Philadelphia police Officer Deanna Demnisky holds up a body bag at that end of a presentation on the dangers of using drugs at Livengrin in Fort Washington.
Police are called to a home — this one in Perkasie — where a 17-year-old has overdosed on heroin,
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In this particular case, the child lived and, a few days later, her dealer — a Perkasie resident who was a reported drug addict — was arrested.
The 17-year-old didn’t have to go to Philadelphia or Trenton or Allentown to feed her habit. There was another drug addict, just a few years older and more streetwise, willing to do it for her.
“These kids don’t all want to go to the city, so one of them runs down to buy a bundle and makes a few bucks for himself and has five bags left over for himself,” Hilltown Detective Lou Bell said.
Quakertown police Lt. Don Bender said the majority of people arrested for dealing drugs in the suburbs are doing it to supplement their own addiction. Bender said the typical younger addict is going to Philadelphia or Allentown to buy anywhere from a bundle to 10 bundles for themselves and other addicts they know. The word on the street is that Philadelphia dope is stronger than Allentown dope, and Route 309 is a straight shot down into the city, including the Far Northeast section.
Earlier this year, Bell busted a Hilltown man who was buying bundles of heroin in Philadelphia with money pooled from friends and getting a few bags for himself as well as some spare cash. Bell said that bust led to two more arrests of dealers in Philadelphia, just across the border from Bensalem, who were selling to suburbanites who were then bringing the dope back home to Upper Bucks.
That’s one way heroin gets around in the suburbs. Another way is the dealer coming to the buyer.
“Because the market for heroin is growing in the suburbs, the dealers and traffickers are simply responding to the heroin market’s demand,” said Jonathan Duecker, special agent with the Bureau of Narcotics Investigation and Drug Control for the state Office of the Attorney General. “The dealers that have historically stayed in the urban venue, forcing users to go to them, have made a business decision to instead travel to the outskirts and suburbs of the city to take the product to the user.”
Suburban users will pay a premium for that type of service, he said, adding that it's also safer for the buyers.
Users and dealers are also becoming more savvy, using social media, the Internet and texting to set up exchanges. “That allows the parties in the transaction to advertise both the demand for the drug as well as the availability,” Duecker said.
Such electronic methods are tough for law enforcement agencies to detect, he said.
And, he added, the epidemic is growing.
“The problem of heroin is definitely increasing statewide; we're seeing more availability, higher purity and cheaper prices,” said Duecker. The findings by the Bureau of Narcotics are consistent with other law enforcement agencies, including the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration offices in the region, he added.
The big change in heroin over the last eight to 10 years is really the source of its origin and the quantity, investigators have determined through its increased availability and lower price, Duecker said. Mexico is considered the primary source of heroin now, whereas most of it previously came from Southeast Asia or Colombia.
“Mexico's close proximity and porous border with the United States means huge amounts can be brought across the border in vehicles, hit the U.S. interstate system, and be distributed anywhere and everywhere throughout the U.S.,” he said.
Since the state has numerous interstate roads, Pennsylvania is considered “a trans-shipment state as well as a destination state,” Duecker explained. “Mexican cartels have flooded the marketplace with heroin nationwide and Philadelphia.”
These cartels, known by investigators as drug trafficking organizations, “are uncompromising” when it comes to competition, he said. They will usually either convince local traffickers to work for them or intimidate them through the use or threat of violence, he said.
“The violence associated with those gangs manifests in the prisons, on the streets, and in the neighborhoods of Pennsylvania and the region,” he said.
Reputation for pure heroin
The cartels also know what their customers want — purer heroin, he said. Philadelphia, and the surrounding region, have historically had cheap, pure heroin, Duecker said. He said the Drug Enforcement Administration has for many years conducted a program where agents buy heroin around the city and in other cities to stay aware of the drug's price, purity and availability.
“Probably more than any other illicit drug, quality matters for heroin users,” Duecker said. “That's one reason why purity matters and the Mexican cartels have responded the way they have, and heroin dealers at the street level have responded accordingly.”
For the dealers, purity means the drug is marketable and attractive and can be cut with other products more times, which means higher profit. For example, he said,
Ray Ban Vintage, 1 kilogram of 99 percent pure heroin can be "cut" to make 1.5 kilograms of heroin, which gives the dealer more to sell. If the product is less pure, the dealer cannot cut it as much, decreasing the profit.
JoAnn Szpanka, director of the Bucks County Crime Lab, said myriad drugs can be cut into heroin. Two commonly used, over-the-counter substances are procaine and lidocaine. The anesthetics or numbing agents have some effects in common with cocaine. Other common cutting agents are the synthetic club drug ecstasy,
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“If the dope is less pure after being cut, the customer will likely know immediately because the successive highs for the user are less pleasurable, and the dealer will lose customers,” Duecker said.
An alarming fact, he said, is that people who don't historically fit the demographics of heroin users are now involved in both the trafficking and using, partially because of the purity factor. The higher purity allows for users to get high without the use of needles.
“The stigma attached to needles, track marks, etc. has been somewhat eliminated by the ability to avoid intravenous injection by smoking it,” he said. “In many of the state’s jurisdictions, heroin has almost replaced cocaine as the drug of choice because of the high availability and the low cost.”
That was echoed by Bell.
From pills to heroin
“The straight-A student from the high school who gets bored is hitting the medicine cabinet,” Bell said. “They start popping oxys by mouth and, after a while, that doesn’t do it anymore, they don’t get high off it.
“They start grinding up the pills and snorting them and that doesn’t do it anymore. They get 'dopesick.' Then they start snorting heroin. It’s cheap, $10 to $15 a bag, compared to $22, $25 or $30 per pill. Then they start shooting it. That one kid, that straight-A student, doesn’t see that when they take that first pill. They don’t see it going down that path where they end up shooting it,” Bell added.
This heroin trend started about six to 10 years ago, and continues to increase in popularity across the commonwealth, Duecker said. Abuse of prescription pills is partly to blame.
"Prescription narcotics abuse is growing at alarming rates; we have numerous cases throughout the state involving doctors writing prescriptions that are in no way connected to legitimate purposes," he said. "We have cases where prescriptions are stolen and forged or sold."
Unfortunately, Duecker said, efforts to crack down on the illegal diversion of prescription pills will potentially result in a new marketplace for heroin.
“As we do a better job addressing abuse of opioid prescription drugs, users currently hooked on those will most likely turn to heroin as a cheaper, purer, albeit deadlier, alternative.”
David Dongilli, an agent with the Philadelphia division of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the Mexican drug cartels are capitalizing on this new market. He said dealers know that the spike in abuse of medicines is leading to an increased demand for heroin.
Wake-up call for parents
Duecker warns parents to be aware and understand that prescription pill addiction is not any different than addiction to heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine.
"There's a troubling notion in society that pills, which are manufactured under strict quality control standards and prescribed by and dispensed by medical professionals, are somehow 'clean' and safer to abuse.”
Duecker said, in fact, law enforcement sees the same types of crimes and violence associated with pill abuse as they do with the other drugs.
“We recently arrested over 50 people across two states involved in selling illegitimate prescriptions,” he said. “During the search warrants conducted as a result of the investigation, we seized 35 handguns, shotguns and rifles, many of which were loaded and strategically placed inside the residences, suggesting that the members of the pill ring were ready and willing to use deadly force to protect their operation.”
Earlier this year, Bucks County detectives shut down an alleged prescription pill ring in which the reported ring leader was printing prescriptions from his computer and a group of heroin and pill addicts would get paid in drugs to fill the prescriptions at pharmacies in Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties. That case is awaiting trial.
Duecker said parents should reinforce with their kids the fact that heroin is extremely addictive and, once addicted, users face an almost insurmountable road to getting off the drug.
“Kids that get addicted to heroin often turn to theft in order to pay for their habit. The bottom line is that heroin is not the drug to 'try' or experiment with; addiction is all but assured and the lives of heroin users and their families will be destroyed along the way.”
Many suburbanites, looking to buy more for less, inevitably make their way to Philadelphia.
"I've worked at Fourth and Indiana and am always amazed at how easy it is to purchase heroin, as well as just about anything else you might be looking for, any time of the day and any day of the year," Duecker said.
And it's not just kids driving in from the suburbs, he said.
It's city school bus drivers, teachers, laborers, housewives from New Jersey, dentists from the Main Line, and Center City professionals who need to get their fix for the day, he said.
"The demographic of the heroin user in Pennsylvania is as eclectic as there is for any drug being abused," he said. "This is another reason why heroin use is increasing; the user base is wide and deep."
Why is it so easy to buy?
Duecker said the phenomenon of open air markets is less about effective policing and counter-drug efforts than it is about very effective drug trafficking and dealing practices. But it accounts for the "widespread availability of heroin." A targeted counter-drug investigation must have the discipline to stay focused on a particular street corner organization and ignore the temptation to knock off street dealers not associated with the targets of the investigation, he said.
"The police officers are in the best position to arrest individual dealers on the street, but those officers cannot be everywhere all of the time. And they have to witness a 'hand-to-hand' transaction while driving through a treacherous intersection avoiding pedestrians."
At the end of the day, Duecker said, there are far too many dealers and not enough resources.
An area of Philadelphia known as the "Badlands" has a reputation for heroin sales, he said. When police target a corner, he said, dealers move around the block to avoid detection.
"You can target an individual, but if he's senior enough in the organization, he won't touch the money or the drugs. If he's too junior, he doesn't know anything of investigative value," Duecker said. "Getting 'into' an organization requires far more investigative time and effort, and you need to start low in the organization and work your way up. But, there are so many independent and loosely affiliated dealers at the ground level that each of them naturally assumes that law enforcement is looking at someone else. And they're right."
Matt Coughlin: 215-345-3147; mcoughlin@phillyburbs.com; Twitter: @coughlinreports
Marion Callahan: 215-345-3060;
mcallahan@phillyburbs.com, Twitter: @marioncallahan
Laurie Mason Schroeder: 215-694-7489; email: lmason@phillyBurbs.com; Twitter: @BucksCourts
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To answer the question as to whether a teacher can call police or the media: Yes, just like any citizen who sees a crime they are entitled to report it, said Matt Weintraub, the district attorney's chief of trials. Weintraub said the school may have its own internal policies, but as far as criminal law is concerned, the teacher is able to report a crime. Journalists also welcome any information provided and in many cases will risk prison to protect a source.
Law Enforcement Can't Keep Up? Maybe Law Enforcement doesn't want to keep up. Ever think of that? Maybe a school district and law enforcement have a common thread It's bad for tourism. Remember the movie Jaws where the mayor was in denial that there were shark attacks? Well there is no difference between that and saying we don't have drugs in our community.
maybe if pot users weren't so blatant and such slobs they a wouldn't get caught. Marijuana differs from other controlled substances because it has a distinct, permeating smell you bring that into in a car and you're even dumber. But i'm sure you know that howdy![beam]
First of all, how would you know what the brownie contained. It certainly wasn't hash....marijuana, maybe. Secondly, after reading an article about a heroin epidemic you are still willing to waste the polices time calling about a student eating a pot brownie. Get your priorities straight. If the cops weren't spending hundreds of thousands of OUR tax dollars busting every kid who eats a brownie or smokes a joint, maybe they'd have a better chance at fighting real crime, heroin addict thieves taking over the town. They act like this is news too - this has been going on for years. Meanwhile there's probably going to be 15 arrests for marijuana or paraphernalia by tomorrow and the heroin just keeps on flowing. Get Focused on the Real Problem and then get Real Solutions.
So most likely the principal was given some brownies in exchange for not calling the police and called it a day. If it happens again I would anonymously report it to the police. I have a feeling if the principal found out you went over their head you'd be looking for a new job. It seems the administrators stick together even when they are wrong so the public doesn't find out about any wrong doing. Unethical jerks.
I have a question regarding the chain of command. Let's say that you are a teacher who witnesses a student eating a brownie laced with hashesh in your class. You call the principal who says thank you very much, I will take care of it. The student is back in class the next day or five days( if he gets suspended. Do you have the right as a teacher to call the police and file a report or call the media in addition to informing the police?
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