Eyebrows were raised around the country in January when Gov. Peter Shumlin devoted the bulk of his State of the State address to what he called a “heroin epidemic” that affected people in every corner of Vermont.
National press attention soon followed - not all of it positive.
In a New York Times article on March 5, Vermont State Police Senior Trooper Wayne Godfrey described rampant drug use at Bennington's Mount Anthony Union High School, prompting outrage at the characterization from students and staff.
Col. Thomas J. L'Esperance, head of the Vermont State Police, later refuted Godfrey's quote and called the trooper's comments “careless and inappropriate.”
On the heels of the Times article, Rolling Stone soon published a story about Vermont's heroin problem, illustrated by a depiction of a maple syrup can with a drawing on its label of a Vermont farmer in the woods taking a break to shoot up.
In the six months since Shumlin's speech, Vermonters have reacted in a variety of ways.
Some say, “At least we're talking about it,” as health-care professionals and state officials host forums to discuss what is a full-blown heroin problem. Others say the problem is overblown - and sensationalized by the national media - to the detriment of Vermont's image.
However, according to law enforcement and health professionals, the truth is difficult to measure, and current attempts to combat the complex and expensive problem are just starting to see results.
Defining the problem
Law enforcement confirms that the heroin problem in Vermont has spiked in the last few years, with Vermont State Police Capt. Matthew Birmingham, the head of the Vermont Drug Task Force (VDTF), describing the demand as “astronomically high.”
Birmingham said Vermont's heroin demand is fueled by prescription drug abuse, which hit Vermont hard for five to eight years within the past decade.
With pressure from politicians and the public, pharmaceutical companies changed the composition of prescription opiates so they could no longer be crushed for snorting or injection. (These medications are time-released now, and will turn into a sort of jelly if crushed.)
This made heroin the next best thing, Birmingham said.
It also becomes an economic issue for addicts: Getting a $10 bag of heroin is a lot cheaper than getting an $80 pill of Oxycontin or Oxycodone on the street.
The nature of the business, and the nature of the drug, combine to make Vermont a perfect place for heroin dealers and addicts, Birmingham said.
But, he said, quantifying the problem is difficult “because there are so many factors to it. Everyone wants clean data.”
Birmingham clarified that “everyone can show an increase in demand on state resources, but that is very hard to quantify with numbers.”
“It's very hard to quantify success with so many different entities that go into this problem,” he said. “It would take a wide-ranging study to determine truly where we are [with regard to heroin].”
Even without such figures, Birmingham relates anecdotally that heroin and opiate drugs are more widespread in Vermont than any other drug.
It's the number-one drug problem, he said.
“Everything we're getting through investigation methods is pointing to heroin,” Birmingham said. “I can comfortably say that it's a huge problem in relation to other drugs.”
He said that between 2010 and 2013 the drug task force “has seen an increase of heroin investigations of 485 percent.”
Breaking down the numbers between 2011 and 2013, he said “we have seen an increase in heroin seizures of 247 percent,” as part of those investigations.
Birmingham explained that while that 485 percent increase is in part due to focused attention, “we generally go where the investigation takes us.”
“If the heroin investigations are the most prevalent, we're going in that direction,” he said. “The investigation is fueled by intelligence, probable cause, information from witnesses, and informants. So if everything that we are getting is leading us to heroin investigations, then you are going to see an increase in that first number.”
Explaining further, Birmingham said that “the second number is alarming to us because what that is showing is that of the investigations that we are doing over the last couple of years, the quantity of heroin coming is greater, which means the demand is higher and more of the drug is being consumed here.
“So that is alarming to us, as not only are we seeing additional investigations on individuals, but more heroin coming in by those who are trafficking it,” he said.
Although some want to point to arrests as a first indicator of both the problem and the solution, Birmingham clarified that arrests “have very little to do with what is actually happening.”
He explained that police might arrest 20 suspects and net 1,000 bags of heroin, or they might arrest two suspects and come up with 10,000 bags of heroin.
Arrest statistics are “a horrible measure of the problem and of success,” he said.
A problem locally and statewide
One Windham County connection to the Vermont Drug Task Force is Bellows Falls Police Lt. Shane Harris, a detective with 25 years in law enforcement, including the eight years he spent on the VDTF while he was employed by the Chester Police Department.
VDTF is a coalition of agencies tasked to coordinate approaches to the drug problem statewide. Fifteen to 20 officers are drawn from different law enforcement agencies that operate throughout the state exclusively on drug-related investigations. Municipal police departments are refunded salary and benefits through state and federal grants so municipalities can back-fill positions, so they are not left understaffed.
Harris says he sees “a resurgence, not an epidemic” in arrests involving heroin, in numbers similar to those seen in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the drug cost $20 to $30 a bag. Now, he said, it sells for approximately $10 a bag.
According to Birmingham, heroin is extremely cheap in New York City: $2 a bag (a single dosage unit, which is approximately 30 milligrams). Dealers can sell it in Vermont between $10 and $25 a bag.
Harris said evidence of the heroin problem in Bellows Falls is amplified, as the village only covers one square mile, and in such intimate space drug abuse is difficult to hide.
“There is nowhere you can turn without seeing it,” he said, explaining that needles have turned up in public restrooms in restaurants and other businesses around town, and some business owners have responded by closing their restrooms to the public.
Harris said he does not know how many times the police or fire departments are called out on a “suspicious material” call. He explained that addicts are not very likely to be seen on the street, as heroin or related drugs leave them lethargic and spaced out.
He added that the department is aware of who in the village is addicted and who is dealing.
According to Bellows Falls Police, of the 30 to 40 heroin-related “incidents” in 2013 not resulting in arrests, seven were heroin-related and 16 were opioid-related.
Police do not differentiate between heroin and other opioids as they are both Schedule I drugs; under the law, they are treated equally and officially classed as “opiates.”
These statistics correlate to a steep rise in arrests. Through mid-May this year there were 37 arrests for heroin (possession and sale), and 20 arrests for opioids (possession and sale).
In terms of heroin arrests, Harris said, heroin use here could reasonably be labeled an “epidemic.”
But law enforcement and health officials note that the police statistics do not accurately reflect an actual spike in the number of users or addicts.
Collecting those figures is the Vermont Department of Health, whose statewide treatment initiative, called Hub and Spoke, has been fully online only since January.
Numbers gathered by treatment clinics reflect only that opioid and heroin drug addiction treatment is available in the state and give the number of people seeking treatment. The state statistics don't reflect the number of addicts or dealers - which is to say, the scope of the actual problem.
'Can't arrest the problem away'
Law enforcement agencies can piece together a rough picture of how heroin gets to Vermont - its source cities and entry points. They match items such as guns taken in burglaries in Windham County with gun violence out of state.
And, as Harris said, “you can't arrest the problem away” - a sentiment echoed in the media in recent days.
Arrests of the top dealers are rare locally, and most arrests, according to Harris, are of addicts for possession or sale of heroin to support their habit.
“We see the same people getting arrested over and over again,” Harris said. “They get released on conditions” such as home detention or custodial release, and go back where they came from, and “back into the life. An arraignment may or may not result in mandatory treatment,” he said.
The May 16 drug arrests of 11 local residents is an illustration in point, if one looks at it from law enforcement's perspective. Two were jailed; the other nine were released on conditions, and awaiting arraignment in July.
Harris explains that most local dealers are “day trippers” who zip down Interstate 91 to Greenfield, Mass., pick up a supply of heroin for themselves and perhaps some friends, and bring it back to use or sell to support their habit.
During a Commons writer's ride-along with BFPD in April, an equipment traffic stop of a minivan with Pennsylvania plates - the vehicle had a taillight out - netted a small amount of marijuana. But two juveniles from Springfield were in the vehicle with three young adults from Pennsylvania who claimed to be “just out for a drive.”
Because of ongoing investigations, officers could not speak officially, but were overhead discussing evidence of heroin transportation throughout the vehicle, indicating that a “drop” of drugs had already occurred.
Officers reported they didn't find heroin and couldn't get a drug-sniffing dog to the scene at the time.
BF police officer Mario Checchi said profiling is illegal in Vermont and is not particularly useful in identifying drug runners generally.
During a February traffic stop of a Springfield woman's vehicle northbound on I-91 in Westminster for a defective equipment violation, drug-sniffing dogs pointed officers to 690 bags of heroin under a rear seat cushion, on which the driver's 5-year-old was seated.
Checchi said drug runners are getting more sophisticated in the means of getting their drugs into Vermont. And traffic stops occasionally will turn up drugs.
He emphasized the importance of a K-9 unit in those situations. The Westminster traffic stop involved K-9s alerting officers to the presence of narcotics.
“Most of the people that we are dealing with who are trafficking are receiving some sort of subsidy for their housing,” said Harris, “or the sellers of heroin are living with somebody who receives it.”
Harris connected this custom with how gangs have become embedded in communities: a member becomes involved with a willing girl or woman who also is receiving assistance from the state. She becomes a hook into the community.
In the 2011 kidnapping and murder of Melissa Barratt of Brattleboro, court documents revealed that she had a known romantic and business association with Frank Caraballo, who was convicted of her murder in 2013.
When the local woman allegedly ran afoul of the gang members she was involved with, she was taken into the woods in Dummerston and allegedly executed to teach other locals a lesson.
Harris is careful to note that although profiling gang members is not law enforcement's modus operandi, they do note when a known gang member is involved in a crime. Putting the pieces together is the job of other law enforcement agencies, but Harris acknowledged the presence of gangs in targeting Bellows Falls for sale of heroin.
Birmingham said that over the past decade and a half, law enforcement has “seen a huge shift of how heroin gets into Vermont. It used to be that a lot of day trippers would head out to get it for themselves or for their friends.”
Now, he said, “we're seeing a very organized network of out-of-state drug traffickers, most of them associated with some form of criminal group, whether that be a gang or anything organized - meaning their purpose is to traffic drugs to Vermont, make a profit, send it back to their leadership and continue on with their criminal enterprise.
“We are seeing much more of that organized criminal activity here in that they are targeting Vermont because the market here is very lucrative and they are getting a lot of bang for their buck,” he said.
Guns for drugs
Once someone develops a hard-core addiction, the addict's life revolves around getting the next dose and will do anything to get it.
According to testimony from heroin addicts in Bess O'Brien's 2013 documentary “The Hungry Heart” (thehungryheartmovie.org), one addict said that at one point she was spending $10,000 a day on her habit. Another said he stole from his family's farm to get quick cash for a daily fix.
In Windham County, sources unofficially link a rash of burglaries to addicts needing money. In some of those burglaries, guns were stolen and later turned up in out-of-state gun violence involving drugs.
In a Boston Globe Metro story on April 28, “Drugs-for-guns traffic troubles police in Mass., Vt.; cheap firearms from one side of border, opiates from other bring peril,” ATF's Boston office public information officer and special agent Deborah Siefert said that “through intelligence gathering, interviews, and thorough investigations, ATF offices in Vermont and Springfield, Mass., have consistently seen guns originating in Vermont used as currency in the interstate drug trade.”
Harris noted that addicts know that guns are welcome currency for heroin.
An incomplete approach
In an interview in April, before the arrests in Bellows Falls of the 11 individuals for various heroin-related offenses including sale and possession, Harris pointed out several problems with addressing the heroin epidemic through law enforcement.
Unless addicts are ready to change their lives, neither arrest nor mandated treatment is likely to make a difference because the addiction cycle with heroin is so difficult to break, he said.
One healthcare professional, who declined to be identified for this story, observed that “you also can't treat your way out of this problem either.
“If [addicts] get arrested, they'd still have a problem. So there needs to be a balance and a comprehensive solution. There is no silver bullet. [An addict] has to change their friends, where they live, how they cope... it all has to work together.
“Focusing only on treatment and law enforcement is not going to make the problem go away.”