They operate quietly in apartments from Aroostook to York County, slipping across state lines with cash and returning with the potent brown powder that is all too lucrative in Maine’s illegal drug market.
And increasingly, the police are watching.
Across Maine, major heroin-trafficking arrests by the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency have more than doubled in the last three years, with agents charging 213 people last year for dealing, up from 91 arrests in 2013.
The law enforcement activity in response to the heroin and opiate crisis has also brought prosecutions to unprecedented levels, according to a Maine Sunday Telegram analysis of arrest and conviction data.
In the same time period, trafficking convictions, which often come long after an arrest has been made and an investigation done, also ballooned, from 347 in 2013 to 515 last year.
To handle the caseload, Gov. Paul LePage last week swore in 13 new drug agents, bringing the number of MDEA agents to 52, the highest staffing level in 25 years.
Gov. Paul LePage, back right, joins Maine Drug Enforcement Agency Director Roy McKinney, back left, as Public Safety Commissioner John Morris administers the oath of office to 13 new state drug agents.
MDEA Director Roy McKinney said that 2016 is expected to be another record year for heroin arrests, reflecting the fact that more drug trafficking is going on in Maine.
“If I were to go back to the last five years, that trend has been on an upward trajectory, and I expect that to continue,” McKinney said. “One of the items we’re looking at with additional personnel is to have more focus (on) cases that have a significant impact on the supply and availability of opiates and heroin in Maine, (rather) than focusing on sheer numbers.”
The figures illustrate not only the scope of the addiction problem, but the high stakes for policymakers charged with coming up with a cohesive, statewide approach that strikes the right balance among prevention, treatment and enforcement.
But measuring the statewide enforcement response – specifically heroin-related arrests and convictions – by agencies other than the MDEA is nearly impossible.
Much like domestic violence offenses a few decades ago, possession of heroin is not tracked as a separate offense in the state’s court system. Instead, heroin and other opiates are included with a host of substances all broadly categorized as Schedule W drugs, making it difficult to discern how many people are being charged specifically with heroin-related offenses.
Today, domestic violence offenses have their own specific classification in state statute, and can be tracked and responded to with more precision. By comparison, without such precise statistics for drug offenses, lawmakers and police officials must rely on anecdotal information.
Over the last three years, convictions for possession of Schedule W drugs have increased 30 percent, from 879 in 2013 to 1,138 in 2015, according to data provided by the state’s Judicial Branch. There is no way to determine how many of those are for heroin and how many are for possession of other Schedule W drugs, such as LSD or methamphetamine.
DIFFERENT APPROACHES
Even in the absence of specific data, law enforcement officials and state leaders are still forging ahead with policies to try to divert addicts from jail and into treatment, even if it means softening the state’s approach to simple drug possession.
Maine State Police troopers, for instance, are no longer automatically arresting people for having small quantities of heroin for their own use, instead issuing summonses on a case-by-case basis, according to documents released by the Maine Opiate Collaborative, an interagency group that has been working since last summer to hash out a cohesive drug response.
But there is still an unresolved conflict in the Legislature that arose last year when lawmakers passed contradictory legislation which made possession of a small amount of heroin both a felony and a misdemeanor. The change took effect in October.
If charged as a felony, heroin possession is punishable by up to five years in prison.
Until the contrary legal language is corrected, prosecutors have been instructed to charge only misdemeanors, punishable by one year of probation, 364 days in jail and a $400 fine, said Maine Attorney General Janet Mills, who has recently pushed lawmakers to allow prosecutors to use the threat of a felony conviction for heroin possession as a way to prod drug users into treatment.
“You have to have a long period of time hanging over them to get them into treatment,” Mills said in a telephone interview Friday. “Defendants are pleading guilty to misdemeanor charges, paying a fine, and leaving. We’ve had a few individuals who leave court, and within a few days, overdose on the same drug, mostly heroin.”
A CALL FOR BETTER MONITORING
Because of the contradictory legislation, Mills says a tactic no longer available is deferred disposition, under which a prosecutor has enough evidence to charge a crime as a felony but puts the case on hold to give defendants time to seek treatment, or else be convicted and jailed. The number of deferred disposition cases is unknown, as is their success rate – the data do not exist.
But treatment advocates say a felony leaves an indelible mark on someone’s history if an offender cannot meet the court’s standards.
Although Mills and others say anecdotal evidence indicates that prosecutors take pains to screen cases and offer alternatives to jail when possible, there is no way of knowing how many cases end this way with success, or if the alternative options are effective for most people or only in a small number of cases.
“I think it would be very much helpful to law enforcement and treatment providers if we were able to, in a real-time and active fashion, monitor how many heroin cases, how many oxycodone cases (are in the courts) at three-month intervals, and sort of see the trend,” said John Pelletier, executive director of Maine Indigent Legal Services, the agency responsible for arranging court-appointed attorneys for criminal defendants. “We can’t do that now.”
NO GOOD WAY TO TRACK DATA
Another problem is that heroin enforcement data often don’t match up between agencies.
There are at least three separate computer systems in place throughout the state to track cases. One system is employed by the Maine Department of Public Safety to count arrests, as mandated by the federal government and regulated by the FBI. A second system used by the state’s eight district attorneys tracks their own cases, and a third is used in courthouses to manage the court’s docket.
The separate systems to track data mean it is impossible to determine whether, for instance, a criminal charge listed during an arrest is the same charge ultimately brought by prosecutors.
The Maine judiciary is soon expected to choose software for a single new electronic filing and record system for all state courts, potentially giving officials a deeper, more accurate look at how cases move through the system.
Despite the shortcomings in how crime data are gathered, the picture in Maine remains clear: More people are likely to face a drug charge in 2016.
Busts like this one in the midcoast typically yield large amounts of cash and drugs.
Nearly three months into the year, officials have already made several trafficking arrests: In January, a man from New York and a woman from Oakland were found in an apartment with nearly a quarter-pound of heroin. In February, police found two men returning from Massachusetts with 24 grams, enough for 240 individual doses, ready to be repackaged and sold on the street in the Biddeford area. In another case, two 19-year-olds, also from Biddeford-Saco, were arrested for a similar drug run, returning to Maine from Haverhill, Massachusetts, with 30 grams of heroin for resale. And in March, two men from Connecticut and New York City took a wrong turn and accidentally crossed the U.S.-Canada border in Houlton, where police found 66 grams of heroin, about 660 doses, and the packaging material required for resale.
The federal court system in Maine is also seeing a rise in drug cases, many of them involving heroin.
In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2015, 57 defendants were charged in federal court in Maine with heroin-related offenses, up from five in 2014 and 22 in 2013, said Donald Clarke, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
So far, 19 of those 57 defendants have been sentenced to prison terms of up to 235 months, Clarke said.
“It would appear that heroin is the most frequently charged drug (offense) per defendant,” he said. “I think any law enforcement or prosecuting office in the state of Maine is aware of the increase in prosecutions and in overdoses and deaths, which have risen from this epidemic.”
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