Painkillers to heroin: A generation lost

• Record 885 kilograms seized in New York this year by DEA, 10 times more than in 2009
• Lower Hudson Valley averages 3,145 arrests per year for drug possession and sale
• How to get help with heroin, pain-pill addiction: 1-877-846-7369 or oasas.ny.gov/accesshelp

This story is the latest in an ongoing series by staff writer David Robinson that has exposed gaps in public-health and law-enforcement efforts to curb the pain-pill epidemic and related heroin crisis claiming hundreds of lives in the Lower Hudson Valley.

Mexican heroin stashed among shipments of food, refrigerators and flat-screen TVs is flooding across U.S. highways to reach the Lower Hudson Valley.

Violent drug cartels smuggled record amounts of heroin into New York this year to capitalize on growing ranks of middle-class suburbanites hooked on prescription pain pills, a Journal News investigation has found.

Federal agents have seized almost 2,000 pounds of heroin in New York, 10 times more than in 2009, enough to give 12 hits of heroin to every man, woman and child in New York City.

Despite the Drug Enforcement Administration busts, the majority of the heroin evaded law enforcement. Much of it poured into Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties over the past five years.

Heroin Survivors: Father looks at "middle-class whites"

Heroin Survivors: Mother advocates after son's death 

Heroin Survivors: "My father died and Michael got high" 

The struggle: Recovering heroin addict looks back, and ahead

From quiet villages to bustling cities, the communities just north of New York City logged an annual average of 3,145 controlled-substance arrests from 2010 to 2014, county and state data obtained by The Journal News show.

Shifts in some arrest figures, however, suggest the days of drug dealers exclusively targeting poor, minority communities are over. Police in Clarkstown and Greenburgh, for instance, had some of the highest drug-arrest spikes during that span, from 59 to 91 and 59 to 121, respectively.

Medical-examiner records show heroin killed 230 people in the Lower Hudson Valley during that period, and 170 deaths have been tied to pain-pill abuse.

“We’re not naïve enough to think we’re getting the majority of (heroin), but it just shows how much they’re sending across,” DEA Special Agent in Charge of New York James Hunt said. “We seize, in New York, one third of all the heroin seized in the United States by the DEA, and our figures have doubled every year for the past few years.”

Authorities trying to curb the epidemic are starting to talk of generational failure. They’re saying gaps in laws and flawed health regulations led to illicit sales of millions of painkillers, which kill 16,000 people nationally each year.

“People have to learn, very young, the dangers of this, and I think a generation was kind of lost that didn’t get the message about pill abuse,” Hunt said.

One of those users is Robert Mazzarese, 34. He grew up in the tough, working-class Lake Avenue neighborhood in Yonkers, where he played high school football and then landed a union job building Broadway stage sets.

Mazzarese got hooked on painkillers after hernia surgery about 13 years ago. He ignored a doctor’s instructions and took a 60 days' supply of pills in 21. When withdrawal hit, he turned to the street and started spending upward of $100 per day on pills. As the addiction spiraled out of control, his job disappeared, along with family and friends’ trust in him.

A drug dealer first offered Mazzarese heroin three years ago as an alternative to painkillers.

In September, Mazzarese completed an inpatient treatment program. He is living with a girlfriend and seeking work as his sobriety daily walks a razor’s edge.

Database: How many arrests in your town? 

Graphic: Compare arrests by town

Spikes in Mexican heroin flowing into New York by way of drug pipelines in southern California and Texas also suggest years of struggle lie ahead for more than just Mazzarese.

“Supply drives demand, and the more you have out there the more addicts you’re going to have and the greater the scope of the epidemic,” said New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor Bridget Brennan.

“The composite of the heroin user from years ago, when you thought it was a ghetto drug, it’s just not like that anymore,” Hunt said. “It crosses all socioeconomic lines: older people, young people, suburbs, it’s all over.”

Investigation: Teacher dead. pill doc arrested. Did state miss warning signs?

