Increase in heroin trafficking frustrating for law enforcement

MARIETTA -- Like the mythical Hydra battled in Greek legend that grew two new heads when one was cut off, new heroin and fentanyl deals are transacted by different users at every turn.

When one dealer or user is caught, another is just beginning.

Local law enforcement track for months known drug users to link the larger network of heroin and fentanyl distribution together but the rate and variable points of transaction make the fight a long war.

"There are so many people selling now, as opposed to 10 years ago when you knew who the dealers were," said Lt. Josh Staats of the Washington County Sheriff's Office. "A lot of the times we're behind the curve and they've been moved from the house by the time we get in."

Staats said heroin distribution in the Mid-Ohio Valley is coordinated through addicts who get a cut of the supply in exchange for selling the rest of what they are given and returning the money to their distributor.

"Now the big distributors are using the addict to set up the deals for them," said Sgt. Ryan Huffman of the Marietta Police Department. "The distributors keep a low profile in hotel rooms or addicts' houses while their local contacts do the deals for them."

Staats and Huffman are members of the Washington Morgan Noble Major Crimes Task Force which works to combat the growing drug epidemic in the valley.

The task force is part of Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine's Organized Crime Investigation Commission and is comprised of representatives of Post 84 of the Ohio State Highway Patrol; Washington, Morgan and Noble County sheriff's offices; the Marietta, Belpre and McConnelsville police departments; and the Washington, Morgan and Noble County prosecutor's offices.

The Washington County Sheriff's Office has three officers who work full-time on the task force and one to two who work on the task force part-time.

Joining them are one officer from the Ohio State Highway Patrol who works full-time on the task force, one Marietta officer that does the same and one who works part-time with the force.

The Noble County Sheriff's Office contributes one officer full-time and one part-time alongside three officers from the Morgan County Sheriff's Office, Belpre and McConnelsville police departments who all work part-time for the task force.

Day to day the task force tracks tips, watches local users and logs evidence from each drug raid with the hopes of finding further links throughout the local network. When a new link is found, or intelligence is gathered by members on the task force from the Ohio Highway Patrol that a large quantity of heroin is being moved, the task force contacts local judges for a search warrant.

"We make more arrests in the cities but people who live out in the country who know their neighbors also know when there's a suspicious amount of traffic going in and out of a house," said Staats.

When pill mills were decimated by the regulation on doctors prescribing pain medication in the early 2000s, heroin flooded the void left in the market.

By 2013 DeWine created an outreach unit to help communities and law enforcement battle the epidemic and combined efforts by the Attorney General's Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Special Prosecutions Section, community outreach specialists and the Ohio Organized Crime Investigations Commission.

"Generally our investigators have found that heroin is brought to major cities such as New York, Detroit and Chicago and traffickers there direct shipments to larger urban areas in Ohio and elsewhere," said Jill Del Greco, public information officer for the Attorney General's Bureau of Criminal Investigation. "From there, the drugs are distributed farther to rural and suburban areas."

Corridors of transit across the country fall along major interstate routes and then heroin is filtered into secondary markets like Marietta from Columbus, Cincinnati and Detroit, Staats said.

"We get a lot of influence here from those three cities, with the distributors sending a different guy or group of people down each time to make contact with their addict's network," he said. "Their network takes care of each other and provides the clientele."

In 2016 the 40-70 percent of regional law enforcement agencies in the Great Lakes region reported to the U.S. Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center that heroin was the greatest drug threat in the area. Across the Ohio River in the Mid-Atlantic Region more than 70 percent of regional law enforcement agencies reported heroin as the greatest drug threat.

"It used to be that the dealers were specific, but now if you make a friend with one addict it spirals and we see the same person selling methamphetamine and heroin at the same time," said Huffman. "We haven't seen a lot of violence from our local addicts, but when you get a supplier, they're the convicted felons with a violent history that figured all they could do for money was distribute drugs."

Heroin availability is increasing and availability levels are highest in the Northeast and in areas of the Midwest, according to a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency National Heroin Threat Assessment Summary published in 2016. Seizure data indicates a sizable increase in heroin availability in the U.S. with heroin seizures increased 80 percent over five years, from 3,733 kilograms in 2011 to 6,722 kilograms in 2015. Traffickers are also transporting heroin in larger amounts as shown by reports over the past two years.

The report states that Mexican traffickers are expanding their operations to gain a larger share of eastern U.S. heroin markets and as the most lucrative heroin markets, the Midwest and Northeast states are where white powder heroin is most prevalent.

"It can take 60 to 90 days to get our evidence tested," said Deputy David Tornes, who runs the WCSO's evidence locker and often appears as a witness for the county prosecutor. "Even the smallest piece of evidence has to be tracked at all times by case number, recovery date and time. I send to the BCI lab everything from small bags of individual portions of heroin to the vials with suspected heroin to be tested."

Huffman and Staats said their task force relies on confidential informants but also on the many calls from locals who notice suspicious activity throughout the region.

"We get calls from citizens all the time who are seeing people coming and going from a house or we get information from someone we arrest," said Staats. "Please keep calling, just because you don't see us outside your neighbor's house that day, doesn't mean your information wasn't useful in tracking this."