Pubdate: Fri, 25 Sep 2015
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2015 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Todd C. Frankel, in Dayton, Ohio

PELLETS, PLANES AND THE NEW FRONTIER

He practiced with baby carrots, swallowing them whole, easing them 
down his throat with yogurt. Later came the heroin pellets, each 
loaded with 14 grams of powder, machine-wrapped in wax paper and 
thick latex. Long gone were the days of swallowing hand-knotted, 
drug-filled condoms. The Mexican drug trafficking organizations were 
always perfecting their craft.

On this trip, Gerardo A. Vargas would swallow 71 pellets - a full 
kilo, just over two pounds, enough for as many as 30,000 hits at $10 
a pop on American streets. And so before he set off on his 3,900-mile 
journey from Uruapan, Mexico, Vargas was given the rules: No soda, 
because it could erode the pellets' wrapping. No orange juice, 
either. Drink only water. He was told which airports to avoid, which 
places to go, his every move orchestrated by his handler in Mexico.

And don't eat anything, he was told, until reaching the final 
destination: Dayton, Ohio, one of the new frontiers of the American 
heroin epidemic.

A sophisticated farm-to-arm supply chain is fueling America's surging 
heroin appetite, causing heroin to surpass cocaine and meth to become 
the nation's No. 1 drug threat for the first time. As demand has 
grown, the flow of heroin- a once-taboo drug now easier to score in 
some cities than crack or pot-has changed, too.

Mexican cartels have overtaken the U.S. heroin trade, imposing an 
almost corporate discipline. They grow and process the drug 
themselves, increasingly replacing their traditional black tar with 
an innovative high-quality powder with mass market appeal: It can be 
smoked or snorted by newcomers as well as shot up by hard-core addicts.

They have broadened distribution beyond the old big-city heroin 
centers like Chicago or New York to target unlikely places such as 
Dayton. The midsize Midwestern city today is considered to be an 
epicenter of the heroin problem, with addicts buying and overdosing 
in unsettling droves. Crack dealers on street corners have been 
supplanted by heroin dealers ranging across a far wider landscape, 
almost invisible to law enforcement. They arrange deals by cellphone 
and deliver heroin like pizza.

In August of last year, a window opened into this shadowy world: A 
tip led federal drug agents to Vargas, a low-level courier willing to 
tell them what he knew in exchange for leniency.

"Sometimes," one agent later explained, "the dope gods smile."

Vargas was the perfect drug mule. He was 22 but looked younger. He'd 
been born in California, moving to Mexico at age 12 after his father 
was deported, so he possessed a U.S. passport. He also had a spotless 
record, perfect English and a desperate need for cash: His father had 
already lost one eye to diabetes.

He'd been offered $6 a gram. This job would earn him nearly $6,000.

Things could go wrong. Another courier headed to Dayton had to use 
the bathroom unexpectedly during a layover at a U.S. airport and lost 
his pellets when the toilet flushed automatically, according to the 
drug agents who finally arrested him.

Pellets bursting was a courier's worst fear. Once, in Lorain, Ohio, a 
courier started foaming at the mouth, and his handler called Mexico 
to figure out what to do. As authorities listened via wiretap, the 
handler was told to cut the courier open and retrieve the remaining drugs.

Vargas had been carefully trained to avoid such accidents. According 
to court documents and multiple interviews with Drug Enforcement 
Administration investigators and Vargas's attorneys, he began his 
journeys with visits to a gray stucco house in Uruapan, a city of 
315,000 people in the state of Michoacan, which sprawls west from 
Mexico City to the Pacific Ocean.

But Vargas knew almost nothing about Dayton, beyond what seemed to be 
an insatiable demand for the secret stash he carried.

Crack cocaine used to be Dayton's drug of choice. That's how La 
Familia Michoacana got its start here. According to the DEA, the drug 
cartel employed a man named Daniel Garcia-Guia, who moved thousands 
of kilos of drugs into Dayton - almost entirely cocaine-until his 
arrest in 2007.

"We didn't seize any heroin in those days," DEA special agent Steve Lucas said.

But a year later, Lucas was at a drug stash house with La Familia 
ties doing a trash pull-going through garbage looking for evidence - 
when he stumbled on pellet wrappings with heroin residue.

"I was shocked," Lucas recalled. "One day it was kilos of coke, and 
suddenly it was heroin."

It was as if a switch had been flipped. And it was happening across 
the country.

This wasn't supposed to happen with heroin. The drug has a reputation 
as a rough ride. That's why many experts believe heroin fell out of 
favor after the last heroin epidemic in the early 1970s. For years, 
treatment centers saw few heroin addicts. But that started changing 
in the mid-2000s and took off a few years later after a government 
crackdown on opioid painkiller abuse. Unable to get pills, many 
addicts turned to heroin, the painkillers' chemical cousin.

