Trumbull meeting targets ways to encourage more drug-treatment options

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Several of the front-line troops in the Trumbull County War on Drugs gave two judges, Warren’s mayor and about 25 others with ties to drug treatment an update Friday to help them debate new approaches to the problem, including more treatment options.

Vince Peterson, a county adult-probation officer who also participates in the Violent Fugitives Task Force, organized the meeting at the Trumbull Metropolitan Housing Authority offices.

Peterson said local overdoses and overdose deaths have become so bad, sometimes it seems as if he’s in the zombie television show “The Walking Dead” because of the “nodding” and other behaviors of addicts he sees.

Peterson said he’s been in law enforcement long enough to have seen drug phases come and go – marijuana, cocaine, crack, methamphetamine, pills and heroin.

“We thought it was bad, and it was, but this heroin epidemic is not like anything else,” Peterson said.

Capt. Jeff Orr, commander of the Trumbull Ashtabula Group Law Enforcement Task Force, said the county coroner has confirmed 53 drug-overdose deaths this year. A dozen more are likely and awaiting toxicology results. There were 54 in all of 2014.

“Dr. [Humphrey] Germaniuk said we could be at 100. I hope not,” Orr said. At one point in the spring, there were nine overdose deaths in 10 days.

“Everybody asks questions like, ‘What are we going to do to stop this?’” Orr said. He now believes law enforcement should have “been addressing this earlier. We need to think outside the box. We need to do jobs we never thought we would need to do.”

One of those things is trying to bring drug dealers to justice by “tracing back” after an overdose death.

In one 2015 case, TAG was asked to investigate after a young woman from Champion died of an overdose.

They found evidence implicating Maurice L. Bryant, 27, of Howland and later charged him with involuntary manslaughter after toxicology results indicated many weeks later that the woman overdosed on 100 percent fentanyl – which is highly lethal.

Orr urged the group to find new ways to get help for the scores of people who have overdosed but were revived with naloxone, such as charging the person with a crime to try to force them to address their problem.

Longtime narcotics investigator Melanie Gamble of the Warren Police Department said drug paraphernalia seized during an overdose, such as a burned spoon, is sufficient for a criminal charge – but the friends of some overdose victims try to hide evidence before the police arrive.

Judge Philip Vigorito of Newton Falls Municipal Court, who runs a state-certified drug court, said some people don’t want help for their addiction no matter how much jail time prosecutors threaten to give them.

Gamble said she asks addicts why they started using heroin, and it’s usually because of a boyfriend, girlfriend or parents.

“It’s always a social kind of thing, where if I’m using or drinking and I’m the only one, it’s not that much fun,” she said. People abusing drugs and alcohol want others to do it with them, Gamble said.

An addict told Gamble she used the first time with her addicted boyfriend “to know what it feels like,” Gamble said, adding that’s a “bad idea.”