SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – The worst-off spend their days in a drug-induced fog minutes from this capital city’s mammoth Palacio Nacional, with its palm-tree promenades and roseate marble walls.

More comfortable speaking English than Spanish, they are members of a growing subculture: deported criminals who served time Stateside and are now wasting away in this Caribbean nation of 8 million.

“We try to stick together because we can relate to each other. We’re Americanized. It’s a different mentality,” Hayden Lafontaine, 37, a convicted cocaine dealer raised in Brooklyn, said. “We’re strangers in our own country.”

Lafontaine lives in San Carlo, a slum that another criminal deportee described as like “the South Bronx when it was burning down in the 1970s.” Mornings he shoots up on heroin, or, if he doesn’t have drugs, shoplifts or calls family members in America, begging them to send money. Then, pain dulled, he sits in his urine-stenched apartment, waiting out the afternoon rains and discussing with other deportees anything from the presidential debates to the latest Yankee game.

As Dominican immigrants convicted of crimes they were kicked out of America, but in Santo Domingo they feel more American than Dominican. They left behind families and friends.

They also left behind a drug culture.

In the Dominican Republic, unlike the situation in New York, heroin is relatively unknown. But that is changing in the barrios like San Carlo, where criminals deported from America are creating their own drug culture.

“In the deportee population heroin is better known, and they are more experienced with it than the Dominican population,” said the director of a drug-treatment program, Julio Diaz Capellan.

“In Santiago, Villa Juana, wherever there are deportees, there are addicts,” Mr. Capellan said, speaking in Spanish. “They also sell to support their vice in every barrio where there is a high population of deportees.”

His program, Hogar Crea, has 34 therapeutic centers throughout the country. Of the nearly 100 deportees the program currently is treating, more than half have heroin-related problems, and almost all of those people first took the drug when they were in America, Mr. Capellan said.

The national drug-control agency maintains that the real consumption problem on the island is crack and cocaine, and that heroin is a cost-prohibitive habit restricted to a small group of wealthy young deviants.

But Mr. Capellan’s experience has been different.

The heroin problem began, Mr. Capellan said, not long after 1996, when the American Congress changed immigration law to require the deportation of many thousands of legal permanent residents who had committed crimes. With nearly 25,000 criminals now having been deported to the Dominican Republic, and many arriving with heroin addictions, the network of deportees addicted to heroin continues to spread.

In the general population, too, heroin use is increasing, particularly among drug-abusers looking for a cheaper alternative to pharmaceuticals, he said.

“We are very worried,” Mr. Capellan said, “not only for the deportees, but also for the residents.”

On a recent afternoon in San Carlo, a deportee named Omar Martinez pointed to his home, a green cement structure that houses the local heroin “shooting gallery.” In a New York accent, he proudly said he lived in the cement building until he was 3. Martinez wore a Florida correctional facility shirt which was hanging limply on his skeletal frame. His eyes were flying.

Growing up in the South Bronx, he said, he never thought he’d again call this dusty slum of his youth home. He was always a legal American resident, and he had no idea he could be deported. Nevertheless, 41 years later, following convictions for drug possession and check fraud, he has been sent back. In his home, cement replaced the wood slats that were there when he was a child, but still there is no running water.

A heroin addict from his early 20s when he began to attend City College, Mr. Martinez came clean when he arrived in the Dominican Republic six years ago. It was the first time since a brief stint in an American methadone program that he’d been off heroin, he said, and he had no choice – there was no heroin available.

“We were all clean and had good jobs when we arrived,” Martinez said.

He worked at a sex and psychic hotline before he found the emerging deportee drug culture. Now, he said, he could name 60 or 70 other deportees addicted to heroin, many of whom float through his home, their “shooting gallery.”

Deportees and those who treat them for drug abuse said the addicts feed their habits with the leftovers as heroin travels from Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama to destinations in America and Europe. When they sell, it is locally and to support the habit.

One reason for the increased availability of heroin in the Dominican Republic is the traffic through it. Fully 27% of drugs trafficked to America pass through the Western Caribbean, according to the American government’s Drug Enforcement Agency.

“It’s becoming more and more heroin takedowns over the past couple of years,” the agency’s special agent in charge for the Caribbean region, Jerome Harris, said. “And we’re seeing an increase in the number of couriers who are getting arrested in the Dominican Republic.” Traffickers known as mules, who swallow the drugs, are being intercepted at a rate of five to six a week, according to the Dominican National Drug Control Agency.

“The real problem we have is the traffic of heroin is increasing every day because of the consumption in the U.S.,” the vice admiral of the agency, Ivan Lins, said. According to Mr. Lins, the mules are diversifying, shifting from young South Americans to people from Holland or England, and to older people, such as a 75-year-old woman who was recently intercepted. Deportees are often the middlemen in the transfer, he said. They bring skills and connections in America to bear in the Dominican Republic, but they generally do not direct the drug cartels.

While most of those deportees arrive with addictions they acquired in America, many said the desperation of their situation, on an island where they feel trapped, has caused them to dive deeper into the addiction or acquire new habits.

Martinez’s roommate is the Brooklyn native, Lafontaine. Raised from age 4 in Bay Ridge, he served three years as an American soldier in Germany and spent seven years in prison for trafficking drugs between New York and Massachusetts.

Lafontaine had sniffed heroin, along with a host of other drugs, in America, but it was in San Carlo that he tried mainlining: Nearly two years ago, he injected himself with heroin for the first time. “We don’t want to do it, but it’s the loneliness that kills you,” Lafontaine said. He cries when he speaks of his Irish-American wife back in Massachusetts and their two adolescent daughters.

Now, 60 pounds lighter than he was before his addiction, Lafontaine calls becoming heroin’s slave the worst mistake he ever made. It’s one of a litany of worst mistakes: dropping out of the University of Massachusetts to start trafficking drugs from New York, cheating on his wife to have four other children with three other women. Still, like most of the deportees, Lafontaine holds onto dreams of returning to America. “I already told my mother,” he said, “legally or illegally, I’m going back.”

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