Today, authorities estimate that there are between 435,000 and 1.5 
million heroin users in the United States. Treatment centers are once 
again flooded with young users, many of whom got their start on 
prescription drugs.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine (R), whose office has focused on 
the heroin epidemic, said he was astonished at how easily pill 
addicts made the switch.

"There used to be some psychological barrier to heroin," DeWine said. 
"That barrier is gone today."

In Montgomery County, home to Dayton, heroin-related deaths have 
skyrocketed 225 percent since 2011. Last year, this county of 540,000 
residents reported 127 fatal heroin overdoses - among the highest 
rates in the nation, according to statistics from the U.S. Centers 
for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The coroner can't keep up," said Robert Carlson, an ethnographer at 
Wright State University in Dayton who helps track overdoses. "There's 
not enough room to keep all the bodies."

Just as U.S. authorities were cracking down on painkillers, Mexican 
cartels were figuring out how to make high-quality powder heroin. For 
decades, Mexicans dealt primarily in home-grown black tar heroin, a 
crude concoction that looks like its name. It is sticky like tree sap 
and odorous like vinegar. Its appeal is limited. And it was sold 
almost exclusively west of the Mississippi River. East of the 
Mississippi, the Colombians pushed powder heroin.

But moving beyond black tar made sense for the Mexicans. Powder was a 
better product. Stronger. It was easier to smuggle, too: Kilo for 
kilo, powder took up less room.

It was also extremely profitable. A kilo of heroin might cost $5,000 
to produce in Mexico. But it could sell for $80,000 to suppliers in 
the United States, twice what cocaine fetches. And a street dealer 
could make $300,000 by diluting the kilo and doling it out to addicts 
one-tenth of a gram at a time.

The first signs that the map's stark divisions were blurring soon 
popped up at the DEA's Heroin Signature Program lab in Sterling, Va.

The chemists there trace the origins of heroin shipments by detecting 
differences in how the drug is made and matching that with known 
recipes from Mexico, Colombia or Asia. But, in 2005, they saw 
something odd. Normally, they failed to identify the country of 
origin for about 5 percent of samples. Now, nearly one-quarter of 
samples were coming up "unclassified."

Drug researchers had a theory: Mexican cartels were hiring Colombian 
chemists to teach them the secrets to better heroin. Then, the lab's 
chemists found the proof they needed. This year, the DEA quietly 
unveiled a new category: heroin of Mexican origin, South American processing.

And that powder is what seems to be driving the epidemic into cities 
like Dayton.

For La Familia, shipping powder straight to smaller markets such as 
Dayton meant no more sharing with suppliers in Chicago or New York.

"I'd never thought it, but we turned into a source city," Montgomery 
County Sheriff Phil Plummer said.

To spur demand, dealers started throwing in free "tester" hits of 
powder heroin when customers bought pot or crack. Many dealers soon 
moved to heroin full time, police and former addicts said.

In Dayton, heroin is sold in "caps"- generic gel caps bought in bulk 
at health-food stores. And when a dealer has good heroin, he will 
brag that it's fire. These caps are fire.

A cap, containing what looks like a dusting of heroin, sells for $10.

With a bellyful of heroin, Vargas followed the same worn path 
followed by hundreds of other drug mules. He began by hopping a 2:05 
p.m. Volaris flight from Uruapan to Tijuana, putting him 20 minutes 
from the U.S.-Mexico border.

No one knows how many tons of drugs slip across that border. 
Authorities know only what they manage to stop. Researchers say the 
border detection rate hovers around 1.5 percent-favorable odds for a smuggler.

The next morning, Vargas and his kilo walked into the San Ysidro 
border station, the nation's busiest entry point. Waved on, he caught 
a hired van outside the border station and headed 100 miles north to 
John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, Calif., bypassing the much closer 
airport in San Diego, which he'd been warned to avoid. Other drug 
couriers had been arrested there.

He caught AirTran Flight 436 to Las Vegas, then jumped on Southwest 
Flight 2419. But he wasn't flying to Dayton. He'd been warned to 
avoid that airport, too. He landed in Indianapolis at 1:19 a.m.

In the pre-dawn hours, Vargas hailed a cab for the two-hour ride to Dayton.

After 3,900 miles and 37 hours, Vargas checked in to a $45-a-night 
room at the Dayton Motor Motel. He was in Room 8.

On the streets, heroin is called girl. Crack is boy. And the switch 
from boy to girl has complicated the job for drug cops such as Sgt. 
John Sullivan, who heads Dayton's undercover drug unit.

"In the transition from crack to heroin," Sullivan said, "the 
business model has totally changed."

The crack trade at least had a physical location. There were crack 
houses. Drug corners. Runners. Police knew which neighborhoods to focus on.

With heroin, it's mobile phones and car-to-car transactions. The 
deals can take place in mall parking lots. At gas stations. In 
suburbs. Dealers will come to you, what's known as the pizza-delivery model.

In Albuquerque, addicts calling their dealer were patched through to 
a dispatcher living in Washington state.

"There's no geography to it anymore," said Lee Hoffer, an 
ethnographer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who is 
studying heroin users. And the dealers have gotten smarter. Tired of 
losing personal vehicles to drug forfeiture laws, they use rentals, 
which can't be seized, Sullivan said. The end of drug houses means 
there is nothing for police to raid - or rival dealers to rob. Turf 
wars have disappeared along with the turf. Drug dealers realized they 
could live anywhere. Some moved to the suburbs. One moved into the 
same upscale apartment building as Sullivan.

The business now is all about the phone. A dealer's phone, filled 
with customers' numbers, is so valuable that it's known as a money 
phone. The information is often backed up onto other phones or stored 
on computers in Mexico. When police seize a money phone, they have to 
seal it in a special bag to block cell signals, or dealers can erase 
its memory remotely.

"Logistically," said Capt. Mike Brem of the Montgomery County Sheriff 
's Office, heroin "is a nightmare."

That was evident one day this summer as Sullivan and a Dayton police 
team tried to buy 10 caps of heroin. An undercover detective called a 
dealer on his cellphone and was told to drive to a street corner and 
wait. The dealer called with new turn-by-turn directions.

Sullivan steered a surveillance van along the twists and turns as he 
struggled to keep up with his detective. The dealer lured the buyer 
closer and closer, until Sullivan's van was sitting atop an alley, 
waiting. The dealer called back. The deal was off. He was suspicious.

Sullivan and his team headed back to the office, where they watched 
surveillance video of another heroin buy: Two cars pulling alongside 
each other on a quiet street, driver to driver, and hands flashing 
through open windows.

"Right there, that was it," said one drug cop. "And then they're gone."

The afternoon after he arrived, Vargas emerged from his motel room. 
He walked across the parking lot, never seeming to notice the 
undercover drug cops parked around the perimeter.

Jason Via, a DEA special agent, sized Vargas up, watching him walk to 
a McDonald's.

On previous trips, Vargas had stayed at a Ramada in a nearby suburb. 
He usually shared the room with another courier. The pellets were 
collected by a blond woman. Vargas overheard her talking on the phone 
with someone he assumed was her contact in Mexico. She called him "Chilango."

Vargas never met Chilango. But the DEA suspects that they know who he 
is- a Michoacan resident who once lived in Dayton and now coordinates 
heroin distribution from Uruapan. The entire operation was being 
orchestrated from thousands of miles away.

In recent years, the La Familia cartel has been hobbled by violence 
and arrests south of the border. Splinter groups emerged. Now, it 
wasn't clear to the DEA how much control any trafficking group 
exerted. Yet the flow of heroin never stopped. The streets never know 
a shortage. Addicts, in fear of being dope sick, always keep backup 
dealers. Dealers keep backup suppliers.

Heroin doesn't move in a straight line, but like a computer network, 
with nodes and redundancies, said Hoffer, the ethnographer. "You can 
take out a large portion of the vertical chain and it'll have no 
effect on the final market - the consumer."

The next afternoon, Via and another agent knocked on Vargas's door. 
Vargas did not seem surprised. He let them in. Via noticed a trash 
can that had been used as a toilet - a sign of a body courier. Vargas 
permitted the agents to search the room. They found a plastic bag 
filled with heroin pellets hidden in the toilet tank.

Vargas began to talk. He told his life story. How he was a married 
father of two. How his father was sick with diabetes.

And then Vargas mentioned that he had one last pellet inside him.

Via rushed Vargas to a hospital. He didn't want the pellet to burst.

Vargas faced serious prison time: 10 years to life. His best shot at 
helping himself was to talk. So he spilled the details of his trips. 
He even sat down with the DEA in a fruitless attempt to use satellite 
maps of Uruapan to find that gray stucco house where it all began. It 
was clear how little Vargas knew. "He was a babe in the woods," his 
attorney, Patrick Mulligan, said.

At his sentencing hearing in January, Vargas was remorseful. The 
judge sentenced him to two years. Vargas did not respond to attempts 
to talk with him in prison.

Recently, county detectives were closing in on another courier holed 
up in another local motel. This time, the courier was a woman, as 
many are these days, a fresh sign of the ever-changing tactics.

But the dope gods were not smiling this time. They just missed her.

The heroin has kept flowing, uninterrupted. Same with the overdoses. 
The treatments and relapses. Caps still go for $10. Girl is still fire.

[sidebar]

About this story: From the countryside of New England to the cities 
of the Midwest, the most deadly epidemic of heroin use in a 
half-century is tearing at the fabric of American life. In this 
series of articles, The Washington Post examines why heroin has made 
such a powerful comeback, how well-intentioned government policies 
have fueled demand for the drug and why enormous hurdles stand in the 
way of bringing the epidemic under control.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom