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NO such thing as CASUAL USERS
Suburban drug use underwrites violent distribution networks and carries risks of addition and death
The guests whispered that the late September wedding would be one to remember. Sweet-smelling freesia and white roses filled porcelain table vases. There was a large bridal party, a six-piece band, a disc jockey and 250 guests.
After plates were whisked away, a slender woman in her 20s and a bridesmaid disappeared into the bathroom. They came out shyly, acted as if they’d never seen each other before, and quickly separated.
Then, a guest at the Weymouth wedding recalled, men began visiting the rest room in pairs. They emerged licking their lips and gently rubbing their noses.
By the end of the night, the guest said, people had staggered in and out of the bathrooms, many having consumed cocaine as exuberantly as champagne.
This type of drug use happens daily here on the South Shore and throughout the United States. At first glance, it doesn’t seem to hurt anybody.
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GARY HIGGINS/The Patriot Ledger
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A deeper look at “recreational” drug users - those who occasionally smoke a joint after dinner or use cocaine at a party - reveals how pernicious and precarious their drug use really is.
In many cases, these are people who have jobs and families and lead otherwise legal lives. But their casual drug use fuels a multimillion-dollar illegal drug industry that destroys families, drains social services and spawns crime, often against people who don’t use drugs.
In a monthslong examination of drug abuse and the war against it on the South Shore, Patriot Ledger reporters found:
- People are dying. On average, 11 people a year have died from drug overdoses in Quincy in the last five years. In Cohasset, police say six people died of apparent heroin overdoses in that same period. The deaths are seldom made public, but far more people die of drug overdoses than in plane crashes, house fires or homicides. There were 404 drug-related deaths in Norfolk and Plymouth counties in 2000.
- Drug users are getting younger. Ten years ago there were 20 juvenile drug arrests on the South Shore. In 1999, there were 208. Seven people 17 or younger were arrested on drug charges in Sharon, 18 in Weymouth and 28 in Plymouth. Ecstasy, at $30 a pill, can be found at every high school on the South Shore, according to Norfolk County District Attorney William Keating.
- The financial cost of addiction is astounding. According to a Columbia University study, Massachusetts spent $2.7 billion - 17 percent of the state budget - to counter the ravages of substance abuse in 1998. The state spent less - $2.3 billion - on aid to public schools that year, and every person in Massachusetts shelled out $441 in taxes to lock up addicts, counsel broken families and tend to substance abusers and their dependents.
- Despite concerted efforts to eliminate the illegal drug trade, Americans continue to use drugs. In February, President Bush outlined a national drug-control policy calling for the expenditure of $19 billion, with 20 percent going to treatment programs and research, and 80 percent to interdiction, police and courts. One goal of that policy is to make drugs scarce and expensive. By comparison, Americans spend $20 billion a year on the nationwide school lunch program that provides reduced-cost or free meals of tens of million of children each school day.
Many drug policy reform organizations say throwing money at the problem hasn’t worked, won’t work and may do more harm than good, but there are strong political, economic and cultural forces keeping the war on drugs on course. Any wavering can be instant political suicide for elected officials.
If people want to smoke a joint after work or do a line of cocaine on a Saturday night, many reformers say, let them, or at least don’t make them criminals for doing it. These legalization advocates argue that decriminalizing drug use would eliminate the culture of addiction and with it a significant amount of crime. They say the nation’s prison population would decline and a regulated and taxable industry, like liquor, would be created. These groups, however vocal, are still in the minority.
Police are not winning the war on drugs - if that means stopping the flow. Only 5 percent of the drugs brought to the South Shore are intercepted, drug investigators say. As long as the demand is there, they say, cleaning up one drug zone just moves the dealing somewhere else.
Prevailing attitudes about drug use don’t help. Many suburbanites continue to turn a blind eye to illegal drug use, separating their pills or their marijuana from the destruction and the drug-related violence they encounter almost daily in their newspapers and on television.
Interviews with multiple South Shore residents indicated a common attitude: The joint I smoked after dinner didn't hurt anybody.
“They’re living a sheltered life,” said Vincent J. Mazzilli, former special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in New England. “They don’t know what they’re doing is supporting a major problem.” Mazzilli has square shoulders and eyes that flicker and, until he retired in December, carried a .40-caliber Glock in a holster on his left ankle. He doesn’t mince words when he talks about drugs.
Mazzilli said middle-class drug users, like all drug users, underwrite a violent distribution network that fosters a culture of neglect and abuse. And it’s never clear, he added, when casual drug use will evolve from something people do occasionally into an unmanageable addiction.
| Many “recreational” drug users draw a distinction between themselves and others who use drugs, saying there’s nothing wrong with use that doesn’t get out of control. |
Many “recreational” drug users draw a distinction between themselves and others who use drugs, saying there’s nothing wrong with use that doesn’t get out of control.
Statistics, however, show drug use is a game of odds and those who get away with it are luckier, not smarter, than those who overdose or become addicts.
Nine percent of people who try marijuana, 17 percent of those who use cocaine and 23 percent of those who use heroin develop a dependence on those drugs, according to the National Academy of Sciences.
More than 8,000 people who said they live on the South Shore entered drug treatment programs in Massachusetts during 1999. Some may have been admitted more than once, and some abused alcohol and no other drug. But more than 2,300 of those who sought treatment said they had used heroin in the 12 months prior to seeking help, 2,200 said they had used cocaine and 1,300 said they had smoked crack.
Experts say only one-third of drug and alcohol abusers seek help. So, the majority of users in every community never set foot in a treatment facility.
One of the biggest problems locally is heroin. Nearly every community on the South Shore has been touched by the drug. Four people died from heroin overdoses in Weymouth last year.
Many people think of heroin as an inner-city drug that is someone else’s problem, but experts say that over the past decade, heroin has leaped out of the cities and landed in the suburbs.
“We have an epidemic of heroin use in New England,” Mazzilli, the DEA agent,said, waving his hand as though he were clearing a foul smell out of the air.
Heroin, not alcohol, is the No. 1 reason people check into detox programs in Massachusetts, according to state figures.
Of the 54,379 Massachusetts residents who entered state-licensed detoxification programs between July 1, 2000, and June 30, 2001, more than 51 percent sought treatment for heroin addictions while 41 percent were there because of alcohol.
Because of the surge in heroin overdoses and deaths, the federal government two years ago designated New England as a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA). Plymouth County got $2.8 million in federal funds under the program, which aims to disrupt drug trafficking and money laundering. With such a small budget, it’s difficult to see how the HIDTA will be effective, but proponents of the drug war say it’s a start.
A heroin addiction can occur within weeks, and because the heroin sold locally is so pure - as high as 90 percent pure in the greater Boston area - people can smoke and snort it, so those wary of injecting drugs are now more likely to try it.
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File photo Quincy police officer James Sullivan takes a suspect into custody after a raid on Liberty Street. Police said they confiscated ecstacy and date rape drugs, among others. |
“More people are dying of drug overdoses than are dying of being homicide victims,” said George Festa, HIDTA director for New England. “I can’t stress the problem enough. All age groups, all economic levels - it’s devastating to this area.”
Drugs seem like a distant problem in towns like Marshfield, Pembroke, Cohasset or Canton. People think of Boston, Brockton and New Bedford as the only places where drugs turn up, but they’re wrong. Those cities are distribution points on the New York City-to-Boston leg of the pipeline that brings most illicit drugs into New England, but they are not the end of the line.
“There is a canyon of deniability,” said Norfolk County District Attorney William Keating. “People don’t understand the prevalence of drugs. You can take those treatment numbers and multiply them by a high number. Then maybe people would realize the scope of the problem.”
Illegal drugs have not only made fresh inroads into suburbia, but the people who use them are starting younger than ever before.
In Plymouth, the number of people 17 or younger arrested for drug-related crimes went from one in 1990 to 28 in 1999. Most of the arrests were for marijuana.
Among the drugs embraced by young people is ecstasy, a psychedelic amphetamine that users say relaxes them, heightens their sense of awareness and facilitates intimacy.
Ecstasy can permanently damage the brain, causing depression, anxiety and other disorders. When used, the drug cuts off the body’s temperature signals to the brain, and users can dehydrate or overheat during the high of four to six hours that it typically produces.
In 1990, police on the South Shore made not one seizure of ecstasy. Last year they made 27 seizures of the drug.
“We have ecstasy in every high school, without exception, on the South Shore,” Keating said. “It’s frightening. One of our biggest concerns is the perception among students that it’s safe.” Mazzilli, the former regional DEA official, spoke harshly of parents who let their kids go to raves - dance parties that sometimes double as drug parties.
“We should not be educating just kids, but some of those parents,” he said. “We had so-called soccer moms dropping kids off at rave clubs so they could overdose on ecstasy.
“Anybody who tells you nothing is wrong (with drug use) is ignorant to the effects of drugs on drug users - lawyers, doctors, candlestick makers or a soccer mom,” Mazzilli said.
The warnings haven’t stopped people who think of themselves as “recreational” users. A Hanover mother said getting cocaine takes less time than some of her errands.
“It’s easier to meet a dealer and get cocaine than to get your dry cleaning - one phone call, and they’ll meet you in a lot in five minutes,” she said.
She said cocaine use has dropped off among her friends, but marijuana continues as a mainstay among the 40-plus set and, at least in her circle, “isn’t considered a drug anymore.”
Mazzilli has some tough words of advice for people who use drugs. He said they’re in over their heads and added that every drug purchase could end with an arrest, an overdose or a body bag.
“I’ve talked to people who have dealt with the same guy for years and then one day he put a gun to their face,” Mazzilli said. “The next person they make a buy from could be the last person to see them alive. Or it could be an undercover agent who will not only take their car, but every asset they have.”
While “recreational” users are often below the radar of police and the courts, addicts and the crimes addiction generates are not.
In 1999, almost 40 percent of the people sent to prison in Massachusetts were convicted of a drug offense, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. At the Plymouth County jail, 44 percent of the inmates serving sentences last year said they were using drugs at the time they were arrested. Fifty-eight percent said substance abuse led to their arrest, according to jail officials.
Casual users and addicts lubricate the pipelines that bring drugs to the South Shore. Without demand, police say, the pipelines would dry up, and there would be a reduction in crime.
“The people buying drugs and using them need money to purchase them,” said State Police Detective Lt. Bruce Gordon, who has spent much of his career fighting drugs. “It’s related to other crimes - robberies, assaults and all the crimes associated with narcotics. It doesn’t affect other people until someone comes into their houses to take their TV or snatch their purses on the street.”
Michael Sullivan, U.S. attorney in Boston and a former Plymouth County district attorney, shared one of the cases that has stuck with him, the 1995 murder of 85-year-old Sophie Petrowsky, an Abington grandmother who was stabbed 30 times in her own home by a crack addict who wanted money to buy drugs. Her killer, Michael Rosa, was convicted.
“The only thing on his mind was his next hit of crack - out of Sophie Petrowsky's pocketbook,” Sullivan said bitterly.
The violence that took Petrowsky's life seems light years away from a tony dinner party on a quiet back street in Hanover, where guests listened to Gershwin and dined on Cornish game hens.
The Hanover mother and hostess described a typical dinner party at her place. She dismissed the violent distribution network that brought the drugs to her home.
“It’s people in a library-like setting with classical music and fine wine,” she said, describing a past dinner party. “We’re not in jeans, not listening to Bob Marley, and it’s very lovely. And they’re passing a joint.
“If you’re 40, and you’re only having one glass of wine, and you choose to have a few puffs off a joint, so what?”
NUMBERS
50%
High school students in Massachusetts who say they have used marijuana at least once
404
Number of drug-related deaths in Norfolk and Plmouth counties in 2000
Click to see graphic showing Drug Arrests by Age on the South Shore
Click here to see graphic showing the percentage of the U.S. population that has used drugs
Click here to view the cost of drug abuse in the U.S.