitutes, and Jake also contracts AIDS and disappears for a time. He later emerges gaunt and sullen, unwilling to talk. Late in the show, Okazaki shows him in a hospital, then follows Jake after he runs away with his IV shunt still embedded in his body. Jake uses the shunt to shoot up more heroin.

Excruciating scenes like those give the documentary its power. Okazaki used a tiny digital camera that allowed him amazing access to the youths he was following, and even into the flophouse hotels where they lived and where visitors with cameras aren't welcome.

It's not a film for the squeamish. He repeatedly shows the addicts shooting up, stripping on street corners to stick a spike in a still-functioning vein, lurching down the street after getting their fix.

Part of what makes the documentary so powerful is that Okazaki focuses only on the young junkies. There's not a single word uttered by a government bureaucrat, a police officer, an anti-drug warrior.

Instead, he sketches in the youths' occasional interactions with welfare agencies, the court system, police and other official types by quick interstitial frames that update what happens. Mostly, though, it's the youths themselves, and their lovers, and in Alice's case, her mother.

THE FACTS

The show: ``Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street'' (for mature audiences; strong language, numerous shots of drug use and crime).

Behind the scenes: Directed, written and produced by Steven Okazaki.

Running time: One hour, 14 minutes.

Channel: HBO.

Playing: 11 tonight, 10 p.m. Monday.

Our rating: Three and one half stars.

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Photo: HBO's ``Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street'' focuses on addicts' lives, and their fall into prostitution, petty crime, drug dealing, jail, physical and emotional decline and AIDS.