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."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom