Cincinnati is the key distribution site for the supply of heroin that has Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky in a choke-hold, narcotics agents say.
The drug, mainly in the form as Mexican brown powder heroin, gets here via the usual drug routes of Interstate 75 and 71, dumping into source cities and then, in the hundreds of pounds, into Cincinnati.
“It’s all from the Mexican cartels,” said Lt. Brad Winall, commander of the Regional Narcotics Unit (RENU) based in Hamilton County. “The cartels will have people who work for them in the U.S. The organizations transport to particular ‘source’ cities. The source cities distribute larger amounts to urban areas, like Cincinnati. Here, it’s cut, so the dealers can make a better profit.”
Heroin is a cheap drug – cheaper and a lot more accessible than the prescription painkillers, which are synthetic opiates called opioids, so many current heroin users were hooked on before they first snorted or injected heroin. Local police in Northern Kentucky estimate a cost of $10 to $20 for an addict to get a fix. A gram of heroin is about $150, said Bill Mark, director of the Northern Kentucky Drug Strike Force.
About five years ago it’d have been unusual to find a heroin dealer in Northern Kentucky, Mark said, but not anymore.
“You see much larger scale heroin trafficking,” he said.
“It bottlenecks here,” said Craig Donnachie, senior supervisory resident agent of the FBI Covington office. “It’s so concentrated.”
About 18 months ago Northern Kentucky hit hard, harder than the rest of the state and had overdose death statistics greater than Hamilton County.
Now, the addiction woes have spread.
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The nation’s heroin epidemic is penetrating idyllic communities in Northern Kentucky as fiercely as New England states such as Vermont and Delaware.
In Delaware and around the country, heroin is in vogue again.
It’s a deadly fad. In the last eight months, fatal overdoses from all drugs, including alcohol, have jumped from 12 to 15 a month from 12 a month. Heroin’s resurgence is to blame for the rising death count, state officials say.
The problem is everywhere, and in all sections of New Castle County, from the Hunter’s Run Trailer Park in Bear to the upscale Country Creek community near Newark. Some users died in bedrooms, others on bathroom floors. One was found in a shed behind a home in Chelsea Estates. Another was lying on a driveway in Bear.
The victims in the 15 suspected heroin deaths that New Castle County Police responded to so far this year range in age from 22 to 51 years old. Nearly a third of them were female. All but one of them was white. Some already had been through drug rehab before heroin killed them. Four had been released from jail within days of their deaths.
Eight of the deaths statewide have been due to heroin laced with fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller added to the heroin to make it stronger and more attractive to the addict.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder calls says heroin in America is an “urgent public health crisis” in America. Delaware Health and Human Services Secretary Rita Landgraf says it’s an epidemic.
New Castle County Police Chief Elmer Setting, who once forced his teen daughter to watch an OD victim in a body bag get rolled into a medical examiner’s van, said the drug is his department’s top priority.
To fight the trade that’s bringing more death and addiction to a region that doesn’t have enough treatment to care for its addicts, the FBI and DEA in Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky deputize regional narcotics officers and local police for specific investigations. When the federal agents work with the local police, convicted dealers can end up with harsher penalties.
Law enforcement agencies are watching heroin numbers of all kinds climb year to year.
RENU, which interdicts drugs transported by interstate, saw more than a 740 percent increase in its seized heroin from 2011 to 2013, Winall said.
The Kentucky Crime Laboratory is analyzing more heroin each year: Total heroin cases jumped from 451 in 2010, or 2.3 percent of all drug cases, to 3,570 in 2013, which amounted to 17.9 percent of all drug cases, according to Kentucky State Patrol records.
Heroin surged in Northern Kentucky before most of the rest of the commonwealth, garnering 60 percent of prosecutions in the state all in 2011 with only 8.4 percent of the population.
Cases involving heroin trafficking and possession in Boone, Kenton, and Campbell counties have gone from 409 cases filed in 2009 to 2,204 cases filed in 2013, according to the Kentucky Administrative Office of the Courts. In comparison to the number of cases filed statewide, the percentage in the three specified counties have gone from 61 percent of heroin cases filed in the state in 2009 to 37 percent of heroin cases filed in the state in CY2013.
“Nevertheless, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of cases involving charges for heroin trafficking and possession,” the KAOC reported to the Enquirer.
“It’s a disturbing trend,” Mark said, looking over the records. “The number of arrests in Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties has doubled from year to year. The problem is growing.”
In order to keep track of its inmate housing issues, Campbell County Jail on Jan. 17 added a new designation a growing number of its inmates: “heroin alert.”
The alerts are the people brought in who either were charged with trafficking or possession of heroin or who, when prompted by jail staff, admit to being a heroin addict. Jailer Jim Daley says it’s easier to keep track of who might be withdrawing, as well as inform the Campbell County commonwealth’s attorney’s office.
