Heroin: The Worst To Come

heroInsight April/May 2000

Source: Orlando Sentinel (USA) - 23/1/00

Language, racial and cultural barriers slow the spread for a time. But addict by addict, the drug reaches out. The day comes when demand breaks the walls dividing society. That day is very close for Greater Orlando. Heroin has devastated portions of the Hispanic community here for years. Now, all the signs indicate it is on the verge of expansion.

As bad as heroin abuse has been, there have been more than 175 deaths locally in five years. It's nothing to what it can become.

The evidence:

Central Florida's death toll continues to climb. Confirmed overdoses in 1999 already have set a record. Medical examiners' records show that at least 54 Central Floridians died from heroin last year. At least four more suspected cases await autopsy results.

Drug cases are occurring over a larger region. In Brevard County, there was one fatal overdose in 1998. There were eight last year. Lake County had its first confirmed heroin death.

Demand for treatment exceeds availability. The need is so strong that Central Florida received approval for one of two new methadone clinics approved last year by state health officials.

Arrest reports show increasing abuse. In 1996, there were 19 suspected heroin dealers arrested on federal charges here. Last year, there were 96. Local and federal agents seized 33 pounds of heroin.

Since September, another 71 suspected dealers have been charged by the Central Florida High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force. On Wednesday, U.S. Customs and HIDTA agents seized 5 pounds of heroin being delivered here from Miami.

Drug users gain diversity

Finally, the population of drug users is becoming significantly more diverse. It is a pattern that has been seen all over the country.

Consider the case of Eugene, Ore., a modest-sized town known for its college students, environmental activism and outdoor sports. It began to see cheap, potent heroin in the late 1980s, five years before it reached Central Florida.

Twenty-nine of Greater Eugene's 315,000 residents died from heroin in the first nine months of 1999. During the same period, there were 35 deaths among the 1.35 million residents of Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties.

Eugene's heroin is `black tar' imported from Mexico. And at first, the dealers and most of the users came from the city's Mexican-American community. Today, it has spread far beyond the Hispanic community. Most addicts are non-Hispanic men and women.

South American heroin now accounts for half of the drug arrests in Burlington, Vt., the home town of Ben and Jerry's ice cream. All along the East Coast, addicts clamour for doses that sell for as little as $4 and as much as $40. In almost every case, the drug found a foothold in a local or nearby Hispanic community before spreading.

In Philadelphia, the typical addict used to be a middle-aged black male. Then, about five years ago, inexpensive South American heroin arrived first in the city's Hispanic community.

`Today, the user population . . . covers all the socio-economic demographics,' said Inspector Jeremiah Daley, head of the Philadelphia Police Department's narcotics unit. The department makes more than 4,000 heroin arrests a year. `Young, white suburban housewives are becoming as common as middle-aged African-American males.'

Orlando's heroin outbreak attracted notoriety four years ago when non- Hispanic teenagers began dying from the drug. But in the years since, more has been learned, particularly about how dealers first left deep and lasting wounds in the local Hispanic community.

Hispanics hit hardest

At most 20 per cent of Orange County's population, Hispanics today account for nearly 70 per cent of all heroin-related arrests and up to 40 per cent of heroin deaths.

That contrasts strongly with the long-established patterns of cocaine and marijuana use. Both of those drugs have been around for generations and are used by a broad cross-section of the population.

There is great reluctance in the law-enforcement community to talk about ethnic background when analysing the spread of drug abuse. Police are afraid they will be perceived as targeting ethnic or racial groups for enforcement. But the cycle of victimisation is so undeniable that the Office of National Drug Control Policy cites it as a major factor in Greater Orlando's growing heroin trade.

`These local drug-trafficking organisations are generally organised along ethnic or racial origins, often recruiting members of the same ethnic background. These DTOs then distribute to groups and persons who reflect the broad spectrum of the population of Central Florida,' states a report released by the White House in mid-December. `Colombian, Puerto Rican and Dominican DTOs are the primary sources of supply of heroin in the Central Florida . . . region.'

The White House group analyses the drug trade worldwide and consults with federal, state and local law enforcement on how to stop it. Four years ago, after an investigation by The Orlando Sentinel, congressional hearings were held here on the smuggling of South American heroin through Puerto Rico and into Orlando. Central Florida was classified later as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area and nearly $1 million in additional federal drug-fighting money was channelled here.

Dealing dope, drug experts say, is like any other start-up business. Vendors feel most comfortable selling to customers they know and understand. So it was not surprising that Colombian heroin producers sought Spanish-speaking partners to market the drug in the United States.

Some critics claim that police overlook non-Hispanic addicts in Orlando to pick on Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Colombians. But that argument has fewer and fewer supporters.

`I do not think it's prejudice,' said state Rep. Anthony Suarez, D-Orlando. `I just think it's the natural course of the drug trade. . . . It's incumbent on us as Latinos to stop it. It's destroying our children and our community.'

Three years ago, Suarez, a criminal defence attorney, helped organise a march in Orlando by 6,000 Hispanic residents to protest, in large part, press reports in the Sentinel that linked local heroin abuse to the drugs smuggled from Colombia through Puerto Rico.

Now, Suarez wants the Hispanic community to confront the issue head-on.

Most Hispanics are not users

Drug users represent a tiny fraction of the 300,000 Hispanics in Central Florida. Addiction may affect just one of every 50 area Hispanic families, Suarez said. But it will take candlelight vigils and church outreach programs, he said, to spread the word.

Pastor Angel Rosado of Longwood's Iglesia Renacimiento Crisitano (Born-Again Christian Church) knows what the cycle of heroin abuse produces. A former addict, he grew up in New Bedford, Mass., where heroin was a long-time fixture that had spread throughout the area.

`It's just destroying the community in general,' Rosado said. `This is the first time I've really seen it related to Hispanics,' he said last week. `When I got introduced to the problem, it wasn't a Puerto Rican problem. It was a people problem. When I was doing drugs, I was doing it with everybody─blacks, Hispanics and whites.'

He sees the signs that Central Florida is catching up.

`If we don't do something . . . to help our community, it is going to spread throughout all of Orlando,' Rosado said.

And that, said Rosado and many others, means getting much more vocal about the problem. Heroin abuse remains a little-discussed secret for many families.

`It's part of the denial system. You don't bring out your dirty laundry for everybody to see,' said Dr Pedro Gonzalez, a psychologist who has treated addicts for 38 years in Puerto Rico, New York City and Orlando. `That's not only Hispanics. That's with every race. They don't want to talk about it.'

Since 1996, the Orlando office of the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested nearly 200 people on heroin-dealing charges. All but 12 were Hispanics, according to federal court records and interviews.

`That's where the heroin is,' said Julio Cuevas, a counsellor at the Centre for Drug Free Living in Orlando. `I don't see it as a racial thing, I just see it as the truth. . . . If the problem was Chinese, I'd say the same thing.'

Until 1993-94, the typical heroin addict in Orlando was a middle-aged, non-Hispanic man who had become hooked somewhere else─in New York City, New England or Chicago. Others were holdovers from the 1970s and early 1980s─the days when heroin was last known to have been sold here.

South American dope

That was before South American dope began to pour in. Rosemary McNally, a nurse who helped found Central Florida's first clinic in 1985, remembers how the clientele suddenly changed.

`It just tripled overnight about four years ago,' McNally said.

The change came in 1995 when a few enterprising dealers began working the nightclubs. Until then, heroin dealers had avoided non-Spanish speaking customers, according to interviews, state and federal court records.

By 1996, the first young, non-Hispanic addicts began seeking treatment, McNally said. Ranging in age from 18 to 25, the men and women told counsellors they'd come in contact with the drug in downtown Orlando nightclubs. That year, the Sentinel reported on six deaths of teenagers from heroin overdoses.

Now the pace of change is accelerating. Drug abuse is spreading through the community. Of dozens of methadone clients interviewed, more than half were not Hispanic.

Yet their presence is still not reflected in arrest data. Only one of those non-Hispanic addicts had ever been arrested on a heroin-related charge. They avoided arrest because they didn't hang around the heroin hot spots─Semoran Boulevard, South Orange Blossom Trail and International Drive. Instead, they did business by cell phone and pager in suburban neighbourhoods where police pressure is low.

Many did business unnoticed in apartment complexes that cater to 20-something tenants. They belong to the second-fastest-growing group─after Hispanics─of addicts entering methadone treatment in area clinics.

More evidence of heroin's widening grip came last month at Orlando's biggest drug sting. Investigators arrested 50 people─14 of them on charges of heroin dealing. The overall group included six non-Hispanics and seven blacks, an unusual diversity.

And agents said they saw dozens of non-Hispanics lining up to buy heroin during the eight-month investigation. They included what cops call `crossover dealers'─non-Hispanic addicts buying up to 100 doses to resell far from police scrutiny.

`The more powerful the addiction, the more likely someone is to start dealing to support their habits,' Orange County sheriffs drug Lt Mike Miller said after the 10 December 1999 arrests. `That's why you probably see a slow movement to Anglos and more non-traditional heroin users.'

Everyone's problem

As the new millennium begins, heroin is becoming everyone's problem.

`A lot of white kids my age are doing it,' said a 20-year-old from Seminole County, who sold dope for two years, mostly to friends from high school.

Another former dealer agreed. `From what I see right now, Orlando is going to be one of the worst places in the country,' said the man, who sold in Puerto Rico and New York before moving to Orlando. `In the next few years, it is going to be all the same. The white guys are starting to come out.'