By Brenda Flanagan
Correspondent
A bundled heroin brick holds 50 hits. Upstairs at a house in Linden, police found 4,300 bricks in a busy heroin mill. In the blue collar neighborhood, apparently nobody noticed. But the street value left them stunned.
“$3M We no see,” said Oscar Cantos.
“They were clearly not only supplying throughout the state, but also out of state,” said Prosecutor Grace Park.
Park today addressed a roundtable at Kean University, called to discuss the heroin problem with law enforcement, legislators and treatment experts. She says this Linden set-up worked wholesale.
“Operating a cutting and processing mill of heroin, then transporting them to other dealers,” she said. When asked if it had become an industry, she said, “It was an industry there, yes, which we just dismantled.”
“And in Paterson, it’s quality. It’s inexpensive, it’s everywhere. We have people who come up from as far as Toms River, Sussex, Warren, New York,” said Passaic County prosecutor Camelia Valdes.
“We have the cheapest heroin in the U.S. right here and we have the purest heroin in the U.S. right here,” said Ocean County Prosecutor Joe Coronato.
Coronato says prescription pills cost $25 a pop on the black market. Heroin’s $3 to $5 a hit, at least in Ocean County.
And the face of heroin is changing from the old stereotype.
“Well guess what? It’s your neighbor, it’s your son, it’s your nephew,” Coronato said. “I had an 18-year-old who was doing 50 packs of heroin a day — 25 in the morning, 25 at night — and died in a motel room. For me, as a dad, I was astounded. It was beyond belief.”
In New Jersey, heroin-related deaths soared more than 70 percent — from 327 in 2011 to 513 in 2012 to 557 last year.
In 2013, the state logged 26,794 admissions for treating heroin addiction. That’s one-third of all admissions for substance abuse.
“It’s a whole supply and demand issue. If there isn’t a demand, there won’t be the supply,” said Sen. Joseph Vitale.
Vitale’s sponsoring a package of bills to address the problem from several angles. He says New Jersey needs to do more than just detoxing addicts and putting them back on the street and that doctors may be prescribing too many painkillers. Patients unwittingly get hooked.
“Physicians are now graded whether they treated a patient’s pain. So there’s the tendency to go overboard. That’s what we saw in the last 15 years,” said Dr. Bruce Bonano.
“We’re not trying to legislate medicine. We’re not trying to tell physicians what to do and how to practice medicine,” Vitale said. “But there has to be a discussion about the dangers of all opiate prescriptions.”
Supply and demand. The distributors offer affordable hits, but what price do you put on the kid who overdoses?