HIDTA designation offers resources for counties’ heroin fight

Sheriff Pete Dougherty, Jefferson County, W.Va., says working with police across state lines in Maryland and Virginia counties helps to combat opioid drug traffic and abuse. Photo by Charlie Ban

Tri-state HIDTA counties nab drug dealers, rehab opioid abusers

The country roads of West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle are carrying more and more heroin to markets far and wide.

Because those panhandle counties serve as a corridor for the drug trade, they qualify for federal aid to help fight the opioid epidemic, which has seen accelerated growth over the last four years. In Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia, heroin has been coming out of Baltimore and passing through dozens of counties along the way.

Jefferson County, population 55,073, is one of the latest to become part of a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), a designation that brings with it programmatic support and federal grants to disrupt the large-scale drug trade and aid in rehabilitation for county residents.

The fact that no interstates run through Jefferson County is one reason Sheriff Pete Dougherty is seeing more heroin coming through.

“As interdiction gets better on (interstates) 81 and 70, drivers are looking for a good, quick alternative,” he said. “That becomes crossing the Potomac River and coming through Jefferson County and on into Virginia.”

By cooperating with its neighbors, Jefferson County is meeting another HIDTA criteria: participants must be willing to cooperate with other agencies, and state and federal agency sponsors.

“I have Loudoun County and Clark County in Virginia, Berkeley County in West Virginia on my borders and we’re right across the river from Washington County in Maryland,” he said. “We’re used to working with our neighbors, and we’re improving communication with them.”

But that’s something relatively new to law enforcement agencies, in Tom Carr’s experience as the HIDTA director for the Washington-Baltimore region.

“Law enforcement, by its very nature, is competitive,” he said. “Agencies aren’t used to sharing, but problems aren’t isolated to one county. Increased cooperation among county law enforcement agencies has been one of the biggest changes I’ve since since I started,” as director in 1994.

The national HIDTA program, administered by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, paid out $250 million in FY16. Designations are renewed on an annual basis. More than 17 percent of counties are represented in 32 HIDTAs, which cover 60 percent of the U.S. population.

What Do They Do

Dougherty has a personnel shortage, with 25 deputies spread over 210 square miles and roughly 1,000 miles of public road. They handle everything from emergency calls to requests for livestock movement.

For Jefferson County, HIDTA is funding the purchase of license plate-reading cameras, which Dougherty sees as a way to free up his deputies and improve surveillance.

“It doesn’t bring you more manpower, but this technology will give us the technology to work better and smarter with the deputies that we have,” he said. “I’d like to be able to watch some of that traffic coming out of Baltimore, but following drug dealers is very time consuming and very difficult to maintain coverage without being spotted.”

Instead, once the cameras are installed, Dougherty will be able to track travel patterns of cars suspected to be part of drug distribution operations. He can forward that information to his neighboring sheriffs — information sharing is another HIDTA requirement. And the lawmen can figure out the best way to spring their trap.

Most often, the driver makes a mistake and gives deputies a reason to stop the car and then give the department’s drug-sniffing dogs a chance.

“They can smell a little bit of heroin like I can smell a pot of coffee brewing 10 feet away,” Dougherty said. “And it’s usually distracted driving, looking at their phone while they’re driving, that gives us a reason to pull them over.”

While Jefferson County just became HIDTA-designated in January 2016, Frederick County in Maryland, population 241,409, has been in the program for more than three years. Sheriff Charles Jenkins has seen HIDTA contributions increase as the county matures and demonstrates its capability, which can serve as a motivation to Dougherty’s force.

Frederick now has personnel from the Department of Homeland Security operating out of its office and Jenkins is seeing the benefit that comes with his new coworkers.

“Homeland Security’s involvement is increasing our capacity locally and bringing federal jurisdictional authority that we didn’t have before,” he said. “Our cases often go out of state and what starts as a small, localized complaint could take us up into New York, the Southwest, the Midwest, anywhere.”

Adjacent to Jefferson County, Berkeley County, W.Va., which surrounds Interstate 81, immediately launched a wiretap effort after earning a HIDTA designation in 2014, which led to the dismantling of a drug ring.

“We don’t want to measure in terms of individual arrests, we want the number of drug distribution operations disrupted,” Carr said. “Every time we make a move, there’s an opposite reaction. If we cut off a supply line, it increases the bad guys’ search time for more drugs and more ‘safe’ routes.”

More than Manacles

Though their counties are thoroughfares for drug shipments, their residents are getting hooked like nothing before.

“HIDTA isn’t just enforcement, it’s rehabilitation,” Dougherty said. “That doesn’t get as much attention, but that’s a big part of it.”

It’s born of the realization and reality that law enforcement agencies can’t arrest their way out of the drug trade. If the goal is to end the sale of illegal drugs, the demand needs to be addressed.

“There are market conditions at play,” Dougherty said. “Arresting drug dealers is a good thing to do. We’re going to do it, but if we arrest Johnny A., Johnny B. is going to take his job the next day because it’s lucrative for him.”

“We want to get to a point where there’s not much of a market for dealers.”

So counties are taking advantage of HIDTA’s funding for rehabilitation services. For Jefferson County, it’s the Day Reporting Center community corrections service. Dougherty hopes to adapt an adult version of the youth drug rehab model that has been successful.

“We put a lot of focus on the parents, keeping them in the loop,” he said. “Counselors meet with the parents once a week and help them out, understand how to react to their child’s recovery. There’s a way to be firm with a child dealing with addiction that won’t trigger them and make things worse.”

Those rehabilitation efforts will need a boost to keep pace with the spread of drug use, which shows no sign of abating.

The typical Washington-Baltimore HIDTA drug user is a man in his 30s, with 10 arrests and six convictions, Carr said, which demographically gives the epidemic even more room for growth. Jenkins said most of Frederick County’s users are in the upper middle class, with money to spend.

“And it’s spread all over the county,” he said. “It’s no worse in one part than the other.”

Dougherty said heroin use has moved out of the low-income areas of county seat Charles Town and into rural areas. “We’re seeing three times as many overdoses as we did three years ago,” he said. “It’s not uncommon to have four in a 24-hour period, over two days.”

And the sales are getting more brazen.

“One of my deputies was filling up his car at a gas station and saw a deal going down across the street, in open view,” he said.

Meanwhile, Frederick County recorded nearly five times as many overdoses through mid-May 2016 than it did for all of 2012. Jenkins said he expects at least 280 overdoses by the end of 2016, which will double the 2015 total.

“I don’t expect it to decrease any time soon,” he said. And, to his chagrin, some users are counting double, having survived thanks to the administration of anti-overdose drug naloxone.

“We revived one user three times in one year,” he said. “It’s great that we have this chance to give people a second chance, but they’re not all getting the help they need.”

Dougherty laments that there are few intensive therapy programs for youths nearby. Most are sent hours away.

And just as he has seen law enforcement change dramatically during his 22 years at the Washington-Baltimore HIDTA bureau, Carr has seen the epidemic change.

“Back when we started, in the ‘90s, it was all cocaine,” he said. “Even a few years ago you wouldn’t find any heroin in Northern Virginia — it was unknown. You had prescription drugs, then, a year later, when those supplies dried up, heroin moved in with cheaper prices.

“It’s straining resources beyond just law enforcement — human services, for instances, taking care of children whose parents are locked up. It’s not just the demand on deputies.”