Heroin trafficking is increasing at a massive rate throughout the U.S., and confusing distribution patterns are overwhelming police trying to stem the flow of drugs.
Gangs and cartels eager to gain a foothold in the heroin trade are flooding the major interstates in the Ohio Valley with the drug and devising ways to flout law enforcement efforts. Suppliers employ multiple heroin mules for transport, so when one gets caught, the drug operation continues. Major dealers are also becoming harder to catch as they use networks of addicts to distribute their supply. Dealers with violent histories create an intermediary, giving them a layer of protection from law enforcement, reports The Parkersburg News and Sentinel.
Heroin seizures across the U.S. increased 80 percent between 2011 and 2015.
“Now the big distributors are using the addict to set up the deals for them,” Sgt. Ryan Huffman of the Marietta Police Department told The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. “The distributors keep a low profile in hotel rooms or addicts’ houses while their local contacts do the deals for them.”
The dealer will give the addict a large cut of the supply and have him deal the rest out, returning the profits. Authorities in the Mid-Ohio Valley are particularly swamped by the opioid epidemic and are struggling to keep up with the rate of distribution. Police in the region said addicts turned to heroin in massive numbers after the federal crackdown on prescription painkillers.
“Generally our investigators have found that heroin is brought to major cities such as New York, Detroit and Chicago and traffickers there direct shipments to larger urban areas in Ohio and elsewhere,” Jill Del Greco, a spokesman in the office of the Ohio attorney general, told The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. “From there, the drugs are distributed farther to rural and suburban areas.”
Police in Maryland and Virginia reported a major uptick in drug seizures on the highways surrounding Washington, D.C., driven by the huge demand for heroin. Roadside drug arrests rose from 1,752 in 2015 to 1,971 in 2016 in Maryland. Virginia experienced a similar increase between 2014 and 2015, with roadside drug busts rising from 3,163 to 3,354, with increasing instances of fentanyl and heroin.
New York experienced a 135.7 percent increase in synthetic opioid and heroin deaths between 2014 and 2015. Connecticut saw a 125.9 percent increase over the same time, while deaths in Illinois spiked 120 percent.
South Carolina experienced the largest increase in the heroin death rate at 57 percent between 2014 and 2015. The heroin death rate also rose 46 percent in North Carolina and 43.5 percent in Tennessee over the same period. Heroin-related deaths tripled from 247 in 2011 to 748 in 2015 in Maryland.
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