The flood of heroin coming into and going out of New York City has surged to the highest levels in more than two decades, alarming law enforcement officials who say that bigger players are now entering the market to sell the drug here and to feed a growing appetite along the East Coast.
The amount of heroin seized in investigations involving the city’s special narcotics prosecutor has already surpassed last year’s totals, and is higher than any year going back to 1991.
The drug makes its way here in trucks rumbling north from Mexico; as they get closer to New York, they park at truck stops or warehouses to transfer loads of heroin to cars bound for mills in the Bronx or Upper Manhattan and, eventually, to users along the Eastern Seaboard at prices ranging from $6 to $10 per glassine envelope.
So far, police actions have only served to keep drug prices elevated by eliminating some of the more careless dealers.
The rise in heroin use nationwide has been well documented, as the drug has created addicts and caused the deaths of well-known figures, like the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, and young people in middle-class families from Staten Island to Vermont.
What the authorities are seeing now is the outgrowth of all that drug abuse, said Bridget G. Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor whose office deals primarily with large-scale operations: far-flung drug organizations accelerating to meet heroin demand by setting up New York operations that are growing in sophistication and output.
“We’re kind of the head of the Hydra,” said Ms. Brennan, who is scheduled to testify about heroin trends during a City Council budget hearing on Tuesday. “This is highly organized, high volume, and it’s being moved much more efficiently and effectively to reach out to a broader user base.”
Her office recorded more than 288 pounds of heroin seized in the first four months of 2014, a figure that does not account for the everyday, street-level drug deals in the city. On Staten Island, where dealers are often users themselves and the rate of overdose is the city’s highest, the office has no heroin cases because there are few big-time players there, authorities said.
Nonetheless, in arrests of users and dealers, Staten Island narcotics detectives have recorded a steep increase in the amount of heroin taken off the street there so far this year — up 61 percent compared with 2013. Detectives are also beginning to find organized networks of dealers there, in what had long been a haven of low crime rates and unlocked doors. ...
Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/nyregion...
Posted By: Jeni Fa
Tuesday, May 20th 2014 at 10:40AM
You can also
click
here to view all posts by this author...
