Posted on 03/16/2014 5:51:41 PM PDT by mgist
Once rare, heroin use on the rise More people seek help; police seeing more on street
The number of people seeking treatment for heroin addiction has exploded in Allen County in the last five years, according to figures from the Drug and Alcohol Consortium of Allen County.
In 2009, of all the people seeking treatment for addictions, less than 1 percent, or about 15 people, were addicted to heroin. That number fell in 2010 to only half a percent of all people with addictions, or less than 10.
By 2012, the number of people with addictions who were addicted to heroin jumped to 12 percent, meaning hundreds of people in Allen County were heroin addicts.
In 2013 the number of addicts on heroin had dropped to 5.9 percent, but it still represents a huge increase from only a couple of years before.
While the decline in people coming forward with heroin addictions from 2012 to 2013 might seem like good news, addictions experts note that all reporting is voluntary, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that heroin addiction was undergoing a sudden decline.
During the same period, the amount of heroin seized by Fort Wayne police, something that was rare just a few years ago, tripled in the three years from 2009 and 2012.
Though the amount of heroin seized by police in 2012, the last year for which numbers were available, seems small – only about 4 ounces – it has become almost a weekly event for police to announce they’ve seized heroin in a drug raid. This month, six men were indicted for allegedly plotting to distribute more than 5 kilograms of heroin in the region and rob other drug dealers in the area, including in Fort Wayne.
Today, police say the heroin, which used to be uncommon here, is flowing in from Chicago and an area known as the Region in northwest Indiana; some is also coming in from Indianapolis.
Marion Greene is a public health research analyst at IUPUI in Indianapolis who compiled the addiction figures that the Drug and Alcohol Consortium uses. Greene said she can only speculate on why heroin is suddenly becoming more common, but she suggests it has its roots in the introduction of some prescription painkillers in the 1990s.
Those drugs were accepted and easily available by prescription, but people came to rely on them. Then in 2013 there was a significant crackdown on the prescription drugs and doctors who were freely prescribing them, Greene said.
By then heroin had become more available, and it provided a better high and was actually cheaper than prescription drugs, Greene said. Heroin can cost $50 to $100 a day, while illegally obtained prescription drugs can cost twice that much, she said. Dealers recognized the emerging trend and took advantage of it.
Meanwhile, heroin was also seeing a resurgence among moneyed celebrities, and it has taken its toll, contributing to the death just this year of Philip Seymour Hoffman and others.
What Greene and others are concerned about is that heroin is shifting to younger users. People addicted to heroin used to typically be 45 to 55. More people in the 18-25 age group are becoming addicted, Greene said, and there has been a frightening jump in heroin use among people younger than 18.
Greene said the experts she has talked to don’t seem particularly surprised by the jump in heroin use. She said one colleague compared combating substance abuse to a game of whack-a-mole. Crack down on one substance and a different one pops up.
Jerri Lerch, executive director of the Drug and Alcohol Consortium, says the willingness to turn to heroin, which used to be viewed as a drug for dead-end addicts, is the result of an aging-out of awareness that people had of the drug a couple of generations ago.
Actually measuring the amount of heroin to be found on the streets, though, is difficult because it is illegal and users don’t respond to surveys, which Lerch said are one of the few ways the consortium gathers intelligence about the prevalence of drugs.
Regarding exactly how much heroin is on the streets, Lerch cited a quote that says things that are easy to count aren’t worth counting and things that are worth counting can’t be counted.
Dan Mawhorr, a sergeant with the Indiana State Police in Fort Wayne, was an undercover officer for nine years, ending about seven years ago, and in that role he said he bought heroin only one time. Now, he says, heroin is going gangbusters.
Like Greene, Mawhorr attributes the rise of the drug to the crackdown on prescription painkillers. Since the crackdown started, the price of those pills on the street has risen to $1 to $1.50 per milligram, so a 30-milligram tablet will cost $30 to $45. Meanwhile, a tenth of a gram of heroin can be had for $15, and in some places for as little as $5.
Estimating just how much heroin is out there, though, is difficult, Mawhorr said. Though various law enforcement agencies keep track of their drug seizures, they don’t compile the numbers.
Heroin use, oddly, can in some ways be attributed to an increase in the use of other drugs. In Kosciusko County, where there appears to be heavy use of methamphetamine, which creates a high, users will sometimes take heroin, which has the opposite effect, to alleviate the meth, said Kip Shuter, the public information officer for the Warsaw Police Department.
Why people are willing to deal with a drug that is so potentially deadly, and which has gained more notoriety recently as more famous actors have died from overdoses, might be hard to understand.
To Lerch, it’s just the result of a society that has become accustomed to and accepting of mood-altering substances, and young people who don’t look at the end game.
“They only look at the front end, not the back end,” Lerch said.
Tend to agree with your post.
Story today here in Indiana talked about the relatively low cost of heroin vs. pain meds and cocaine.
I think we need to start regulating what we are putting our kids on. Now they are drugging toddlers on Ritalin and other suppressive medications.
Heroin is popular in Mexico.
Kill the dealers, uasage will drop.
That’s been the transition here in Wi too. Oxy also became more expensive with the crackdown and heroin became the low cost alternative.
Mark Belling spent a few shows talking about it recently. Shocking hoe prevalent it’s become in the metro suburbs of Milwaukee
Very good point.
Heroin was around in in the 70’s. they got rid of it. Understand this is a multibillion $ industry. They bought Chavez. He used his military man power and cargo planes for distribution around the world.
The cartels have joined forces with Hezbollah and Islamist Brotherhood. There is not one major SEC regulated bank in Wall Street that hasn’t been caught laundering Billions, and there is not one bank that has been held criminally liable for anything.
The is no doubt that our government is working with the cartels. Fast and Furious was an example. http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/north-america/item/17396-u-s-government-and-top-mexican-drug-cartel-exposed-as-partners
Go after the cartels. Go after the banks who launder their money. Thats blood money. JP Morgan functions as a money launderer openly in Caracas. http://dailycaller.com/2013/08/21/jp-morgans-venezuelan-cronyism-reaches-a-boiling-point/?onswipe_redirect=no
The FDA, the SEC, and the DEA are suddenly asleep at the wheel, or getting their palms greased at all levels. I wonder what those Bank employees that were dropping like flies a few weeks ago knew?
The point is, the trade has been around a lot longer than this article tries to imply. I believe the roots for what you see now were established in the early years of the Rock & Roll era.
I have kept in contact with my Hoosier best man from my first marriage occasionally for all these years. He became addicted after he lost a leg in a car accident and is a functioning addict all these years later. As a matter of fact, he’s a world renowned sculptor specializing in public art. He doesn’t do heroin anymore but is active in the Narc-anon movement and he’s where I get my information. A person who’s been in the trenches for many moons. It breaks my heart to read his letters. Even though he is worth more financially than I, I would not trade a minute of my life for his, but he can’t say the same.
Ahhh yes those democrats are soooo giving...
Call me a conspiracy kook but I think this is just one more dilberate evil program to now destroy the youth in this country. When have you ever heard of heroin being as cheap more available than cnady on the streets? We are at war and we are still asleep
I remember seeing a documentary about meth, and the recovery programs are a joke. We need to start really executing the dealers, confiscate their money to pay for the investigations, and you’ll see drug dealing and use drop like a rock.
The Chinese were forced to endure opium dealing in their country (forced on them by the British) and forcibly addicted by the Japanese. NO wonder they execute people for it. They know the realities and thing is, our justice system is a joke.
The next time some suburban dip-wit decides to deal a little pot, maybe the threat of confiscating all the family assets will force parents to start paying attention to their brat whelp’s activities.
I think that if parents faced losing their homes, bank accounts, trophy toys, they would be making sure that their brat kids aren’t messing around with dealers and selling.
If we had rock solid proof that someone was distributing and dealing, we could drag them to the prisons that house death row prisoners, move them forward, with a quick stroke of the pen, we could have them executed in a week.
The only reason drug addiction is so widespread is because we have some delusion that dealers and users are all good people at heart. reality is, they love drugs and the money it brings more than anyone else.
BINGO! I’m pretty sure the motive is good old fashioned money, but they don’t give a rats tail about the thousands of nameless kids who’s lives are ruined with this. The Pharma industry call sleep sound at night because their destruction of families is so far removed from the legal money they make that they invent new forms of opium products they call “pain relievers”. Now Holder is come to the rescue with another million dollar drug called Naloxone that prevents heroin overdoses. That’s Holder’s bold response to this epidemic. Soros must have invested in that Pharma or stoled their patent or something.
Rare?
Heroin use has increased and decreased over time. Big in the seventies, not so big again until lately.
I think Pharma is guilty of lots of things. But it is a stretch to blame them for abuse of a prescription drug, if that is what you are saying (if not I apologize for misunderstanding you).
Just because a person is prescribed a medication doesn’t mean they have to take the whole script. It should just be used as needed.
I hope the Phamas continue improve on pain meds. Have you ever had to deal with someone dying of cancer?
Just make things up as you go.
Naloxone was developed in the 60s. Widely available in the 70s when I was administering it to lab animals.
30 naloxone tablets cost $121 at Walgreens.
After - how many deaths? River Phoenix, Kristen Pfaff, Shannon Hoon, Bradley Nowell, Jonathan Melvoin… the list seems endless - it finally went out of style. Then it was ecstasy. Then crystal meth came into fashion. After that, it seemed to be pills. And now it has circled back to heroin again and already claimed a celebrity (Philip Seymour Hoffman). This article makes it sound like the whole of suburbia just discovered heroin and that's just not true.
Thank you, you are absolutely correct. I remember all you wrote about except some of the names you mentioned required Googling to remember who they were.
They are talking in my locale about making the prescription drug Narcan over the counter even if it requires our doctor who’s in charge of the Health Department to take signed prescription sheets for Narcan to every single pharmacy in my county. Might be a worthwhile band-aid.
I wonder what the cut is for Obama and Holder?
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