Source: Orlando Sentinel (FL) Copyright: 1999 Orlando Sentinel Website: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/ Forum: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/interact/messageboards/ Contact: Sun, 17 Jan 1999 Author: Jim Leusner and Henry Pierson Curtis of The Sentinel Staff [Pedro Ruz Gutierrez and Mike Berry of the Sentinel staff contributed to this report.] HEROIN FIGHT STALLS AS MORE DIE Just 17 months ago, the nation's drug czar congratulated the Orlando area for stemming its rate of heroin deaths. Today, such praise would be dead wrong. Heroin killed twice as many people last year as it did in 1997. The death toll is expected to break 50 when final lab results are completed. In just five years, the drug has killed 136 users in Orange, Osceola, Seminole, Volusia and Brevard counties. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others are living fix to fix. Nothing tried so far has stopped the flow of heroin into Central Florida or done more than temporarily suppress the rising number of deaths. A new task force is arresting drug dealers, but heroin with a purity and addictive power unheard of 10 years ago is easily available to teens for $10 a dose. The federal government has provided only part of the drug-fighting money promised to the area. School drug-abuse talks and other programs pound home the dangers of heroin, but most new users are at least 20 years old, untouched by typical anti-drug efforts. Worst of all, even though someone dies of a heroin overdose almost every week, few people seem to care. "Nobody gets involved unless they know the people who have died. They don't think of them as people," said Tinker Cooper of Orlando, whose son died of an overdose in 1996. On Friday(1/22/99), Congress will take a look at the problem. The U.S. House Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources subcommittee, represented locally by U.S. Rep. John Mica, R- Winter Park, will hold a public hearing from 10 a.m to 2 p.m. in the auditorium of Lake Howell High School near Casselberry. Witnesses will include former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez, the nation's drug czar from 1991 to 1993. Also expected to testify are law enforcement officials, heroin users, parents of drug victims, educators and drug treatment experts. The rising number of heroin deaths in Orlando continues to mystify drug-treatment and law enforcement officials. A Sentinel review of 1998 police and medical examiner records shows the fatalities largely were confined to Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties, with victims ranging from age 18 to 45. Four were 18 years old. One was 19. "You think, 'It won't happen to me. I'm only going to do a little bit. I'm not going to get sick using it,' " said a Central Florida man in his mid- 20s who works as an undercover drug informant. He recently overdosed after using heroin for seven months. "I'm tired. I'm really tired of it all," he said, adding that he has 30 or 40 friends who are users. Police theorize that most users like him are simply out of reach of mainstream drug prevention. They don't read newspapers, watch TV news or listen to anyone but their friends. And it's still hip to be high, even in Central Florida's best public and private high schools. "On the street, this is something cool to try," said Orange County Sheriff's Lt. Mike Miller, a supervisor in the drug unit. "And when they try it for the first time, they're [already] high on GHB, roofies, powder cocaine." Autopsy after autopsy has proved that mixing heroin with other drugs can be a lethal formula. Deaths continued to rise after Orlando imposed a curfew for teens in downtown nightclubs. Authorities blamed the club scene for easy access to drugs and the rising popularity of heroin. Drugs still trade hands in nightclubs. But the scene has grown. After- hours house parties go unregulated in the suburbs. And heroin changes hands in garages and offices now, just the way cocaine spread through the working and middle classes in the late 1970s. Not just in city A map of Central Florida drug busts shows how drugs have moved outward from Orlando. Old haunts remain along South Orange Blossom Trail and Oak Ridge Road. But teens are getting arrested for buying heroin on the outskirts of Hunter's Creek, a community of walled neighborhoods in south Orange County, along Semoran Boulevard in east Orlando and at tourist hotels. The 1998 death toll would have been even higher, except for the quick work of Orange County paramedics and emergency room doctors. They saved 21 heroin overdose victims last year. Orlando's heroin problem came to light in 1996 after six teens overdosed and died within 10 months. The drug that everyone thought had died with inner-city junkies in the 1960s and '70s quietly arrived in Florida's family-friendly vacationland. The new sources -- Colombian drug groups -- peddled a cheaper, more potent brand of heroin processed in remote South American labs. Alarm over the deaths and increased numbers of drug-trafficking arrests triggered town meetings and civic and school plans to educate the public. Congress responded by designating a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area stretching from St. Petersburg to Daytona Beach. Headquartered in Orlando, the local-federal partnership would combat a variety of drug problems, but its primary mission was to target heroin traffickers. With great fanfare and speeches by Mica and Sen. Bob Graham, D- Fla., they announced $1 million in funding to form the unit in January 1998. But the money didn't show up in Central Florida until August. So far, the office of drug czar Barry McCaffrey has allocated only about $1 million of an expected $3 million for 1999. The task force works out of three police agencies around Orlando with borrowed equipment and manpower. Still, agents have arrested 58 suspects and seized 5 1/2 pounds of heroin since June, when they made their first arrests, said Drug Enforcement Administration agent Steve Collins, the group's heroin supervisor. Despite such efforts, heroin and cocaine continue to arrive at Orlando International Airport on flights from Puerto Rico. The island is a favorite stopover point for Colombian, Puerto Rican and Dominican smugglers. The San Juan-to-Orlando pipeline is so strong that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement says it's the reason heroin is cheaper and purer in Central Florida than anywhere else in the state. While South Florida heroin tests 30 percent pure, the FDLE crime lab in Orlando routinely finds street-level doses up to 97 percent pure. 'No one seems to care' "People are dying and no one seems to care," said FDLE drug supervisor Dave Donaway. "Everyone is just as eager to go out and sell it -- and people are just as eager to use it as before the deaths came to the forefront." Donaway and his squad of agents made 25 heroin trafficking arrests in 1998 in joint investigations with Orange and Osceola counties. They seized two pounds of heroin, equal to at least 10,000 street-level doses. FDLE plans to move a second squad to Orlando to target heroin cases, he said. Orange County deputies made 171 heroin arrests from January to November 1998. They seized about 11/2 pounds of heroin. Osceola County authorities made 48 arrests and seized nearly a half-pound of the drug. The results of these and other efforts can be seen most weeks in federal court: gaunt-looking heroin users and dealers doubled over in pain, fighting the effects of drug withdrawal. Defense attorneys sometimes delay bail hearings for weeks to let the junkies withdraw in jail. Concern about heroin overdoses and drug use prompted the Orange County school district to introduce a heroin awareness program in the 1996-97 school year. Discussions about the drug and how to deal with it start in the fifth grade. Annual drug-use surveys suggest that the percentage of high school students who experimented with heroin has dropped -- from 1.6 percent in 1996 to 1.2 percent in 1997. But the percentage of regular users remained steady, said Marge LaBarge, senior administrator for the district's Student Assistance and Family Empowerment program. "The school district will not be able to stop a heroin addict. They have to go into treatment, and that is beyond our realm," LaBarge said. "Our only role there is to try to get help for them." Tinker Cooper, who lost her 26-year-old son to an overdose on Jan. 3, 1996, said many Central Florida residents tend to blame the families of addicts and treat them as outcasts. It angered her to discover that many people don't care if heroin users die. "These are not scumbags," Cooper said. "These are good kids from good homes." Becky Cherney, a spokeswoman for the Central Florida Health Care Coalition, said heroin abuse is becoming a forgotten epidemic because of the difficulty many people have dealing with long-term social and health problems. Last spring, the coalition's corporate members, who provide health insurance to 750,000 Floridians, sponsored an anti-heroin campaign that distributed thousands of T-shirts and posters in schools. Little seems to have come of it, however. "It seems like we have a disease-of-the-month mentality," Cherney said. "We have a notoriously short attention span." For those who cannot help but remember, Cooper is organizing a support group for the families of heroin victims. The idea came from Capt. Ernie Scott, head of the Orange County sheriff's drug unit. Victims' families are helping the Sheriff's Office make a 16-minute video on the dangers of drugs. About a dozen overdose victims appear in the video the way deputies found them. Some were teenagers. Others were slightly older. Some have the pasty look of mannequins. Others have the choked-blue look of death. The first audience will be every member of the Sheriff's Office. Sheriff Kevin Beary issued the order, partly to make sure his deputies understand how families of overdose victims suffer. "Will it make a difference? Who knows," Scott said. "But the families all say if it saves one life, it's worth it." Law enforcement officials say they need more money, manpower, drug treatment and education programs to win the fight. But they say it can't be won while public apathy remains so high. "Imagine if a gunman was out and responsible for the death of 50 people. We would be outraged," said Seminole County Sheriff Don Eslinger, head of the board that oversees the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force. "There's no difference between the heroin trafficker and someone who puts a gun to someone else's head . . .," he said. "How we face the problem today determines the success or failure of our community in the future." - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck