Valley drug-interdiction team adds muscle to war on drugs

The Mahoning Valley’s central location between Cleveland and Pittsburgh and between New York and Chicago plus its sophisticated interstate highway infrastructure have long shined among the region’s brightest assets for economic development and quality of life.

Those same assets, however, also have a seedy dark side.

Drug traffickers from Mexico and large urban centers across the United States exploit our central location and sophisticated transportation network to ply their nefarious trade. So much so that the federal government’s Office of National Drug Control Policy has targeted Mahoning County among a handful of others in the state as so-called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas in the United States.

As Maj. William Cappabianca of the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office puts it, “Mahoning County is a main thoroughfare” for drug hauling in the region and nation.

NEW TASK FORCE OFFERS PROMISE

That’s why it is particularly encouraging to witness the launch of a new initiative by the Mahoning Valley Law Enforcement Task Force devoted to stopping illegal drug shipments in transit before they reach their destinations.

The highway drug-interdiction team of the task force consists of uniformed officers patrolling interstates in marked police cars, who stop vehicles based on prior intelligence, driving errors or vehicle defects. Participating agencies include the Austintown, New Middletown and Youngstown police departments, the Liberty Police Department and its drug-sniffing dog, and the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office and two of its drug-sniffing dogs.

The team’s formation could not have come at a more propitious time. Drug abuse – particularly heroin abuse – has risen to epidemic levels in the Valley and the state. The side effects of that meteoric rise have ushered in increased overdose deaths and a swath of violent and property crime throughout the region committed by users desperate to support their habits.

The premise of the interdiction team logically centers on supply and demand. By lessening the supply of the illicit drugs, demand should also dry up, thereby diminishing the adverse impact of the drug trade on individuals’ lives and communities’ safety and well-being.

TARGETING ‘WEAKEST LINK’

“One of the weakest links of a criminal enterprise is the transportation of its illicit goods,” said Lt. Jeff Solic of the Austintown Police Department, commander of the task force. “We want to intercept that [transit],” said Solic.

“If we can stop it before it gets to its retail location, we can keep it out of the hands of our citizens,” he told Vindicator Staff Writer Peter Milliken in a story published earlier this month.

We applaud the aggressive gung-ho attitude of the task force and the cooperation of its member police agencies. We hope other law-enforcement entities in the region – particularly those close to interstate highways – will sign on as well. We also look for the interdiction team to work closely with other state and federal authorities such as the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Homeland Security Department that share common missions in the long-standing war on drugs.

Given the scope of drug transit through the Mahoning Valley, the local task force could well play a central role in staunching the flow of illicit and dangerous drugs into our community, our region and our nation. As such, the interdiction team deserves widespread community support.