A tiny snapshot of how opioid addiction is killing Americans

Normally I don't trust anything the NY Times prints, but once in awhile they run a story like the one below, about a gal from a small Vermont town that was invaded by heroin.  Here's the link.  Summary below will save you a lot of time:

In 2012 in the small town of Rutland, Vermont (population 16,000), Ginger Parker and her partner injected heroin, as they did most days.  They nodded off.  Her boyfriend never woke up.

When medics arrived they found empty glassine heroin bags stamped with the word FLOW.

Ginger and her partner were regular heroin users, often two bags a day each--so about $100 a day.  At the motel the couple was excited to see the Flow stamp, since it had a reputation for being high-quality stuff.

After her partner's death, Parker agreed to help investigators from the Rutland police and the D.E.A. trace the heroin to the criminals who had supplied the drug.  It took four years but would finally lead to New York City, the Tremont section of the Bronx.

Even after being overtaken by fentanyl as the top killer, heroin remains a multibillion-dollar market, powered by selling millions of tiny clear envelopes of the stuff.

In New York City the bags sold for as little as five bucks--cheaper than an alcoholic drink.  But six hours away in Rutland--and thousands of other small towns--drug dealers discovered users would pay $30 for the same bag.  

If you're looking for why drug use in small-town America has exploded, this is a big part of the reason: Small towns had little competition, so pushers took their deadly product where they could make five times more money.

In 2012 Vermont had 50 opioid-related deaths.  Four years later overdose deaths had doubled, and five years after that they'd doubled again.  And that was four years ago.

The Times writer says "the deadly web of addiction has proved impossible to eradicate," but that's because of liberal Dem policies.  Other nations don't have nearly as great a problem with drugs as the U.S.  They just have the will to do what our rulers won't allow.  That's a clue.

Drug dealers from New York City discovered that a bag that sold for $5 in the Bronx could be sold for $30 in small-town Vermont.  It was a license to print even more money.

Now the story introduces a brand-new New York prosecutor, Shawn Crowley, who grew up in a town of a few hundred people about 20 minutes south of Rutland.  In 2014 she became a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York.  Friends back home told her how heroin was invading Rutland.

In New York City Crowley saw how heroin and violence had devastated so many areas of the city.  Slowly she learned which crews controlled which blocks, where the stash houses were and who was shooting whom.

After about six months on the job her supervisor handed her a case that had been kicking around for a couple of years. The defendant was Ruben Pizarro, known as Chulo, a ruthless drug dealer.  He'd been arrested about 30 times but somehow had always managed to avoid real jail time.  For those who are curious, that's another clue.

Chulo and a companion were charged in a 2012 robbery of a cab driver.  Local prosecutors were useless, so in 2013 cops brought the case to the Southern District hoping the feds would have more success.

It would be her first trial.

DNA evidence had led the police to the accomplice, who pleaded guilty but refused to testify against Chulo.  Although the victim had identified Chulo from a photo, there were no other witnesses and no video of the robbery.

The trial--in 2015--lasted four days.  As the jurors filed in Crowley saw one smile at Chulo. The verdict: not guilty.  Realizing the setup Crowley told a detective, Next time you arrest this guy, call me.

Back in Rutland the trail of the supplier led to a 19-year-old New York City man who moved the drug from the Bronx to dealers in Rutland.  A few days later NYC officers spotted the man in the Bronx.  During a foot chase he tossed a plastic bag containing 1,365 packets of heroin.  But he wouldn’t help investigators in return for leniency. The Hughes Avenue crew he worked for was too dangerous.

In 2010, the two brothers who led the Hughes Avenue crew murdered a man who had no connection to the drug business.  Now, five years later, that crew was at war with Chulo, the dealer who had beaten the taxi robbery charge in August and was back on the street.

Chulo and the Hughes Avenue crew were rivals for territory and customers, thus money.  Their so-called pitchers even pitched addicts as they left a drug-treatment center.

