Police struggle to stem opiate tide
BOARDMAN
One victim describes opiate addiction as a ripple spreading its effects across the community.
For local law-enforcement officials, however, it might seem more like a tidal wave.
“A very, very high percentage — and I would estimate in the 80 to 90 percent range — of the things that we deal with have some nexus to drugs or drug addiction,” said Boardman Police Chief Jack Nichols.
“In the case of something simple like a theft from Walmart, often that theft is being committed to support a drug habit. In the case of a domestic violence, oftentimes that’s the result of an altered state of mind,” he said.
Enforcement efforts largely focus on drug dealers.
“Our primary focus is we go after drug trafficking — take out the supply chain,” said Lt. Jeff Solic of the Austintown Police Department, commander of the Mahoning Valley Law Enforcement Task Force.
The drugs, he said, primarily flow in from major metropolitan areas such as New York City, Detroit and Chicago.
“And obviously there’s multiple distributors that operate in a certain area,” he said. Dealers rely on more than one distributor, and users usually have more than one dealer, he said.
There’s not much overlap between Mahoning and Trumbull counties, Solic noted. A fentanyl-laced batch of heroin that recently caused a steep spike in overdoses in Trumbull County, for example, didn’t seem to impact Mahoning County as hard.
There are, however, connections between Mahoning and Columbiana counties, Solic said.
In Boardman, the narcotics enforcement responsibility lies with a unit led by Sgt. Mike Hughes.
“We obtain information on who’s selling the drugs. It could come from a neighbor calling it in, it could come from somebody else that’s been arrested, it could come from a scorned girlfriend or husband,” Hughes explained.
“We go out and we buy heroin from the drug dealers, and then we’ll search their residence, find their heroin, arrest them, and let the courts handle it from there,” he said.
His team executes, on average, 50 search warrants a year.
“In all my years as a Boardman policeman — and I’ve been here 38 years — in all my years combined, we did not do a total of 20 search warrants on drug-sales locations in 25 years,” Nichols said. “And now they average one a week.”
Police also encounter the opiate crisis when drug users commit crimes or overdose.
“Oftentimes when people start down the road to recovery, most often it starts with an arrest,” Nichols said.
In some cases, family members struggling to deal with an addict choose to involve the police.
“I’ve seen success in doing that. For a parent, it’s probably the most difficult thing in the world to do,” Nichols said. “But the thing is, you have to let them have their consequences.”
In those instances, police would file a report, if, for example, a family member reported a theft. Police would conduct an investigation, get a search warrant and then make an arrest.
“Then we rely on the court to force the intervention,” Hughes said. Family members sometimes try to get their loved one into the county drug court program.
Prior to about five or six years ago, officials say, the drug that police dealt with most often was cocaine. The demographic for drug users was not nearly as young as it is today.
“We used to think crack was bad. It doesn’t hold a candle to heroin,” Hughes said.
Youngstown Police Chief Robin Lees says his department’s experience with opiates is similar but that Youngstown has different crime patterns and a larger cross-section of drugs.
“It crosses jurisdictions, economic backgrounds, everything else,” he said.
His department recently acquired Narcan, the trade name for the overdose antidote naloxone. Nichols plans to order 30 to 40 doses for his department this week.
The consensus among local law-enforcement officials is that their efforts alone are not enough.
“We’re at the point now with this opiate thing that we’re not going to arrest our way out of it. You can’t possibly arrest your way out of it,” Nichols said.
“It’s a three-pronged approach. ... Enforcement, education and prevention, and treatment,” Solic said.
“Thinking positively, I would like to work myself out of a job so we didn’t have to do this,” he said. “It really can’t get much worse. We can only go up from here.”