Pubdate: Sun, 02 Mar 2003 Source: Worcester Telegram & Gazette (MA) Copyright: 2003 Worcester Telegram & Gazette Contact: http://www.telegram.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/509 Note: only publishes letters from state residents. Author: Kerry Schmidt, Gary V. Murray, Chris Echegaray, Richard Nangle, Bronislaus B. Kush THE DRUG TOLL Examining A War Fought On The Streets Of Worcester WORCESTER- Two men are leaning up against the vinyl supply building at 836 Main St. Both in their mid-20s or so, neither well-nor poorly dressed. Just two nondescript young men wearing black pants and coats alongside a busy street on a sunny but frigid February weekday in Main South. Shortly after 10:30 in the morning, a gray Toyota, noticeably clean and free of the salt and road dirt so evident on nearly every other vehicle on the road, pulls up. The driver, the only person in the car, lowers the passenger-side window. What the three are doing becomes more and more obvious as the taller of the two men talks to the driver, at first shaking his head from right to left a few times, then nodding in agreement. The deal is on. From half a block away, there's no way of telling whether the driver is a man or a woman, how he or she is dressed, or his race or ethnicity. The man on the street reaches inside the window, takes something from the driver, and in practically simultaneous motion gives it a fast but thorough look as he shoves it in his pocket. He then motions to his partner, who darts on foot across Main, heads up Allen Street, turns left on Mount Pleasant Street and stops in front of what's left of an abandoned car. The partner takes a quick look around, reaches inside and grabs something small enough that it fits inside his right glove. He then retraces his steps back to Main, where the taller man and the driver have been waiting no more than a few minutes. The tiny packet is given to the taller man, who instantly hands it to the driver and the Toyota pulls away. The deal is done. On June 17, 1971, a declaration of war was issued by then-President Richard M. Nixon. The eradication of illegal street drugs, he vowed, would receive the full attention and resources of the federal government because they were "decimating a generation of Americans.' Three decades and a new century later, the War on Drugs continues, with the primary combatants - drug dealers, with the immutable law of supply and demand seemingly on their side, and local police - battling daily for control of the streets, the front lines of the war. It is no different in Worcester, Massachusetts. Everyone from top city administrators to the guy next door acknowledges the existence of illegal street drugs in Worcester. The evidence is stark and includes the drug overdose deaths of about 300 people since 1996 - a great many of them attributed to higher purity levels and lower prices for heroin and cocaine - and a total of 522 HIV/AIDS cases in Worcester County transmitted through intravenous drug use as of Jan. 1. The flip side, however, is that with the exception of the relative few actively engaged in the war, it is hard to detect much concern or focus on how pervasive illegal drugs are here. The public disgust and frustration that pushed Mr. Nixon to declare a war on drugs is only faintly echoed in 2003, yet by any measurement the problem is getting worse. Heroin, cocaine, marijuana and myriad variations on the theme are much more accessible and potent; considerably more people are shooting, sniffing or smoking them; and the impact on society is far greater than was the case in 1971. In January and February, Sunday Telegram reporters interviewed more than 65 people - including police, prosecutors, dealers, users, health care and social workers, representatives of active neighborhood crime watch groups, and others - as the starting point for a continuing examination of the toll taken by street drugs on life in Worcester. The sources' experiences and observations make it quite evident that while the war's casualties are far greater and more widespread than the conventional wisdom assumes, the situation here is far from hopeless. William T. Breault, chairman of the Main South Alliance for Public Safety, for instance, often has been at odds with the city administration and Worcester police whenever he believes drug laws aren't being adequately enforced in the Main South neighborhood he's lived in the past 46 years. Of late, however, he sees a turn for the better. "It's definitely tilting our way,' he says of the War on Drugs as it is being waged in Worcester. "You not only see it out on the streets; you sense it, you feel it.' Some of the key points raised during those two months of interviews: While in no position to wipe out street drugs in Worcester, city police have managed to maintain a lid on the situation, a significant achievement. By placing an emphasis on cultivating informants and targeting the dealers who supply the street-level dealers with drugs, officers have helped protect Worcester from the extensive violence and economic deterioration that have overwhelmed other, less prepared communities. Selling drugs and drug addiction are not the exclusive domains of any particular ethnic background or economic class in Worcester, nor does education level necessarily protect oneself from the pitfalls of street drugs. While prevalent throughout the city, the negative impacts of street drugs, not surprisingly, are considerably more pronounced in low-income neighborhoods, particularly Main South, Vernon Hill, Belmont Hill, the Austin-Piedmont streets area, and the Great Brook Valley housing project. A commonly repeated complaint in that regard was that locating the city's limited number of drug