Pubdate: Sun, 02 Dec 2012
Source: Marion Star, The (OH)
Copyright: 2012 The Marion Star.
Contact: http://www.marionstar.com/customerservice/contactus.html
Website: http://www.marionstar.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2991
Author: Nick Bechtel

HEROIN IN MARION: NO SIGN OF ANY DECLINE IN USE

Opiates pose toughest problem in local war on drugs

MARION - The drug problem in Marion isn't getting better.

Officials say it's getting worse.

"It's bad," said Wade Ralph, Marion Fire Department public information
officer. "It's bad bad. It's a major problem in Marion right now."

Major Bill Collins with the Marion Police Department
agrees.

"It's not unusual for us to probably deal with 10 or more
heroin-related calls a week," he said. "That could be somebody
overdosing or a mom that found heroin instruments in her kid's room or
the heroin addict who robbed a Motomart to get money for heroin. So
it's hard to put a number on that unless you know exactly whether
they're a heroin addict or not."

While the police department is unable to officially tally the total
number of drug cases they deal with, they can track the number of
drug-related deaths with help from the county coroner.

"Just so far this year, through November, we've had 15 overdose
deaths," Collins said. "Out of that 15, six were heroin related and
nine were just pharmaceutical related."

Those 15 deaths, mostly attributed to opioids, are up from nine in
2011. Use of opioids, which are psychoactive narcotics such as
morphine, oxycodone and heroin, has been a rising trend for years in
Marion.

But it's not just a death or overdose problem, according to Jody
Demo-Hodgins, executive director of the Crawford-Marion Board of
Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services. It's an addiction
problem.

"Overdoses are one of the consequences of addiction," she said. "For
every one person who overdoses, there are about 800 people in
addiction in need of treatment."

Many opioids come in the form of prescription medicine, also known as
pain killers. Most current addicts use these pills as a gateway to
harder opioids like heroin. According to Collins, the shift to heroin
is common because it is cheaper and more potent than pills.

"I don't know a single opiate addict that didn't start by taking
pills," Demo-Hodgins said.

Both Collins and Demo-Hodgins said the range of people affected by the
addiction is all-encompassing.

"We've seen pictures of a nice-looking 20-year-old girl," Collins
said. "Three months later she's been on heroin non-stop and she's just
all ragged out, skinny, frail and can't wait to get high again. You
didn't really see that with crackheads. You didn't see that impact
that fast."

Collins said he has seen it affect men and women of all social
classes, and it's happening in urban and rural settings.

"But the thing that sticks out to me more than social class is the age
of people," he said. "From 16 to early 20s is probably our bulk of
cases. It certainly ranges higher than that, but the ones that we're
seeing most often and the ones that we're dealing with most often are
your average middle-class kids."

Collins, who has been monitoring the local drug scene since the 1980s,
said that crack cocaine was the most popular street drug in Marion
until about four years ago when heroin began showing up.

"We saw a person with (heroin-filled) balloons on them and were like
'What the heck is this?' We hadn't really seen it around here."

He said heroin dealers, mostly coming in from Columbus, brought the
then-unheard-of drug to Marion.

"People would trip two or three times a day to Columbus to buy enough
heroin for their own use, plus enough to sell to keep up with their
own habit," he said. "As that happened, the crack dealers from Detroit
and Chicago that we have predominantly had here started seeing that
their money supply was drying up because people were buying
pharmaceuticals and heroin. So it took them a while to transition and
figure the trend out, but eventually they did. And now, almost all of
our heroin comes from the Detroit area."

Ralph believed there was influence from outside Ohio contributing to
the local drug scene as well.

"It puts us in a unique situation," he said.

"For Chicago and Detroit, (Marion) is a smaller community and (drug
dealers) can run the gambit and not have a lot of competition."

Collins and his staff won a major battle in the war against drugs back
in March. Four men were arrested in the 400 block of North Prospect
Street. Police confiscated heroin, crack cocaine and more than 700
pills with a combined street value of $9,500. The four men were all
from the Detroit area.

Since that large drug bust, Collins said, it has been relatively
quiet. The lack of large busts like that could be attributed to the
budget cutbacks that has cut the number of police officers and sheriff
deputies on the drug task force from six to two.

Collins said monitoring the day-to-day drug scene has suffered, with
only large-scale dealers targeted because of limited manpower.

"A lot of times we get calls on the TIPS line from people that give us
information of a house on a particular street," he said. "And then
they call back three days later and say 'Why haven't you done
something? I called and told you this house was busy.' I can't set a
guy out there for eight hours. For us to have any impact, we have to
go after the people that are dealing the drugs. That's a pretty
in-depth thing to do. It takes a lot of man hours and a lot of
investigation to try and get the bigger players that are involved."
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