Pubdate: Thu, 03 Jul 2014
Source: USA Today (US)
Copyright: 2014 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/625HdBMl
Website: http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/index.htm
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/466
Author: Donna Leinwand Leger

HEROIN DEALERS INJECT BUSINESS BASICS

Drug Trade, Clientele Are Not What They Used to Be

Women juggling espresso drinks and shopping bags bustle past a Jeep 
parked at a shopping center one sunny afternoon in June as a drug 
dealer hops into the passenger seat. He exchanges three grams of 
heroin for $125 from a mother of teenagers. The transaction takes 45 seconds.

It's a scenario that plays out all over Albuquerque and other cities 
as heroin dealers catering to young, affluent suburban addicts shift 
their operations from backalley deals in shady parts of town to 
delivery on demand at downtown offices, high-end malls and suburban homes.

The operators of these sophisticated enterprises employ MBA 
techniques for marketing, managing risk and training employees, says 
DEA Special Agent Eduardo Chavez, a group supervisor for the Drug 
Enforcement Administration in New Mexico.

"They operate like a multinational business, even using the language 
of business, talking about minimizing losses and volume discounts," 
Chavez says. "They operate from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with 30 minutes for lunch."

In New Mexico, where the rate of deaths from drug overdoses is among 
the highest in the nation, drug traffickers are responding to a new 
consumer - opiate-addicted suburbanites who got hooked on pain pills 
that are now in short supply, Chavez says. When they can't get 
oxycodone, they turn to heroin to satisfy their craving.

Many of these new clients have families and hold down jobs, so drug 
traffickers have reworked their businesses to maintain regular hours, 
seven-day-a-week service, a central dispatcher and well-trained 
drivers in nice cars who can blend into affluent areas.

In Albuquerque, drug traffickers assign drivers to each quadrant of 
the city, from the swanky, suburban Northeast Heights to the gritty, 
poorer southwest, so they can respond quickly to their customers, 
Chavez says. Each driver is stocked with a day's supply of 
pre-measured and packaged Mexican black tar heroin.

"People are still thinking of the heroin addict as the skinny, 
trackmarked junkie living on the streets," Chavez says. "They don't 
look like that anymore."

WITH PAIN PILLS SCARCE, HEROIN IS EASIER, CHEAPER AND JUST AS GOOD A HIGH

Pain-pill addiction reached its peak in 2008, when overdose deaths on 
narcotic pain relievers, such as OxyContin and Vicodin, surpassed 
deaths from heroin and cocaine combined.

New Mexico for decades had the nation's highest overdose death rate, 
mainly from heroin, state epidemiologist Michael Landen says. Around 
2006, prescription opioids, made from chemicals that resemble 
morphine and other opiates, emerged as the major cause of overdose 
deaths. By 2010, prescription-painkiller overdoses accounted for 
nearly 250 deaths a year, double that of heroin, he says.

Federal and state law enforcement officials and state medical boards 
have cracked down in the past decade, shutting down doctors who 
overprescribed and pharmacies that filled their prescriptions with no 
questions asked. Drug makers, responding to federal government 
pressure, created abuse-resistant forms of time-released oxycodone 
that are difficult to crush and snort.

New Mexico set up a program that tracks prescriptions, so addicts 
can't go from doctor to doctor in search of ever more pain pills. The 
program recorded a 10% decrease in opioid prescribing in 2013, Landen says.

The crackdown led to scarcity, which drove the street price up to $1 
per milligram, Chavez says - $80 for one 80 milligram pill. Some 
addicts turned to heroin for the same high at less than a third the 
price. The transition is made easier by heroin's high level of 
purity, allowing new addicts to get high by smoking it. Eventually, 
as their tolerance grows, addicts turn to injecting the drug.

"Our heroin overdose death rates are very high, and they have been 
high," Landen says. The major change "is that the deaths are 
increasingly among whites, and increasingly among women."

NABBED AGAIN, A DRIVER TELLS HIS STORY

Vito Gurule says that on a good day, he makes $200 cash.

Gurule once thought he'd like to be a chef. Lately, though, he has 
been driving around most days from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. delivering heroin 
to his middle-class customers, he says.

The DEA agents have watched Gurule for weeks.

On the day of his arrest, they watch as he leaves his house in a blue 
Impala and drives to the commuter train station, where he picks up an 
older woman with haphazardly dyed red hair. The agents follow him 
past the sleek office towers and restaurants of downtown Albuquerque. 
A little after 9 a.m., he pulls up to Recovery Toolbox, a methadone clinic.

The agents grab him as he emerges from his car. He wears a white 
T-shirt, jeans, a red and black rosary around his neck and a Michael 
Kors watch. He has two thumb-size bags of heroin and other drugs 
tucked into a slit in the seam of his underwear. He does not carry a weapon.

Chavez puts Gurule, handcuffed, in the front seat of his car. Gurule 
sighs and slumps in the seat. He knows what's coming. If you run his 
name through the state court system, more than a dozen criminal cases 
pop up. "There are two kinds of people in jail," Chavez begins. 
"Those who didn't cooperate and those who wish they did."

Gurule's story spills out. Gurule, who is 33, lives with a 17year-old 
girlfriend and her 18month-old son. He has a soon-to be ex-wife and 
another girlfriend on the side. He is the father of five, four boys 
and a girl.

He thinks of himself as a family man, speaking proudly of his teenage 
twins - one with straight A's. He worries that his young daughter 
might be at risk at his wife's home. "She's got like 10 dudes staying 
at my old house," he says, so the 10-year-old girl stays with him and 
the girlfriend.

Gurule says he started using drugs as a teen in Los Lunas, south of 
here. He has been on and off methadone for 12 years. He was studying 
culinary arts in community college and worked at restaurants, but it 
wasn't enough money. "I had problems with the marriage. I need to 
make money on the side," he says.

Chavez tells Gurule they have a search warrant for his house. Gurule 
says his girlfriend will be home with her son and his daughter. "She 
won't be surprised," he says.

Gurule lives in a terracotta-colored one-bedroom duplex in a 
trash-strewn neighborhood of double-wide trailers and crumbling 
bungalows in the city's southwest. The agents, weapons drawn, 
approach the house and pound on the sliding glass doors.

Gurule's girlfriend comes to the door carrying the baby. She can't 
unlock the iron gate covering the doors. Gurule locks it from the 
outside when he leaves to protect them from robbery. The DEA agents 
ask him whether he has thought about what would happen if there's a 
fire. They use his key to open the gates.

Chavez lets Gurule, still handcuffed, out of the car. His daughter 
runs to him, crying inconsolably, and throws her arms around his 
waist. Chavez pries them apart and distracts her with questions about 
school and her artwork. Inside, her report card is on the 
refrigerator and a bowl of half-eaten Fruity Pebbles waits on the 
table beneath a painting of the Last Supper.

In the upstairs bedroom, agents find pills sewn into the seams of 
Gurule's clothing and bottles of Xanax and Vicodin. They find a 
kitchen scale - key to a trafficking charge - under a pile of clothes 
in the closet.

DEA agents hope Gurule's arrest will be the first in the chain that 
leads them to the big bosses.

A grand jury charged him Tuesday with five counts of drug 
trafficking. He could be sentenced to eight years in prison.

'I WISH I NEVER TOOK THAT PILL'

The client lists for the heroin firms that operate around Albuquerque 
include people like a 24year-old woman who arrives at Starbucks in 
the upper-class Northeast Heights neighborhood wearing oversize 
sunglasses and turning heads as she tosses glossy blond hair over her 
shoulder. It is hot, but she is wearing a longsleeved sweater. It 
covers arms scarred with needle marks.

The woman asks to remain unnamed because she works as a confidential 
source for federal agents.