rehabilitation and treatment facilities, as well as other social services and low-income housing programs, in neighborhoods already heavily victimized by drug activity only exacerbates problems. The human cost of lost and wasted lives caused by street drugs is hardly confined to users: Children of drug addicts, for instance, are at considerably higher risk for neglect and abuse at home. Spouses can find themselves without a place of their own to live when an addict is fired from his or her job, or no longer is able to work. Living with an addict parent can emotionally cripple a child and generate a ripple effect that harms not only that child's ability to learn in school, but others in his or her classroom. Street drugs claim a significant financial toll on everyone, drug user or not. Tax money pays for health care and social services for users who cannot afford them, for the enforcement of drug laws, and for the prosecution and incarceration of drug dealers. Revenues lost to shoplifting and robberies committed by addicts are passed on to consumers; absenteeism and poor work performance by employees who use drugs raise prices and decrease the quality of products or services for which the user is responsible. Preferences for street drugs come in cycles. Heroin currently is the drug of choice among users, regardless of age or income, and the use of crack cocaine, a purified form of cocaine that is smoked, is high on the list. The popularity of so-called designer drugs such as Ecstasy generally is short-lived, with curiosity attracting initial experimentation, but high prices sending drug users back to their standbys. The myths portrayed on television and in the movies to the contrary, there is no single person, family, cartel or syndicate ruling over a drug empire called Worcester. "We hear it all the time,' notes Sgt. Timothy J. O'Connor, supervisor of the day shift for the Worcester Police Department's Vice Squad. "Be nice if it was true. We'd know exactly who to go after. Unfortunately ..' The list goes on and on, and the more one considers what those on the front lines have to say, the more evident it becomes that there is little hard and fast knowledge on combating illegal drug use. That, in turn, produces many more questions than answers. Decriminalize street drugs and channel the resources now devoted to enforcing drug laws into treatment programs? Opponents counter that the track record of existing treatment programs isn't good and that too many addicts would still resort to crime for money to live on. Mount drug education and prevention programs for young people on a scale similar to the successful campaigns over the past 10-15 years that discouraged the use of tobacco? "Have you been on a college campus or around a high school lately? Have you seen how many young people are smoking cigarettes?' asks police Lt. Alexander Donoghue, who has spent 20 of his 33 years as a cop working narcotics. "No one, and that includes police officers, disputes the need for treatment and prevention, but this (anti-smoking campaigns) isn't working nearly as well as you seem to believe.' Then there is the outlook of Margaret, a street prostitute and heroin addict, that, if shared by many others, seems to suggest there is no use even trying to get people off their drug habits. She says she started "dabbling' with heroin when she was a teenager and has been a junkie the last 10 to 12 years. Margaret, who says she is 33 but would have no problem passing for 60, adds that she has been in and out of various rehabilitation programs and even quit using for nearly a year. She's back on the habit now, however, and insists that is precisely the way she wants it. Does anyone even know the extent of the drug problem in Worcester? By one account, Lt. Donoghue points out, there were 6,000 to 7,000 addicts living in Worcester a few years ago, which would translate to more than 4 percent of the city's population at the time. The veteran narcotics investigator has doubts, however, about the reliability of the estimate, which was included in an analysis conducted by a local college. It relied upon data that included drug arrests in the city, but did not specify the hometowns of those arrested. In other words, the analysis appears to lump "tourists' from other area communities who come here to purchase illegal drugs with local residents and classify all of them as Worcesterites. Whether the number is high, low or accurate, is something the lieutenant says he has no way of knowing. What he does know is that 1,230 people were arrested last year on felony drug sale and distribution charges - the count rising steadily each of the past five years - and that Vice Squad officers encounter new faces on the drug scene every day. Who are the people who use drugs in Worcester? "Nurses, lawyers, factory workers - you, me, anybody, everyone,' says Raul, a cocaine and heroin dealer in the city. Sgt. O'Connor concurs with the dealer's assessment. Raul should know about such things. He was busted last year by Vice Squad officers and became a police informant in the hope that his sentence, expected next month, will be reduced. Wearing a gold watch, ring and necklaces easily worth more than $20,000, he looks every bit the dealer that Hollywood would have us expect, adding that he is anxious to leave Worcester and return to his homeland. "These guys arrest a dealer,' he says of the Vice Squad, "and five new dealers drop out of the trees. There's a lot of business out there, but it's getting tougher to deal with.' Asked what is needed to put men such as himself out of business, and his answer comes quickly: "Get people to stop buying.' The business may be getting tougher and riskier, but there's a reason so many attempt to sell drugs in the city. It can be summed up in one word, according to Lt. David Richardson of the Vice Squad: "Greed.' At times, he noted, it is difficult not to empathize with addicts who can be as dependent on drugs as they are on food or water. The people who sell to them, however, are a completely different story. Evidence of how much a dealer can make recently was found on piece of paper hidden in a room rented by an El Salvadoran who had been in Worcester about five months and was being watched by police. There was no indication he was anything more than a low-level dealer, but, unlike others who fit that description, he did not use drugs himself. He managed to get out of town just before officers raided his room. No drugs were found, but tucked behind some ceiling molding was a copy of a wire transfer he had sent to his homeland a few days earlier. It was for $86,000. Is Worcester even willing to attempt new means of combating the drug problem? Actually, it has tried. For much of the 1990s, the local incarnation of the national Fighting Back project launched by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was hailed as the magic bullet that would result in innovative and sure strategies to combat drug, alcohol and tobacco abuse. The local effort was called Worcester Fights Back and, banking more than $5 million from the foundation and the federal government, it attempted to come up with a communitywide approach involving local schools, health care organizations, neighborhood and religious groups, businesses and local government that would focus on helping drug users quit and, more important, help keep young people from turning to drugs in the first place. Worcester was one of 15 U.S. communities selected for the first phase of the project and from 1992 to 1997 the money rolled in. That last year, however, WFB was notified by the foundation that Worcester wasn't among the eight communities selected for the second phase of the project. A postmortem on WFB conducted by analysts from Brandeis University's Florence Heller Graduate School of Advanced Studies later concluded that the local project was plagued by policy rifts between business and local government leaders who emphasized direct services such as treatment and rehabilitation programs, and neighborhood activists who pushed for funding for job training, crime prevention and housing. The project's longest-serving director and senior program manager both described the evaluation as "pretty fair' in its conclusions. The foundation's own evaluation of its Fighting Back program was similarly direct. While demonstrating some positive results, "the sustained, 10-year community-based coalition approach with ample technical assistance and direction, top-notch people and sites that were pre-selected, did not produce robust results in terms of decreasing substance abuse,' according to the evaluation. The report also states that the foundation will continue to help communities combat substance abuse. Interestingly, among projects now receiving funding from the well-heeled foundation is the Drug Policy Alliance, which actively advocates for "more sensible and humane drug policies' that promote "realistic alternatives to the war on drugs.' Among other things, the DPA has called for eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana and "redirecting most government drug control resources from criminal justice and interdiction to public health and education.' Is anything working? The unyielding determination of fed-up neighborhood crime watch groups combined with more aggressive police enforcement is helping move the drug trade off the streets. The most common place now to buy drugs in Worcester, said Vice Squad Sgt. Thomas J. Gaffney, is "any parking lot in the city,' while some former "crack houses' in Main South and on Grafton and Belmont hills now are homes for families with children. Even so, "Some properties remain problematic no matter how much energy and time are put in to changing them,' said David McMahon, co-director of Dismas House, a residence for former prisoners located on Richards Street. He is speaking of a three-story apartment house almost directly across the street from Goddard School of Science and Technology, a public elementary school. According to neighbors, cars come and cars go at the apartment at all times of the day and night. Pedestrians wander to the back of the building at odd times, stay briefly and wander off. Syringes tossed from windows at 11 Richards St. sprinkle the adjacent community garden. Garbage and trash spills from the house onto the lawn. Cars are disassembled so often that neighbors are convinced the address is also a chop shop. "It's been like this for more than 20 years,' said one resident of the street. She has lived on Richards Street for longer than that. "It's too bad because this is really a nice street, very diverse with a lot of neat people. We just have this one bad apple and it affects all our lives. It sits in the middle of the street. There's no escaping it.' Owners over the years have either ignored neighbor complaints or, as one did, respond with a new paint job. "Nice guy,' Mr. McMahon said. "He had a Free Tibet bumper sticker on his Volvo.' Sporadic police raids have slowed but never stopped the business at 11 Richards. Mr. McMahon does not believe a police crackdown or longer prison terms for drug offenders will solve a problem that he is convinced remains rooted in poverty and despair even more intransigent than the dope houses. "Heroin in Worcester is a massive problem,' Mr. McMahon said. "It's cheaper to buy a couple of bags of heroin than a couple of six packs of beer.' - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens