By Eric Francis
Standard Correspondent
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION – A common denominator has emerged during the course of several otherwise unconnected criminal investigations across the region this fall and winter ranging from some of the individuals connected to the homicide in Bethel to the rash of thefts from cars in Woodstock to the burglarizing of area homes in search of jewelry. It isn’t the grinding recession — it’s heroin.
“There have been four major heroin busts in the past couple of weeks in Rutland County that have included trafficking levels,” Vermont Assistant Attorney General Robert Menzel said earlier this month at the Windsor County Courthouse.
In all of those cases the heroin was coming directly up from Brooklyn, a shift from recent years in which Hartford, Connecticut and Springfield, Massachusetts appeared to be the primary supply points feeding narcotics into Vermont.
“That’s just what we are seeing,” Menzel said, calling the Brooklyn connection “probably the biggest development right now,” in Vermont’s perennial fight against drug-fueled property crimes and the violence that seems to eventually follow along with them.
Despite the recent arrests, the street value of the drugs in the Rutland area doesn’t appear to have changed which authorities are taking as an indication that there is still plenty of it around.
“The price seems to be holding steady,” Menzel noted.
On the other side of the state, the Lebanon, New Hampshire police department has reported nearly five dozen heroin-related arrests in the past couple of months, a resurgence of interest in the drug which has surprised police who have spent the past several years dealing non-stop with cases of prescription medication abuse, especially Oxycontin, Oxycodone, and the other “Oxy” species of the same opiate-based painkillers.
Ironically, authorities suspect that the reason heroin is increasingly popular again in Vermont following its last big surge, which began in the mid-1990s, may be because they are finally choking off the supply of prescription meds.
“I can speculate that it’s because the price of Oxycontin has gone up. Now there’s scarcity and many of my patients have pointed out to me that heroin is cheaper so that may be driving some people back to heroin. I think it’s a plausible explanation,” said Dr. Ed Piper, a clinical psychologist who treats addicts at the HCRS facility in Wilder.
Although reliable statistics are hard to come by, Dr. Piper and others watching the latest upswing in demand for heroin say that on the one hand in many cases today’s heroin addicts seem to be yesterday’s teens who were sneaking access to Oxycontin and on the other are many adults who began taking Oxycontin via legitimate prescriptions for medical ailments but who then turned to black market sources when they couldn’t bring themselves to quit.
“I think we’ve seen a big upswing (of doctor’s giving out opiate prescriptions) in the past 10 years and I’m pretty confident that is accounting for the momentum,” Dr. Piper said, adding that, even though there is a chicken-and-egg argument to be had about them, the arrival of methadone clinics in the region has also meant an uptick in the amount of known addicts frequenting them. “Over the last five years it’s a real epidemic,” Dr. Piper said.
With teens who inadvertently find Oxycontin to be a gateway drug to heroin, Dr. Piper said the appeal begins simply as a thrill centered around pills that are relatively easy to obtain and conceal and which don’t produce the kind of initial nausea symptoms that heroin is known for. “I think it’s curiosity,” he said. “More family medicine cabinets have Oxycontin available and kids as young as junior high are checking it out. It’s a way to act out and strut your independence. It’s also a very dangerous and foolish way.
With adults who get drawn into the same downward spiral, Dr. Piper laid part of the blame with a cultural shift that took place after drug companies were allowed to start advertising their products directly to consumers. “It’s encouraged self-diagnosis. I think people should be embarrassed telling their doctor what they should be prescribed but they’re not,” Dr. Piper said, adding, “I don’t think the medical community is entirely at fault for this but they are certainly part of the solution, if they want to change it. Patients are coming in very insistently and saying, “What you did doesn’t help, physical therapy doesn’t help, I want treatment for my pain, I can’t sleep…” well, what are doctors supposed to do?”
Piper says what follows when people who really shouldn’t be taking opiates do so anyway is relentlessly predictable. “It’s a one-way street,” he noted, “There’s no easy way to get off opiates.”
“Heroin is pretty unforgiving,” Dr Piper explained. “You fix in the morning and you probably have to fix again by mid-afternoon or you are going to start going into withdrawals.”
Although heroin withdrawal symptoms are real, Piper said the somewhat legendary descriptions of them given out by addicts are a peculiar symptom of opiate addiction itself rather than an established medical fact.
“Junkies on opiates have just enormous fear of being ‘sick’, which is their label for withdrawal, and the funny thing is that really opiate withdrawal is not that bad,” Dr. Piper said. “You feel bad but, compared to some other things, it’s not that excruciating; however, there’s an unexplainable fear that opiate addicts have of this which causes them to do desperate things. There are medical symptoms – people are sweating and shaking and throwing up – but it’s not like losing a leg. The amount of fear attached to it is disproportional.
When you see surveillance footage of someone going into a convenience store with a shotgun and ripping the place off for a whole 75 bucks you can think to yourself, ‘Well that’s opiates!’ When you see really stupid crimes those are the ones that are acts of desperation.”
Unfortunately, Dr. Piper said, a rise in heroin use doesn’t necessarily mean a corresponding rise in people seeking treatment to get off the drug. He said he and other licensed drug and alcohol counselors around the state are often some of the first people that addicts get sent to talk to once they’ve been busted by law enforcement but often those that go on methadone and other “maintenance” treatments simply stick there, a bit like ‘zombies’, according to Dr. Piper who said, “With methadone it’s amazing, people would travel from Burlington to Bennington on a daily basis to get it. That’s how devoted to people become to what they need. It’s kind of breathtaking to witness for somebody who’s never been into that.”
Others simply have no interest in even attempting to address the underlying problem. “We talk to them and hopefully move them closer towards seeing the actual costs to their life – their humanness – of their opiate addiction,” Dr. Piper said, “I can’t say it’s rewarding but I think it is refreshing talking to people about things that really matter. It reaches some people but others are just so addicted they can only think of that one thing and they are out the door trying to score.”
This article first appeared in the December 29th edition of the Vermont Standard.
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