In November of 2015 police had arrested a man named Anthony Ramos—street name Roach—for selling drugs.  Ramos told the police he was selling for Chulo.  Roach had been arrested several times, making him a good candidate to be flipped.

The FBI had arrested a Bronx heroin wholesaler named Neil Lizardi, who was eager to make a deal for a lighter sentence.  Over the preceding five years Lizardi had sold 100 kilos for more than $6 million to one customer--Ramon Cruz.  Lizardi said that since around 2010, Mr. Cruz had been selling Flow to the Hughes Avenue crew, which was also moving heroin to Rutland.

On Nov. 24 of 2015 the violence between Chulo and the Hughes Avenue crew escalated. There was a killing, this time caught on video.  Chulo and an associate had shot a Hughes Avenue pitcher outside a Tremont daycare as parents were dropping off children.  Chulo had chased the man through a parking lot, firing repeatedly. The man fell and Chulo shot him in the heart and fled.

On Dec. 2, the police and FBI arrested the street leader of the Hughes Avenue crew, and Cruz, the middleman.  Weeks later they got Chulo.

In March 2016 Crowley and her colleagues prepared for trial.  Ms. Crowley and her colleagues met with Ginger Parker, partner of the man whose death gave the feds the first lead.  Parker had gone through rehab, had a job and had been allowed to keep custody of her daughter, but Crowley worried that a setback could send her reeling.

Three Manhattan trials from the investigation took nearly a year in 2017 and 2018.  Among the more than a dozen defendants who would plead guilty was Mr. Cruz, then 52, who had packaged Lizardi’s heroin for retail sale.  He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Roach and Lizardi testified for the prosecution in exchange for lighter sentences.

Chulo was found guilty of murdering the Hughes Avenue pitcher whom he had shot outside the daycare center.  A woman who had been walking her young son there testified that as Chulo hurried from the scene he'd caught her eye and smiled.

Addressing the judge before his sentencing, Chulo said his rivals had shot at him often. “I’ve been going through this with these guys for many years,” he said.  “I’m not trying to make no excuses. I just want to be treated fairly.  If I was doing something wrong, I apologize.”

He was sentenced to 75 years.

Ginger Parker testified at one of the trials. A prosecutor asked if she was still using drugs.  She said no.

How long had she been clean?

“Since the day David died,” Ms. Parker said. She added: “I love my daughter. She already lost one parent to it.  She didn’t need to lose both to it.”

But in the seven years since testifying, Ms. Parker, now 47, has been repeatedly arrested for shoplifting in Vermont, and has missed nearly a dozen court dates.  Then one evening last month she was arrested after police said they found cocaine and drug paraphernalia in a car in which she was a passenger.

One person who had long suspected Ms. Parker was using again was Shirley LaPine, the mother of Parker's deceased partner. While Ms. Parker was in rehab, Ms. LaPine cared for the couple’s child — her granddaughter—before the toddler was returned to Parker.

Ms. LaPine says she hasn't seen her granddaughter, now a teenager, in years.

The Flow case was a triumph for the investigators and prosecutors who had devoted years of their lives to it.  Murders were solved, killers were punished and the distribution network was disrupted.

Of course it's just a drop in the bucket, but at least Vermont’s annual opioid deaths have dropped from 235 three years ago to 180 last year.  That's still over three times the number in 2012 but a good trend.  

The estimated number of Vermont residents being treated for opioid addiction —11,500—has more than doubled since 2012.  The cost of treating one person can be as much as $3,000 per month.

In Rutland, in 2015 one of Ms. Crowley's childhood friends had been featured in a news story about how the town was struggling with the heroin epidemic.  Crowley's friend said she had gotten help and hadn’t used in two years.

In 2021, she died of an overdose. 

==
No NY Times article would be complete without a jab at Trump:

The Trump administration is proposing to cut funding for many programs believed to have contributed to the recent reduction in opoid-overdose deaths.

Ah, of course.  Because once an NGO gets taxpayer funds, it never gives them up.