Investigation: Doctor, prescription drugs connected to local tragedies

Investigation: Pain-pill abuse kills hundreds in our suburbs

Drug cartels schemed for years to expand heroin's grip beyond poor neighborhoods. Their opening came after pharmaceutical companies started churning out more opioid pain pills, which are chemically similar to heroin.

From 1999 to 2010, the number of painkillers sold nationally quadrupled. During that span, pharmaceutical companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits claiming they misled people and doctors about their drugs' addiction risk as the potency increased.

Heroin dealers appear to have taken a similar approach to growing their customer base.

Cartels created new products and used marketing to target wealthy Americans. Fashion-designer labels started showing up stamped on heroin packets. Dealers also started selling a higher-potency heroin to attract painkiller addicts, who authorities said typically begin by snorting that purer form of heroin before switching to injecting the drug as their tolerance grows.

What has also ignited heroin’s resurgence is New York’s push in 2012 to crack down on healthcare workers improperly prescribing drugs, after nearly 15 years of unchecked pain-pill abuse hooked thousands.

“Pills have gotten harder and more expensive on the street as law enforcement has clamped down on doctors and pharmacies that are over-prescribing, and (users) resorted to the street and they’ve got the habit and heroin is cheap and plentiful,” Hunt said.

Some addicts say they bought their first $10 bag of heroin because they couldn't afford $50 for a pain pill.

Heroin’s flow into New York had slowed to a trickle since peaking in the late 1980s, but the drug roared back in the wake of widespread pain-pill abuse.

White Plains Public Safety Commissioner David Chong has spent much of his 36-year career on the front lines in the battle.  In the 1980s, he worked undercover for the New York City Police Department, and led a task force that focused on Asian gangs controlling the heroin trade.

Mexican drug cartels took over the trade from Asia and the Middle East. They have also sought to hook more middle- and upper-class people previously scared away by the idea of injecting heroin. The strategy involved selling heroin that is 10 times more potent and deadly than 30 years ago.

“Because of the potency of the heroin on the street now, it doesn’t have to be shot, it can be snorted,” Chong said, “It’s different now, and we come across overdoses by people in very nice luxury cars, and housewives and people with good jobs and very responsible jobs, and a lot of that comes from the addiction to the painkillers.”

The unprecedented amounts of Mexican heroin have also sparked concerns about the return of drug-related violence.

“We don’t want it to become a battleground for logistically selling this stuff because it’s all about the money,” Chong said.

Mexican drug cartels seem to be stealing ideas from legitimate businesses as international trafficking profits surpass billions of dollars.

In 2014, the DEA busted a trucking company in Queens transporting heroin from Riverside, California, where the Sinaloa cartel is smuggling record amounts of heroin and other drugs into the United States across stretches of desert and suburbia. In May of this year, the biggest heroin bust in New York’s history involved the same cartel, which had transported the drugs to industrial parks in Montville, New Jersey, just 45 miles west of White Plains. Police followed the drugs to the Bronx and Yonkers, where they seized 154 pounds of heroin worth $50 million on the street. Four months later, another 141 pounds was seized in a similar bust spanning Yonkers and the Bronx.

Graphic: How many heroin arrests in Westchester?

Graphic: How many heroin arrests in Rockland? 

Graphic for controlled substance arrests: Sale and possession

Heroin: How Riverside County in Cali. became America's drug pipeline

The major busts this year, like many others, involved storage facilities and stash houses strategically located along highways, which would be used to transport heroin to street-level dealers in places like Westchester County and farther upstate.

Other arrests this year involved drug dealers using Greyhound buses and Metro-North trains to transport heroin. Drug dealers are also using cellphones and social media to deliver heroin to users in parking lots of shopping malls, like a drug bust in March involving the Palisades Center, and to homes throughout the Northeast.

Hunt and Chong described the Mexican drug cartels as a mix between Wal-Mart and Amazon.

“It’s an illicit business, but they run it like regular businessmen would do it, with transportation and new tractor-trailers, and often these loads are mixed in with real loads of like produce, tech equipment, TVs, refrigerators,” Hunt said.

Chong pointed to the apartments, basements and back rooms of businesses across the Lower Hudson Valley and New York City being used to cut the heroin into millions of individual doses, in an assembly-line style, to create more “customers.”

“The issue is that because it is so readily available, and the times now with the social media, and it’s not like with the pay phone where you’re putting a dime in and waiting in alleys to meet the dealer; Now what you’re doing is you can order it up and they deliver it to you,” he said.

Logan Flood of Cold Spring died in March of a heroin overdose at 22, after battling addiction for eight years.

His story is like so many other white, middle-class suburban kids with seemingly every advantage who got hooked on illicit painkillers and turned to heroin, his mother, Kathleen Pemble, said.

Despite 15 stints in treatment programs and rehab, Flood repeatedly relapsed amid the ample supply of heroin drowning the Lower Hudson Valley.

“Once you start with heroin that is going to be your favorite thing forever,” Pemble said, fighting tears.

Pemble, 54, said her rural Putnam County village of 2,000 has been hit especially hard by heroin. She said seven heroin overdose deaths happened within a 6-mile radius of her home since 2012, although authorities don't track community specific data. Putnam had 23 total heroin deaths from 2012-14.

Neighbors facing the fallout of addiction have reached out to Pemble after she posted details about her son's overdose death in an obituary.

As Flood’s heroin use led to lying and stealing, his mother said she did the once unthinkable and threw him out of the house. When he sneaked back in and stole $800, she called the police.

“That was one of the times where we made an impression on him, but you have to go to extreme measures and it’s really hard to let your child sit in jail,” she said.

The DEA's Hunt noted that young people especially have lost the stigma heroin carried among past generations. He blames mishandling of the pain-pill epidemic for spreading opioid addiction, which is critical in driving them to heroin.

“Ten years ago you didn’t hear much talk about it, and there was a generation of young people who for kicks started using pills, thinking it was just like for kicks, drinking wine and drinking beer like young people are going to do, and it became something they couldn’t handle,” he said.

Document: Community specific heroin arrests in Putnam

Document: Community specific heroin arrests in Rockland  

Brennan, the narcotics prosecutor, echoed the comments about painkiller addicts giving little thought to switching to heroin. She’s heard of dealers stamping heroin packets with designer labels, such as Chanel, to attract well-to-do female users.

“There is a very casual attitude towards heroin, and nowhere near the fear a different generation would have with it,” she said.

Some top local, state and federal prosecutors are beginning to target more doctors and other health professionals suspected of improperly prescribing painkillers.

Brennan has filed about 24 cases against pharmacies, doctors and others handling the drugs. She is also among the few prosecutors filing manslaughter charges when illegally sold pills lead to overdose deaths. Those cases, she said, are rare because they often involve middlemen.

“You have to see that pattern, and people selling on the black market, and doctors who are basically drug dealers in white coats taking cash for prescriptions and conducting no examination,” she said.

Citing several recent high-profile pill-mill busts in Manhattan and the Lower Hudson Valley, such as the arrest of Dr. Alfred Ramirez, who is accused of illegally selling prescriptions for 10,900 pain pills, Brennan said the wave of illicit opioid pills on the streets seems to have crested.

“What we hope to do is limit the number of new people who are becoming addicts,” she said.

Still, gaps exist in how government agencies track and regulate prescription drugs, such as inaccuracies in state and federal records, which remain largely unaddressed, as investigations by The Journal News earlier this year show.

Pharmaceutical companies are also implementing more internal oversight as part of a series of multimillion-dollar legal settlements tied to the improper marketing and sales of painkillers beginning in the 1990s.

“This is the only drug epidemic which was literally started by the pharmaceutical companies and legal prescriptions, and so I think the responsibility for reining it in has to come from there, too,” Brennan said.

How to get help with heroin, pain-pill addiction: 1-877-846-7369 or oasas.ny.gov/accesshelp

Twitter: @DrobinsonLoHud

David Robinson is a staff writer for The Journal News. His stories have exposed gaps in public health and law enforcement efforts seeking to curb a pain-pill epidemic and related heroin crisis claiming hundreds of lives in the Lower Hudson Valley.