WASHINGTON, DCIn a humanitarian relief effort expected to greatly ease the pain of America's blighted inner cities, the federal government will begin importing and distributing the wonder-drug heroin to the growing urban underclass, President Clinton announced Monday. President Clinton displays one of the needles that will soon pump sweet relief into America's blighted inner cities. Citing 'the horrible pain of life in America's urban centers,' Clinton urged all Americans living below the poverty line to begin using the substance immediately and 'forget the daily agonies of your unceasingly horrific lives in a mind-numbing rush of glorious, opiate-induced oblivion.' 'A lighter, a spoon, some cotton balls and a syringe are all America needs to end the misery of poverty forever,' Clinton continued. 'Poor people of the nation everywhere dream of a way out of the ghetto, and I am here to tell them: Do not give up on that dream. America, heroin is that way out.' Government officials were unanimous in their support for the president's plan. 'This stuff is unbelievablewe're talking 100 percent pure unrefined China White,' U.S. Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) said. 'Our nation's poor are clearly going to be on cloud nine once this 'mainline' hits the vein.' According to CIA Director John Deutch, no price is too great to pay for injections of the precious substance. 'These struggling people won't be thinking about anythingnot poverty, not starvation, not savage, random gang beatingsnothing at all but that next sweet, sweet taste,' Deutch said. 'What an incredible rush it will be for them.' According to federal studies, the levels of crime, poverty, despair and misery within the nation's inner cities have grown so rapidly in recent years as to make survival 'an impossibly hopeless task, endurable only through the aid of massive, regular smack injections.' 'Once these disenfranchised masses begin to shoot up, they will feel like they can do anything,' said Bruce McCartland, a top Clinton aide. 'And I mean anything: get a high-paying job, buy a new car, escape the vicious cycle of poverty. You name itwhen you're on the nod, anything seems possible.' A Bronx, NY, resident unwinds after a long, hard day with a relaxing hit of government-supplied heroin. The program has the added advantage, said U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala, of requiring no taxpayer funding, as the substance can be purchased at bulk and sold for a small profit on city streets. 'It's an extremely cost-effective program,' Shalala said. 'Once it gets off the ground it will require very little additional funding, as our studies show that the heroin users themselves will be willing to pay for further doses of the substance. Heroin users are wonderfully resourceful and entrepreneurial when it comes to finding the money to purchase drugs. Some even start their own small businesses, such as selling their bodies, or even the drug itself, in order to pay for their next 'fix.'' As an added bonus, the new program will help foster a strong sense of community within inner cities, as heroin users will likely often be forced to share needles. 'There's nothing more beautiful,' McCartland said, 'than seeing a group of young addicts coming together to pass the needle around.' The latest in a recent string of psychoactive drugs to hit the market, heroin functions much like other commercially available anti-depressants, such as Prozac and Zolaft, which have created an unprecedented boom in drug-therapy pharmaceuticals in recent years. However, experts say heroin is even more powerful, causing an incredibly pleasurable sensory overload of the central nervous system and creating a near-total shutdown of the areas of the brain that register pain. 'Zolaft and Prozac have greatly improved the emotional lives of millions of America's mildly dissatisfied, upper-middle class suburbanites,' said Dr. Louis Reed, author of the bestselling Listening To Heroin. 'But let's face it: Prescribing Prozac to the wretched, world-weary human flotsam of the inner cities would be like putting a band-aid on a massive head wound. Nothing less than total chemically induced escape from reality will do. Heroin is the way.' 