MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Finding solutions to a drug overdose problem that claimed 64,000 Americans in 2016 isn’t easy.
The problems are complex, multi-faceted, and range across multiple agencies that deal in law enforcement, mental health, health care, and the political spectrum.
And while thousands die — more from drug overdoses in 2016 than every American death in the Vietnam War — the nation’s law enforcement community is taxed, overworked, and desperate for solutions.
“Some of us are dealing with heroin, some of us are dealing with fentanyl, some of us are dealing with meth, some of us are dealing with cocaine,” Morgantown Police Chief Ed Preston said. “But we are all dealing with a multitude of drug addiction issues.”
That was what Ed Preston learned when he joined three other active and former police chiefs from varying cities of diverse sizes all across the United States as part of a report issued by the Police Executive Research Forum.
“Addiction is a type of disease and requires long-term treatment,” Preston said. “But we don’t treat addiction like that, typically. We get them clean in a 14 or 28-day process, and we send them right back to the same circumstances where they were using or got addicted or were exposed to it, with the same people that were using with them, exposing them to it, and expecting them to stay clean because we dried them out for 28 days.”
The report issued offers 10 standards for law enforcement and communities to potentially follow. Preston said each standard offers something potentially important, but most focus on the same common theme: preventing a tragedy.
The current model, which often focuses on short-term care, doesn’t check every box, Preston said.
“We didn’t get them sober,” Preston continued. “We dried them out for 28 days. So, now, we have a greater chance of recidivism and overdose because now they are dried out, their body is not as adjusted to taking the doses they were before. They take the dose they took before, and now it kills them.”
The current healthcare infrastructure needs to include more massive, long-term care — treating opioid use disorder like any other disease.
“We don’t have a system set up in this area where we could put them directly into rehab right there,” Preston said. “We have to find bed space available for them. Sometimes we have to find out if insurance is available to pay for it and those kind of things.”
If there’s a thought that what Preston describes his police officers doing in the fight against the epidemic doesn’t sound like traditional police work — or even police work at all — that’s because it probably doesn’t.
“Those are not policing issues, but the police end up having to deal with it because nobody else can or will,” he said.
The signatories on the report included six members of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health; police chiefs from Burlington, Vermont, Arlington, Massachusetts, Seattle, Washington, and Morgantown; and two former directors of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Meanwhile, as police continue to deal with the opioid facet, Preston said there are already alarming new drug trends fast developing.
“There is a very high probability that in the near future that we’re going to be dealing with other types of drugs, such as methamphetamine,” he said. “And we’re going to see meth addiction, and with that we’ll see a different type of crime that will go with that because the effects of the stimulation of the central nervous system. Fights, assaults, batteries, we’ll see much more of those kind of things.”
Enter Charleston Police Chief Steve Cooper, who told MetroNews “Talkline” host Hoppy Kercheval on Monday that he’s already seeing that trend come to life.
“We were seizing more heroin than meth for years, and now the scales have really tipped to the point where we don’t believe we’re on track to even seize 1,000 grams of heroin compared to possibly 25,000 grams of methamphetamine,” he said.
Preston and Cooper both agreed that this isn’t just ordinary meth, or “bathtub meth” that rocked the state during the early to mid 2000’s. Rather, this is “ice” — a high-grade quality meth cut with fentanyl.
“(Mexican) cartels are flooding the market with very cheap crystal meth,” Cooper said. “And the purpose is to get as many people addicted as possible so as to grow their client base back up. The profit margin was not good on marijuana for the cartels. So, they all started mass producing this crystal meth.”
Originally, Cooper said investigations revealed that two cartels were responsible for the meth trade. That number has risen exponentially.
“Double digit number of Mexican drug cartels that are now mass producing crystal meth,” he said. “And it is very pure.”
In Morgantown, Preston only hopes it’s not too late to get out ahead of this newest drug trend.
“We’re not just looking at what’s going on now,” he said. “We’re looking at what’s coming down the future and how can we intercept and stop it before it comes to crisis that we’ve had with the opiates.”