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| Law enforcement's story: Looking for the trouble |
By: By JACI SMITH, Managing Editor
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Posted: Friday, July 11, 2008 11:07 pm
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Scott Robinson has “people.”
That was apparent by how often the Rice County deputy sheriff’s cell phone rang during a recent two-hour interview.
One call was from someone letting him know where a key suspect was at that moment.
Another was from a cop, ready to help him set up a bust.
A third was from someone looking to do a deal with his undercover persona.
PART 4 OF THIS SERIES
School's story: A tough test
Dan's story: A 20-year-old shares about addiction
A young girl's poem about addiction
***
Jake's story, Part 3; links to other Part 3 stories
Jake's story, Part 2; links to other Part 2 stories
Stories from Part 1
BY THE NUMBERS
Much has been made of the numbers former police chief Gary Smith used in his July 3, 2007, press conference. From federal, state, county, school district and law enforcement sources, here are some statistics on the problem of opiate use in Northfield and greater northern Rice County.
• People in northern Rice County (where all the county’s ODs occurred) died in 2007 of an overdose at two times the rate they did in Hennepin County and Ramsey County over the same time period. (Verification of the math used to produce this statistic comes courtesy of a statistician serving on the News’ Watchdog Team).
• In 2005, less than 1 percent of heroin users in Rice County who sought treatment reported using in the last month, compared to 2.1 percent average statewide. In 2007, 5.9 percent did, compared to 3.5 percent average statewide.
• 6.1 percent of Rice County people seeking treatment for addiction reported heroin as their drug of choice, compared to 3.5 percent average statewide.
• In the 2006-07 school year, 30 students at Northfield High School, or 2 percent of the total student body, were treated for some form of chemical addiction, 15 of whom were treated for OxyContin or heroin use. In the 2007-08 school year, eight were treated, four of whom used OxyContin or heroin.
• According to the 2006 (latest available) federal drug health survey from the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, the number of users who seek treatment for illicit drug use represents between 5 and 10 percent of the population actually using.
• The number of juvenile drug-related cases opened in the county increased from 40 in 2005 to 64 for the first 11 months of 2007. Meanwhile, adult drug-related cases opened declined from 143 in 2005 to 113 for the first 11 months of 2007.
• The percentage of positive drug test results on juveniles incarcerated in the county has declined for every drug except opiates.
• In the most recent state school safety survey (from 2007), 12 percent of senior boys and 9 percent of senior girls, or 25 to 30 students, admitted using a drug other than marijuana, alcohol or tobacco within 30 days of taking the survey.
• A 2008 Healthy Community Initiative Survey found 27 percent of juniors said it was “easy” to get prescription drugs not for them. 5 percent had done it.
• The same survey found that 11 percent of juniors thought about half their classmates were using some “other drug” that wasn’t alcohol, tobacco or marijuana. 10 percent reported they thought it was sometimes/usually OK that they did. 63 percent said they knew it was wrong.
— Sources: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Minnesota Department of Health, Minnesota Department of Education, Rice County Sheriff’s Department, Rice County Department of Corrections, Northfield School District, Healthy Community Initiative.
OPIATE FAQs
WHERE DO THEY GET IT FROM?: Although there are local dealers, the main heroin/OxyContin pipeline is most certainly the Twin Cities, police say. OxyContin is sold by pill; heroin, depending on the type, is sold by rock — often tied up with a small balloon — or powder — wrapped in a paper “bindle.”
WHY DO SO MANY
OVERDOSE?: Each case is clearly different, but the reason why heroin is so dangerous a drug (one federal report said more people die of heroin than any other illicit drug except cocaine) is that a user never really knows the potency of the dose they are taking. Powder heroin is often “cut” with filler to lessen the high and extend the supply, which earns dealers more money. The more potent or pure the heroin, the less needed to depress a body’s nervous system enough to be fatal. Law enforcement has said the heroin coming into Northfield recently is quite pure, thus quite potent. |
Robinson, and his partner, Faribault Police investigator Mark Krenik, say they are the busiest that they’ve ever been in their careers since they began working on the Rice County Drug Task Force.
The task force, created in January of this year, is one of the ways area law enforcement is combating what they call the “significant” problem of oxycodone and heroin use in Northfield. Oxycodone is more commonly known by its pharmaceutical name, OxyContin. And the task force is not alone. Since — and even before — former police chief Gary Smith’s now-infamous July 3, 2007, press conference announcing that as many as 250 young people in the area were using heroin, there were those who knew and were working on the problem of opiate use in Northfield.
They all agree they’ve made progress in the last year, but not nearly enough.
Four men have died of heroin overdoses in the last year and three more nearly did, according to the county. All had home addresses north of County Road 1 in Rice County.
That’s an overdose death rate two times those of Ramsey County and Hennepin County combined.
Law Enforcement
There are the hours Robinson works as part of his regular 40. There are the allotted overtime hours he works each week. Then, there are the hours he donates because he believes the use of opiates is a serious problem in Northfield and the northern part of the county, and because he knows the task force is making a difference. He is working with his boss, Sheriff Richard Cook, on a plan to spend even more time in Northfield.
The task force was formed, according to Cook, partly because of economics and partly because of philosophy.
The county was formerly part of the South Central Drug Investigation Unit, a collaborative that for many years was run by Northfield Police Capt. Roger Schroeder, and made up of law enforcement from Waseca, Steele, Blue Earth, Faribault and Rice counties.
The unit was funded by federal money, which as early as 2007 was threatening to dry up, Cook said. That would’ve forced Rice County to come up with more than $100,000 just to put one officer on the unit, and his time would’ve been split between the five counties.
In addition, a Rice County member of the unit, a Northfield police officer, had been repeatedly coming to unit meetings and talking about a heroin problem in the city that needed to be addressed. Cook said he knew that dealing with that was not going to be easy, and that it wasn’t going to get enough attention in the existing unit.
So, in the months before Chief Smith’s press conference, Cook said he began discussing a “paradigm shift,” the creation of a Rice County-only task force that would not only work on enforcement, but also on collaboration among local police units, health care providers, advocates and educators.
He had every police agency’s support to do it, including Northfield.
The Northfield Police Department was struggling in 2007. Officers knew there was a opiate drug problem from anecdotal evidence picked up on patrol and from the work Schroeder supervised.
But the department doesn’t have enough officers when it’s fully staffed to have a narcotics unit, and in 2007, it had several open positions. At one point, the Northfield officer on the South Central Drug Investigation Unit had to leave the unit to cover vacancies back home.
By August 2007, the Northfield Police Department was also missing its chief, with Schroeder doing double duty as interim chief and head of the South Central Drug unit.
Shortly after that, with Schroeder’s backing, Cook publicly announced the end of Rice County’s involvement in the South Central unit and the creation of the Rice County Drug Task Force.
Since January, Cook says the Rice County task force has received more intelligence and made more progress than anyone had in five years before on the South Central unit.
The task force has executed 18 operations — more than two a month — with at least one other partner jurisdiction, and has made more than two dozen arrests.
“I’m comfortable saying my cases in Faribault are coke, crack and meth,” Robinson said. “In Northfield, it’s half pharmaceuticals, half heroin.”
There were three arrests that were critical in combating the opiate problem in Northern Rice County: Jacob Wolf, 24, and Benjamin Hanks, 25, both of Northfield; and Sean Donkers, 23, of Nerstrand, all of whom are already convicted or facing trial on drug charges. Police consider the three to be heavy opiate users and dealers. One police official called them the “head of the snake.”
“This is a tough group we’re dealing with here,” Cook said. “It’s 18- to 25-year-olds, mostly 20- to 25-year-olds for the more serious busts, but it’s almost like they had this network and it has just grown from there.”
While the busts are certainly more public, there are other less obvious ways the task force helps combat the opiate problem in the area.
Robinson has done many speaking engagements, including an appearance at last year’s “After the Headlines” event at the middle school, and worked with the Rice County Chemical Health Coalition to create a DVD it hopes to release soon on drug and alcohol use prevention. Task force members routinely show up at meetings of the Mayor’s Task Force on Youth Alcohol and Drug Use and it isn’t out of the ordinary to find Robinson walking the beat talking with as many kids as he can get to know. He’s convinced the information they have will help solve Northfield’s opiate use issue.
The Northfield Police Department, according to new Chief Mark Taylor, has been ramping up its own efforts as well in the last year. Robinson says information the department has given the task force has been instrumental in many of the arrests that have been made.
Beyond enforcement, Taylor said he has several other ideas, chief among them building relationships with citizens in the community. Recently, he instituted walking night beats for officers.
Taylor said he also meets monthly with a de facto “board” of police chiefs and the county sheriff to share support, ideas and information. Everything his officers hear on the street gets passed on to the task force.
In addition, Taylor is excited about the trial DARE program that recently graduated its first class at the elementary school level and, in conjunction with the school district, he’d like to help develop a comparable curriculum for use in the high school, if the district’s interested. He’s still working internally on that idea and hasn’t approached the district with it yet, he said. And the department has school resource officer Thad Monroe working in the schools.
Most importantly, the chief hopes to announce a Northfield officer’s assignment to the county drug task force by next week.
Although it would be difficult to make a direct tie locally between opiate use and other crime, Taylor said he has seen in his time here the type of crimes that studies have repeatedly shown are tied to drug use, such as burglary and theft. He won’t say whether or not there has been a marked increase because he doesn’t know.
“I think it’s dangerous to put it on a scale — more of a problem than what? — but it is a significant problem in the community, the most significant problem we have to deal with right now,” Taylor said. “But we have made great progress in the last year.”
PREVENTION/YOUTH COMMUNITY
The information revealed in former chief Smith’s press conference didn’t come as much of a surprise to Josh Hinnenkamp, executive director of the Northfield Union of Youth (the Key), or other people who work with youth.
“Providers knew before the press conference that they were seeing an increase in people seeking treatment for heroin addiction from the Northfield area,” said Zach Pruitt, coordinator of the Healthy Community Initiative.
And it was hard to hear because some groups had been talking publicly about what was being done but were basically ignored, according to Kathy Sandberg, of the Rice County Chemical Health Coalition. Sandberg is also a member of the Mayor’s Task Force on Youth Alcohol and Drug Use.
“It was as if there was this horrible problem that Gary Smith knew about and no one else did, or they did and refused to do anything about it,” Sandberg said. “What all our organizations had been doing all along got no play at all.”
What followed was a series of public discussions, at least three of which were the brain child of Hinnenkamp and his Key colleagues, that resulted in a “to do” list of sorts. Many in area youth/prevention organizations say the Key kids and their work with the Mayor’s Task Force, the Chemical Health Coalition and HCI was the reason for as much community involvement as there was in those meetings.
But a year later, there are equal parts of elation and frustration with the progress.
A high point is that there will now be a local health provider able to administer the medication that treats opiate addiction, Pruitt said. Dr. Charles Reznikoff of the Hennepin County Medical Center will soon hold regular office hours at the Northfield Hospital clinic, according to hospital president Ken Bank. Administering opiate addiction withdrawal medication requires specialized training.
There has also been a significant effort to address disposal problems with prescription medications, Sandberg said. A recent HCI and school district survey found that 27 percent of juniors in Northfield High School thought it was “easy” to obtain prescription medication not for them, and 5 percent had actually done it. The response rate of the survey was 83 percent.
The mayor’s task force will soon launch a positive social norms campaign that focuses on highlighting the “good” statistics — those that reflect far more kids are saying no to opiates in Northfield than are saying yes, Sandberg said.
All the organizations have more ideas they’d like to implement going forward, but can’t because they don’t have enough hands to make it happen.
Pruitt of HCI said there are four mentoring programs currently going in Northfield and all have significant waiting lists because there aren’t enough mentors. Multiple studies as well as information from local kids who were — and are — using suggest that more conversation with a trusted adult would go a long way to preventing drug or alcohol abuse. The HCI/school district survey found that about 1 in 10 youth in grades six, eight, nine or 11 felt there was no adult who was listening to them when they wanted to talk about issues important to them.
The Key’s Hinnenkamp was more blunt.
“There was a lot of time spent debating whether heroin use is a problem in Northfield — it is. There was a lot of pointing fingers,” Hinnenkamp said. “But this community needs to do a better job of getting involved now. Go to the HCI Web site, click through and find a mentor program. It’s a one-hour commitment a week. Stop finger pointing and do something.”
— Reach Jaci Smith at 645-1116 or jsmith@northfieldnews.com.
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Interesting that there was all these activities going on before the press conference but nothing seemed to be publicly discussed or any intervention was going on. People still continue to die. What was the tipping point that brought the discussion to this point?
Painkiller and Heroin Addiction. Do you know someone who needs help?
Buprenorphine is a state-of-the-art medication, combined with psycho-social therapy, to treat the medical condition of opioid addiction in the privacy of a physician’s office. FDA approved in late 2002, this treatment has improved quality of life for patients and provided dignity to opiate addiction treatment. Buprenorphine is sold under the brandname Suboxone® by Reckitt Benckiser Pharmaceuticals.
Find a physician – www.naabtList.org:
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For information visit www.naabt.org
And while suboxone is a great drug for treating opiate addiction, many opiate users are in fact chemically dependent. To combat chemical dependency requires help on a much larger scale. I tried a "suboxone only" approach to treating my addiction, with some counseling. This didn't come close to helping me deal with my problem. While I was able to maintain short term sobriety (a few weeks tops), I found myself still wanting chemicals to deal with life. I would take drugs that weren't effected by the suboxone (benzodiazapines, alcohol, pot, etc.) and sooner or later it always led back to the same thing, my drug of choice, opiates. Treating chemical dependency requires a change in thought patterns, accompanied by support of both people who love you and by people who have experienced the same things. When I say "the same things" that can apply to anyone who is chemically dependent, whether their drug of choice is alcohol, heroin, crack, whatever; because they all have the same effects in the long run: jails, institutions, or death. It is these people with the same experiences that are the most beneficial to my sobriety, the people in the programs of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Yes, I know, you think you don't belong in A.A., neither did I. But when it came down to it and I had nowhere else to turn, A.A. welcomed me with open arms and let me know that I wasn't alone. While suboxone may curb my cravings for opiates, A.A. has taught me a new way to live, and it's this new way of living that brings me joy, hope, humility, and happiness. So if you're going to contact naabt, I also suggest contacting Greater Minneapolis Intergroup (A.A.)
Minneapolis Intergroup
7204 W. 27TH Street- #113
St. Louis Park, MN 55426
(952)922-0880
www.aaminneapolis.org
St. Paul Intergroup
1600 University Ave. #407
St. Paul, MN 55104
(651)227-5502
www.aastpaul.org
I believe they both have listings for meetings in Northfield. They can help you locate a meeting nearly everywhere in the southern half of MN.