The heroin alerts are climbing, Daley said. The average population in the Campbell County jail per month is 490 inmates, and an average of 235 of them are using or have heroin related charges, according to jail data. That’s 48 percent of the average population.
A commonly heard statement among cops in Ohio and Kentucky is, “we can’t arrest our way out of this epidemic.”
NKY FBI’s Donnachie agrees.
“We’re trying to cut the supply. That’s what I try to attack,” Donnachie said. “You also need public awareness and additional treatment.”
A grass-roots movement in Northern Kentucky that nearly two years ago morphed into a multi-tiered effort among public and private health care advocates, families, drug prevention groups and even the chamber of commerce is pushing for treatment funding and space.
Lt. Dough Ventre, commander of the multiagency Clermont County Narcotics Unit, said heroin is sold there, but not in large quantities.
“We’re seeing trafficking where people go into the city, buy a little bit,” Ventre said. “They sell some, they’re using some and they go back and re-up.”
“We’ve pinched a bunch of Mexican dealers, doing home delivery to people,” Ventre said. They’re sent into the region with a car and a cell phone, without a driver’s license, he said.
“Their job is every day to go around, drive and drop off heroin.”
Unlike Mark and Finall in Northern Kentucky and Hamilton County, Ventre said his unit sees mostly Mexican black tar heroin.
The difference in the heroin epidemic now and a heroin explosion in the 1970s is in its landing spots in affluent communities, such as Northern Kentucky’s Fort Mitchell.
“We had three people in one lot in Fort Mitchell with heroin paraphernalia,” Donnachie said. While police were questioning the trio, they spotted four more in another car in the same grocery store lot no farther than 30 yards away.
The overdosed addicts show up anywhere, slumped over steering wheels in shopping plaza lots, overdosed in fast-food restaurant restrooms, in homes and in parks throughout the region, police and paramedics say.
In the small river city of Bellevue, it’s not out of the ordinary for a cop who arrives to a heroin overdose call to recognize the victim.
“They are our friends and neighbors and they deserved better,” said Bellevue Police Chief Wayne Turner.
As the Northern Kentucky Drug Strike Force and FBI hit larger targets, Bellevue Police officers work on their own goal: “Shut down their curbside businesses,” Turner said.
“Every one of these victims has a name and a story,” Turner said. “I think what hits police departments like mine the hardest is the fact these are real people and someone’s family, not just a case number or a cataloged statistic.”
Turner’s force of 11 is out checking for suspected heroin dealing every day. If the chief gets a complaint about a suspicion of dealing at a house, he orders his officers to work on surveillance, but if that fails, be sure to make their presence known.
“We try to saturate that area with officers: Marked cruisers, unmarked cars, on bicycles,” directed patrol officer Craig Stephens said.
“I tell them to go there. Do your roll calls there. Be there every chance they can,” Turner said.
Bellevue Police carry gloves and sharps containers in their cruisers to collect discarded heroin syringes along streets and near the highways.
In Bellevue, police are taking the heroin crisis personally, Stephens said.
“It’s the girl next door,” he said, conveying the story of a teenage girl who, police had heard, was a heroin addict. They were anxiously awaiting a tragic call to her family’ s home, but officer Roy Catron intervened.
He’d met a heroin addiction counselor through his work as a street cop, and he introduced the counselor to the teenager. She was sent to Florida for treatment. “She’s now healthy. She’s in college,” Stephens said. “He did this all on his own.”
In Covington, police have been known to drop off heroin addicts at the NKY Med Clinic, the region’s only methadone clinic.
Everyone, it seems, has a story, and no one sees an end to the heroin epidemic.
“The short answer is no,” RENU’s Winall said, asked whether he sees relief coming.
“We target the heroin trafficker and make arrests and seize large quantities of heroin much like other drug task forces,” he said. The unit’s interdiction program finds the heroin comes from California, Texas and Arizona, frequently, and it often goes through Chicago before getting to Cincinnati.
“However, as long as there is the continued appetite and demand for heroin, the cartels will find ways to transport the heroin into the Greater Cincinnati area – and of course there will be a continuous supply of local traffickers willing to sell the smaller quantities to individuals addicted to this drug. ?
Kentucky Crime Laboratories heroin cases:
2010: 451
2011: 749
2012: 1,803
2013: 3,570
Campbell County Jail: total inmates housed on ‘heroin alert’ — in for possession, trafficking of heroin or admitted heroin addiction to jail staff:
| 2013 | 2014 | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| JANUARY | 458 | 489 | |
| February | 423 | 506 | |
| March | 457 | 481 | |
| April | 473 | 510 | |
| May | 453 | 494 | |
| Source:Campbell County Jail | |||
Heroin: Cheap, pure, plentiful
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