Pubdate: Thu, 22 May 2014
Source: Rappahannock News (VA)
Copyright: Times Community Newspapers 2014
Contact: http://www.RappahannockNews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3690
Author: Roger Piantadosi
Page: 1
HEROIN: IT'S HERE, AND THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES
Today, heroin is cheaper and, being illegal, easier for addicts to
obtain than prescription painkillers. The consequences - a dramatic
nationwide rise in overdose deaths since last year, increased thefts
and related crimes, crowded jails, overtaxed social services - are
not just making headlines across the country and in the neighboring
counties and cities of Virginia's Piedmont. They're here. "It would
be a mistake to think Rappahannock County is somehow immune," said
Virginia State Police Captain Gary Settle, a Rappahannock native who
heads the VSP's Bureau of Criminal Investigations at its Culpeper
Division headquarters, at a roundtable discussion and interview last
week with the Rappahannock News - a forum attended by Rappahannock
County Sheriff Connie C. Smith and other state police special agents
and investigators who lead VSP's drug-enforcement efforts in the region.
Two months ago, Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins reported 20
heroin-related deaths since the start of 2013, and more than 100
overdose cases. In the northern Shenandoah Valley counties and towns
covered by VSP's Northwest Virginia Drug Task Force, task force
coordinator Special Agent Jay Perry said last week that his region
recorded 21 overdose deaths in 2013 and more than 100 cases in which
the heroin-neutralizing drug naloxone, more commonly known as Narcan,
had to be administered. ("Otherwise that number of deaths would have
been much higher," he added.)
He added there have already been 14 overdose deaths and 24 injuries
in the northern Shenandoah region in 2014. "And those are just the
cases reported to us," said Perry, who estimates that authorities are
made aware of "maybe two-thirds" of drug emergencies.
Blue Ridge Drug Task Force coordinator Tom Murphy, the VSP special
agent whose undercover team covers the area that includes
Rappahannock, says the Piedmont region has had five overdose deaths
so far this year.
Changes over the last five years to prescription painkiller laws and
the pills' formulations have made them more difficult to obtain and
use, according to both Perry and Murphy.
"Heroin is also less expensive," said Murphy. "An eight-milligram
pain pill can run $80. For $20 or $25, you can get a six-or
seven-hour high on heroin."
"We had a pill problem," Perry said. "We shifted from a pill problem
to a heroin problem in late 2012."
Sheriff Smith (who dropped out of participating in the VSP's Blue
Ridge task force several years ago for budget and personnel-related
reasons) has said there have been no overdose-related deaths over the
last two years in Rappahannock. But she noted that tracking such
incidents is difficult.
As an example, she cited a very recent "unconscious person" call, to
which she and other deputies responded. When EMTs and deputies
arrived, Smith said, family members were already present; it was
clear that the scene had already been cleared of any evidence of drug
use before anyone called 911. Such scenarios have become more
commonplace over the last two or three years, Smith said.
There are no hospitals in Rappahannock, either. But even in
jurisdictions where hospitals are treating overdose cases, Perry
said, federal HIPAA privacy regulations inhibit EMTs and emergency
room medical personnel from reaching out to law enforcement.
Though HIPAA rules specifically exempt law enforcement personnel,
there is no requirement in Virginia for law-enforcement notification
by medical authorities dealing with the consequences of illegal drug
use. Settle said several of the area's state legislators are aware of
the issue, and hopes the laws can be changed during the General
Assembly's 2015 session.
Other local consequences of increasing drug use, according to
Rappahannock County Commonwealth's Attorney Art Goff: Over the last
three and half years, he says, half of the removals in the county -
actions by social services to remove children from their homes and
place them into foster care - can be attributed to heroin and other
drug abuse by the parents.
Last week Goff proposed a late addition to the county budget to pay
for a part-time member of the Blue Ridge Drug Task Force who'd work
for the commonwealth's attorney office. The request was opposed at a
county supervisors' work session last week by the sheriff - who is
struggling with her own department's downsizing, and likely
restructuring, with this July's opening of the Rappahannock
Shenandoah Warren Regional Jail - and is not a likely addition to the
2015 budget. But Goff believes outside help is necessary.
"Can we handle it locally? Most of the time, yes, the sheriff's
office can handle the war on drugs," Goff said. "But the equipment,
surveillance and otherwise, for the modern day drug war is expensive.
And technical assistance, the kind that can analyze a seized computer
on scene for example, is even harder to come by."
In many ways, the same national economic realities that are causing
Rappahannock and other jurisdictions to engage in repeated
belt-tightening exercises in recent years, according to Settle and
his special agents, are also the cause of the increase in overdoses
and heroin deaths.
Heroin is a money-maker, Perry said, and many dealers (almost none of
whom use heroin, he notes) have gotten into the illicit business in
the past several years looking for a quick fortune - and are "making
it up as they go along," as he put it.
Thus heroin is arriving in the Piedmont and Northern Shenandoah -
primarily from Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, respectively - with
widely varying levels of purity, some of it cut with such
intensifying additives such as fentanyl, a drug commonly used in
hospitals to treat post-surgery pain. The purity of the heroin ranges
from 15 percent to more than 40 percent, Perry said - "and if you're
used to 15 percent, and you take the same hit of a 40-percent pure
product, you're going to be in trouble."
Murphy said the heroin arriving in his region, coming largely from
Washington, is generally less pure than what arrives in Perry's
Northwest region from Baltimore - which, unlike Washington, is a
"primary distribution center." Addicts and dealers often make
multiple daily trips to and from Baltimore from the northern
Shenandoah to buy at the city's "wide open" street markets, Perry said.
Goff has said he believes the majority of Rappahannock's drug
traffic, quiet though it seems, is coming from the north, "from
Warren County and Shenandoah County and Winchester."
In Winchester, in fact, the Northern Virginia Daily published an
interview this week with a 25-year-old recovered heroin addict who
will graduate next week from a year-long rehabilitation program at
Shenandoah Valley Teen Challenge Women's Center in Mount Jackson. The
woman, who nearly died of an overdose at Warren Memorial Hospital in
Front Royal last year, attended high school in Rappahannock County,
and served three months at Rappahannock's jail after pleading guilty
in 2012 to breaking into and stealing from a Chester Gap home to pay
for her habit.
As she told the interviewer, the drug education effort she and many
others received in high school didn't leave much of an impression,
admitting that she knew "absolutely nothing" about illegal
prescription drugs when she tried her first one. Within a year she
was using heroin, she said.
Settle thinks the first step local communities can take is to
recognize and understand the problem, and he and his task force
members have organized several regional "stakeholder" meetings over
the last year, inviting representatives from local, state and federal
law enforcement, as well as medical and social service professionals.
"This is not just a law enforcement problem," Settle said. "This is a
societal problem, and all of us need to be working together to solve it."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom