A heroin epidemic that has exploded in other parts of the country in recent years has been insidiously seeping into Arkansas over the past three or four years, creating a growing sense of alarm in the office of U.S. Attorney Chris Thyer.
"From my perspective, we have a serious heroin problem that is growing to become epidemic," Thyer said. "Arkansas is lagging behind other parts of the country where it has already reached epidemic proportions, but we are rapidly getting there."
The re-emergence of the highly addictive drug is being blamed on easy access for many years to over-prescribed opiates to treat pain. Opiates are a class of drugs derived from poppy seeds and include morphine, opium, codeine, oxycodone and hydrocodone.
More than half of all abusers of heroin say their addiction started after they began using prescription drugs they found in their home medicine cabinets or the medicine cabinets of their friends' parents, Thyer said.
He said that in the past 10 years, Arkansas, along with the rest of the country, has seen a steady increase in the abuse of prescription opiates such as oxycodone and hydrocodone. A resulting crackdown, which has made the drugs harder to get and consequently more expensive to buy on the street, has prompted many desperate addicts to turn instead to heroin, an opiate that targets the same brain receptors and is considerably cheaper.
Attorney David Cannon of Little Rock, who regularly represents people charged with drug crimes, said his clients tell him they can buy a dose of heroin for $25 to $50, while a single hydrocodone pill without a prescription costs them $40 to $60, and a single oxycodone pill costs them between $60 and $100.
"It ends up getting expensive real quick, depending on a person's habits," Cannon said, citing a well-known fact about opiates: Regular users quickly develop a tolerance and steadily need higher doses to attain the feelings of euphoria and relaxation that the drugs induce. Cannon said some opiate addicts need six, seven or eight doses a day.
Heroin is becoming easier to find, too, as Mexican drug cartels, long experienced at smuggling cocaine, marijuana and other illegal substances into the country, have "stepped right in to fill the void and are now supplying heroin," Thyer said.
The Associated Press reported this fall that a drug gang implicated in the disappearance of 43 students in a southern Mexican city paid the mayor hundreds of thousands of dollars a month out of its profits from making opium paste to fuel the U.S. heroin market. Officials described as "lucrative" the practice of growing opium poppies and sending opium paste to be refined for heroin destined for the United States.
Overdoses in Cabot
Thyer's office prosecutes drug crimes investigated by federal agents, sometimes in cooperation with local police, such as the Cabot Police Department, which in July of 2011 began experiencing a rash of heroin overdoses involving young adults and teenagers.
After the father of a 20-year-old man reported to the Arkansas State Police that his son had died from a heroin overdose in Cabot, state police contacted Drug Enforcement Administration agents, who learned that there had been nine overdoses involving young adults, two of which were fatal, in a six-month period in the Cabot area.
An ensuing DEA investigation found that the 20-year-old Little Rock man, Jared Maxwell, and 25-year old Dustin Harris of Cabot had obtained their heroin from the same person, who regularly drove from his Cabot home to Memphis to obtain the supply that he distributed in the Cabot area. An indictment handed up in July of 2012 by a federal grand jury in Little Rock accused Wallando Onezine of Cabot of being the main distributor, and seven other men of engaging in a heroin distribution conspiracy.
Since then, all eight have pleaded guilty, some to reduced charges, and all but two have been sentenced. In return for his guilty plea to the conspiracy charge, Onezine is serving a 10-year prison sentence. Had he gone to trial and been convicted, he faced an automatic life sentence because of his leadership role and his past criminal record.
However, the Onezine case, which brought to light a burgeoning heroin problem in Arkansas, is no longer the only heroin case pending in federal court in Little Rock.
Among the heroin cases that are slowly filtering on to the federal docket is that of a Sherwood couple, Kari Evans Janiszewski and Patryk Janiszewski, who in August admitted to distributing small amounts of heroin from 2009 through 2011. The college-educated professionals were awaiting the birth of their first child when they appeared before U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr. on Aug. 21 to plead guilty to a distribution-conspiracy charge.
After both admitted they had overcome addiction to heroin, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Peters cited the "extraordinary rehabilitation by both defendants even before we brought charges" in January of 2013, in agreeing with defense attorneys to let them remain free until sentencing.
"Beating heroin addiction is extremely difficult," Peters told the judge. Citing the "enormous progress they've made," she said it "would almost be to society's detriment" to take them away from their jobs -- operating a software business and working in a law firm -- while a pre-sentence investigation is completed.
The couple declined to be interviewed for this article and are still awaiting sentencing of up to 20 years in prison.
'Kilogram of heroin'
In a July 23 detention hearing in another pending case, a Little Rock-based DEA agent testified that a traffic stop in Texas earlier in the month led to the seizure of a 1-kilogram packet of heroin that the passenger said he was delivering to a Little Rock home.
Asked if heroin was a common substance in Arkansas, agent Dale Van Dorple replied, "It is not." He called the amount of the drug that was intercepted "a tremendous quantity."
"Has local DEA seen a kilogram of heroin in Little Rock anytime recently?" asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Givens.
Van Dorple replied, "I've been in Little Rock now for nine years and I have talked to Little Rock narcotics officers that have been doing this for 20 years, talked to AUSAs [assistant U.S. attorneys] and ... no one had ever heard of a kilogram of heroin being here in Little Rock."
A kilogram is the equivalent of 2.2 pounds. Putting it in perspective, Van Dorple told U.S. Magistrate Judge Tom Ray that 1 kilogram of heroin could generate about 15,000 doses, depending on the purity of the drug.
"When you're looking at something like that coming into your city, it can be devastating if it was ever to hit the streets," the agent testified. "If you're looking at potentially 15,000 dosage units of heroin, the chances of somebody dying out of those 15,000 units, I would say, is great."
In the case in which Van Dorple testified, the passenger traveling from San Antonio to Little Rock agreed to cooperate with authorities and arranged to drop off the heroin at the house at 8 Rolling Lane the next day. Just after the drug was delivered, Special Weapons and Tactics officers from the Little Rock Police Department, working with federal agents, surrounded the house and arrested one of the residents, Kyle Matthew Cox.
Van Dorple said that while officers armed with a search warrant broke down the front door of Cox's house, someone smashed out a rear bedroom window and tossed out the package that the Texas man had just delivered.
Agents designed the package to look like a full kilogram of cocaine but it actually contained only a small amount of the drug, Van Dorple said, noting that agents didn't want to risk the possibility of a large amount of the drug getting into the community if the execution of the warrant went awry.
In ordering Cox to remain jailed, Ray noted that a loaded, blood-spotted shotgun found on a bedroom floor near the broken window, coupled with bleeding wounds on Cox's arm, constituted "strong circumstantial evidence" that Cox "at least entertained the thought of defending himself with [the gun] against the police."
Cox was later indicted on charges of conspiring to possess more than 100 grams of heroin with the intent to distribute it and being a felon in possession of a firearm, a 12-gauge shotgun, in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime. He has pleaded innocent and is awaiting a March 30 jury trial before U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright.
'All-Arkansas problem'
Thyer said the resurgence of heroin, which is capable of causing physical withdrawal symptoms after just one use, "is not an inner-city problem. It is a Cabot, Ark., problem. It is a suburban problem. It is also a city problem. ... It is an all-Arkansas problem, because the use of prescription drugs crosses all economic lines."
Federal and state prosecutors in Arkansas have for years been prosecuting people for selling illegally obtained prescription drugs, primarily opiates.
"You can draw a straight line between the prescription drug problem we've been having for 10 years and the heroin problem," Thyer said.
Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley, who prosecutes cases filed by police departments throughout Pulaski and Perry counties, said he has seen "quite a surge" in arrests for illegally obtained prescription drugs over the years. While he is aware of the link between those drugs and heroin, Jegley said that so far, his office has seen only "a few" cases involving heroin.
"We have yet to see anything significant," he said, adding, "Arkansas, in just about everything, crimes included, is on the back end of trends."
Among those facing federal charges in Little Rock for selling oxycodone pills is former Razorback and NFL running back Cedric Cobbs, who was indicted in October along with 32 other people. The indictment alleges that the group conspired between June of 2013 and Oct. 7 to sell the pills, a "large quantity" of which was seized during an investigation.
Cobbs, 33, faces a jury trial in June before Judge Marshall.
Cannon said he has represented "soccer moms, nurses and businessmen" on charges of forging prescriptions to obtain opium-based drugs, noting, "Hydros and oxys are what you see the most."
While he has "not seen the trend here in Arkansas yet" when it comes to heroin, Cannon agreed that prescription-drug abuse is rampant.
"That is the case I do the most is prescription drugs," he said. "Since I have been in the practice of law, for 17 years, marijuana has been a constant, crack was really big for four or five years, meth has been big for the last six or seven years, and prescription drugs are the big thing now."
Thyer said that at conferences he attends across the country, heroin "is an enormously big topic, and not just around U.S. attorneys."
He noted that in some places where the drug has reached epidemic proportions, some first responders carry a heroin antidote at all times.
From 2006 to 2010, Thyer said, heroin deaths across the country increased by 45 percent.
"The single biggest drug problem in Arkansas is still methamphetamine," Thyer said. "But when you get to pockets in Arkansas, that's not true. If you took the heroin problem and added it to the prescription-drug problem, it probably is bigger than meth."
"This is not a situation where we can prosecute our way out of the problem," he said.
"People need to understand that these two things are inextricably intertwined and we have got to come at it from all facets. The prescription drug problem is the feeder."
He said while "eventually, it will affect all age groups," the heroin problem is mostly confined to teenagers and young adults, because they grew up in households where prescribed opiates were commonly available in family medicine cabinets.
Thyer said he frequently speaks to civic clubs about the prescription drug and heroin problem, and "two things happen every time. Eighty percent or higher [of people in the audience] say they had no idea this was going on, while the others say they've had this happen to a family member or friend."
He said most people in the audience vow to go home and immediately clean out their medicine cabinets.
SundayMonday on 01/04/2015