So far this month police have charged six people in Berkeley and Jefferson
Counties with the intent
to sell the drug. Last month three others were arraigned in federal court in
Martinsburg on charges they conspired to sell heroin.
“Heroin’s very dangerous, especially to a beginning user as
far as you have different grades of heroin,” Kyle Williamson, federal Drug
Enforcement Administration agent, said.
Williamson runs an office that oversees Western Maryland and
Berkeley, Jefferson and Morgan
Counties in West Virginia.
“Some heroin is more pure than other heroin. Heroin that’s been processed, that’s going to
be snorted, if you inject it intravenously, you’ll die,” Williamson said.
And statistics from the state Bureau for Public Health show
more people are dying with heroin in their system. In 2007 there were 21
deaths. That number increased to 37 in
2008.
Tom Light, WV Health Statistics Center spokesman, said estimates
there could be up to 35 heroin-related deaths this year.
Light said Berkeley
County led the state in deaths for the
past eight years with Cabell
County not far behind.
Other counties seeing an increase in the number of heroin-related deaths are
Jefferson, Kanawha, Monongalia and Hancock.
Officials we talked to say the spike in heroin use has
affected younger people, in their teens and 20’s. Paul Camilletti, Assistant US Prosecutor for
the Northern District of WV, said many of the deaths involve more than one
drug.
“It seems that mixing heroin with Xanax, which a lot of these
young folks do, that’s pretty dangerous. That’s a dangerous cocktail and it
does seem to cause some pretty significant changes in your bodily metabolism,
and you fall asleep and die,” Camilletti said.
The increase in deaths correlates with criminal activity
Williamson has observed since taking over the DEA regional office four years
ago. According to Williamson, heroin is being sold in the Eastern Panhandle and Western Maryland in open-air markets, where someone
stands on a street corner selling the drug.
“And that was relatively limited to cocaine from 2005 all
the way through the first part of 2009, but now we have a full-blown open-air
heroin market,” Williamson said.
“We’re starting to see a trend maybe where they’re setting
up what we call 'heroin mills' in hotel rooms and they’re actually milling the
heroin, packaging it, cutting it up into single dosage unit quantities and
selling it,” he said.
Williamson said heroin is brought to West
Virginia from cities like Detroit
and Pittsburgh.
In the Eastern Panhandle it primarily comes from Baltimore,
which has the reputation of being the heroin capital of the U.S.
“You’ve got people that go to Baltimore and they bring it in back via
vehicle, distribute on the street, distribute in the form of capsules,” Williamson
said. “Generally on the street, you’re running anywhere from $160 to $200 for a
gram of heroin.”
Williamson said law enforcement has recently made
significant arrests of dealers responsible for bringing lots of heroin into the
area.
“That person will soon be replaced,” he said. “It’s just
inevitable.”
For some, heroin is a substitute for cocaine which has
become less pure and more expensive in the past year or so.
“Because of its purity and the small amount that’s taken by
each user, it’s in effect cheaper, not on a gram per gram basis, but on a dose per
dose, or hit per hit basis,” Camilletti said.
“Where we might be paying $50 or $100 per dose per crack
cocaine, we’re paying $15 or $20 per dose for heroin.”
Williamson said heroin doesn’t carry the stigma it used to
have because users no longer have to inject it to get high.
“And now because you
can snort it, a more pure form that can be snorted, that’s more appealing to
people who normally would be scared off by the needles,” Williamson said.
Heroin is also popular among people addicted to prescription
drugs, a trend Ellen Valli sees. She’s
the Program Director at the Martinsburg Institute, one of eight methadone
clinics in West Virginia
that treats narcotic addicts.
“We’ve got 18-year-olds knocking at the door who have been
using narcotics for years, often starting with Oxycontin and prescriptions
they’re getting out of their parents medicine cabinets or from physicians, who
are writing huge amounts of narcotics, and then eventually having problems
maintaining, getting the medication, finding themselves turning to heroin,” Valli
said.
Since it only takes a small dose to get high on heroin, it’s
hard to prosecute trafficking of the drug when dealers are caught because the
penalties for carrying small amounts of drugs are fairly light.
“The federal sentencing guidelines are geared toward heavy
weights of drugs and heroin just doesn’t traffic in heavy weights,” Camilletti
said.
But Williamson said if a heroin dealer is connected with a
death, the penalties are stiff.
“One thing in the Federal law that really helps us out with
heroin and any other drug is a distribution that results in death,” Williamson
said.
But it’s not easy to connect heroin deaths to the
dealer. Many overdose deaths are not
witnessed by anyone. And many times the
person who dies has other substances in his bloodstream, so it’s hard to prove
heroin actually caused the death.
Camilletti says the last time his office successfully
prosecuted a case for distribution resulting in death was in 2005.