New Hampshire Union Leader: City streets rife with drug dealers and users
By TIM BUCKLAND
A Manchester police officer displays three packets of freshly confiscated heroin, on left, and two packets of crack. Each packet contains a single dose. (Thomas Roy/Union Leader)
MANCHESTER - The young woman sidled up to the unmarked police car. She knows the men inside are cops, despite their jeans and T-shirts. And they know her.
"I'm not using right now," Kendra Johnson said before asking for $20 and jokingly offering a sexual service.
Officer Matt Jajuga politely told Johnson she has to try to stay off drugs and avoid the type of behavior that recently landed her a stint in Valley Street Jail and notoriety in the news - she was the woman found in January with New Hampshire Motor Speedway General Manager Jerry Gappens engaged in what police called a "sexual act" at the time.
Jajuga, whose brain is a steel trap of names - he knows everyone walking around the area just east of downtown - said the approach he and his partner, Officer Paul Rondeau, take while on plainclothes duty is to talk to people. Each time they stopped during a recent shift where The Sunday News was allowed to ride along, the conversations were light and friendly, whether it was to ask a "known prostitute" to stop sitting on private property or to run a check for warrants on a young man who darted in front of their car.
"You don't want to treat people like they're worthless. That doesn't serve any purpose," Jajuga said.
"It doesn't help to be abrasive. They'll shut down," Rondeau said.
During recent patrol shifts, Rondeau and Jajuga focused on looking for people breaking into cars, a problem in the area on and around Lincoln Street, while Officer Tony Battistelli patrolled a similar area, looking for any laws being broken.
But the officers' real work is combatting the heroin epidemic, the root cause of most crime in the city. With many state officials focused on trying to increase funding for anti-drug education efforts and to provide more treatment options for heroin addicts, it is police officers who are on the front lines
***A bigger problemManchester Police Chief David Mara said the problem is more acute now - as opposed to previous so-called drug epidemics involving meth, crack cocaine and even heroin - because of the increase of drug overdoses. The state had more than 300 deaths in 2014 and the city has had more than 30 people die from oversdoses so far this year.
He said he was a patrol officer in the early 1990s when crack cocaine was that era's problem drug.
"I think this is a worse long-term problem," he said of heroin.Boston Globe: Heroin exacts an especially savage toll in Plymouth
PLYMOUTH — Fire Chief G. Edward Bradley carries Narcan, the drug that reverses heroin overdoses, nearly everywhere he goes around this sprawling town. Even to the Little League field when he watches T-ball games.It’s part of a personal mission, gnawing and never-ending, that Bradley sees as the greatest challenge of his long career.
“You see all the alarms around town for the nuclear plant we have here. I wish we had one for heroin,” Bradley said last week.
Plymouth counted 15 drug-related deaths last year and 313 overdoses, a total 50 percent greater than Taunton’s, a city of similar size that once had been considered the face of the drug epidemic.
This year, Plymouth is on track to smash its own grim record. By Saturday, the town had recorded 136 overdoses — an average of exactly one a day — and 10 related deaths.
Mass. residents are more worried about drug abuse than are Americans generally, a Boston Globe poll found.It’s a tally that has risen so quickly, so stunningly, that many Plymouth leaders did not realize the town had an opioid crisis until it overwhelmed them. That includes Police Chief Michael Botieri.
“It took time for me to become a believer in this epidemic,” Botieri said. Now, nearly everyone believes.“It’s not getting any better, obviously,” Bradley said. “We realized we’re as bad as some of the biggest cities in the state, if not worse.”
Plymouth’s per-capita overdose rate is significantly higher than hard-hit Worcester’s, a city three times its size that saw a 59 percent rise in overdoses last year.While the numbers grow, so has Plymouth’s response...Opioid abuse considered widespread, poll finds
Nearly three-quarters of Massachusetts adults believe heroin use is an extreme or very serious problem in the state, and almost four in 10 adults know someone who has abused prescription painkillers in the last five years, according to a survey by The Boston Globe and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The poll also found that Massachusetts residents are more worried about opioid abuse than are Americans generally, and that more adults here believe prescription drug abuse is getting worse...
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