Her drug use began at 14 with pot supplied by an older sister. She 
experimented with cocaine, ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms. Her sister 
developed a cocaine addiction. "I remember thinking, 'I'll never be 
like that,' " she says.

Then she stole an oxycodone pill from her father, who had a 
prescription. She remembers keenly the euphoria. "I loved that 
feeling," she said.

She graduated from high school, got a solid job as a bank teller, 
bought a new car and moved in with a nice guy. Here and there, she 
would accept an oxycodone pill from a friend.

Within a year, an occasional pill turned into a full-fledged habit. 
At the height of her addiction, she says, she spent $80 a day on 
pills. She stole from her family. She pawned her dad's tools, her 
jewelry and her iPad. Her bank accounts were overdrawn. Her credit 
cards were maxed out.

"I would be late for work because my priority was getting the pills," 
she says. "I spent thousands and thousands of dollars." She told her 
parents and her boyfriend. "They were astonished," she says. "They 
had no idea."

She spent three months in rehab. Over seven sober months, she says, 
her dealers seemed to be everywhere, as if they were following her. 
One day, she caved, calling a dealer she knew. But the dealer had no 
pills, just heroin.

She smoked a half-gram of heroin that day.

A new job in 2013 brought her to Albuquerque, where a friend hooked 
her up with a new set of dealers. She took up with one of the 
drivers, who gave her free heroin. Sometimes she would drive with him 
to California to pick up kilos of heroin to bring to the market in 
Albuquerque. "I never thought in my head, ' I'm a drug dealer,' " she says.

When he moved back to Mexico without a word to her, she got involved 
with his boss. He gave her free heroin, too. He also threw around a 
lot of cash, once giving her $100 to do the laundry, she says.

In October 2013, she began shooting up.

At the mall store where she was an assistant manager, she popped into 
the back every few hours to shoot up. Then in February, her 
supervisor found her needles in a makeup bag in the bathroom. She was fired.

She went into rehab in March. A month later, DEA agents arrested a 
few of her former dealers.

"They could have arrested me. I'm so thankful they didn't. I don't 
want that life," she says. "I want to go back to school and be 
something. I want a career."

"I wish I never took that pill," she says. "If I never knew what 
opiates were, if I never tried that pill, would my life be different?"

[sidebar]

SHOPPING FOR A FIX, SUBURBAN MOM MAKES A QUICK CALL

Buying heroin in Albuquerque is as simple as making a phone call and 
placing an order.

A mother of teenagers, a woman in her 40s wearing fashionable 
leggings and flip-flops spangled with rhinestones and charms, is a 
recovering heroin addict who is helping the DEA because, she says, 
she's upset that dealers will sell to teenagers, including her own.

The woman, who asked not to be named because of her relationship with 
the DEA, grew addicted to pain pills after she broke her back nearly 
a decade ago while skating with her kids. She had a good job at a 
tech company, and she had health insurance. By 2010, she needed more 
than 80 milligrams of oxycodone a day to keep the pain and her 
cravings at bay.

Doctors, responding to the federal crackdown, often make pain 
patients sign contracts limiting the number of pills they can get 
each month. So when one of her kids stole her pain pills, her doctor 
refused to replace them.

"Anything in the world is better than withdrawal," she says. "Sweat 
covers your whole body. There's sweat between your toes. It feels 
like your guts are coming out of your body. You're vomiting bile."

She bought pain pills on the street, once meeting a dealer outside a 
Circle K store at midnight. Soon she was out of pills and money. A 
friend gave her heroin. It wasn't long before she graduated to 
needles, injecting the drug into her muscles.

"Your day becomes a quest to search for the money to buy drugs," she says.

With the DEA listening in, she phones one of her regular dealers. In 
less than two minutes, she negotiates the purchase of three gram pack 
of heroin and sets up a meeting place in a parking lot within steps 
of a Starbucks filled with workers from a nearby office park. The 
driver will deliver in less than an hour. 
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom