‘It was like overnight’: Heroin flooding Midlands

Just a year and a half ago, heroin was a rare thing in the Midlands. Now, it’s a “party drug,” with several kilos flooding the area each week from Mexican and Colombian cartels.

The supply is moving to meet demand. Users are switching to heroin because:

▪ It’s cheaper than prescription pills, like oxycodone.

▪ Law enforcement and doctors have cracked down on the availability of prescription pills and the ingredients used to make meth, a drug that can be “cooked” locally.

▪ What’s available is good.

“A lot of it has to do with the purity of the heroin,” said Robert Murphy, assistant special agent in charge for South Carolina with the Drug Enforcement Administration. “Now you can smoke it, snort it, and you shoot it. Younger kids are starting out mostly snorting it, and they’re getting hooked.”

In 2015, Lexington County saw 25 heroin overdose deaths, according to Coroner Margaret Fisher. In 2016 so far, officials suspect three heroin overdoses, though toxicology is still underway to confirm that.

“Pain pills are normally what leads to heroin overdoses in Lexington County,” Fisher said. “They start taking pain pills, then can’t get them from the doctor anymore, and heroin is very easy to get.”

Lexington Sheriff Jay Koon said he is keeping an eye on heroin. “I know it’s resurging,” he said. “It’s the drug of choice in some areas.”

Richland County has felt the boom hard, too, according to Capt. Brian Godfrey with the Richland Sheriff’s Department’s Narcotics Unit. While the unit’s 2015 statistics aren’t yet complete, Godfrey said there were at least 162 heroin cases on record as of Wednesday. That’s up from 97 cases in 2014 and 28 cases in 2013.

“It was like overnight,” he said.

In 2015, Richland County saw nine heroin overdose deaths of 25 total overdose deaths, according to Deputy Chief Coroner Leonard Bradley. In 2016 so far, there have been three heroin overdoses.

Heroin use sneaked up on some who deal with drug abuse in South Carolina.

Sara Goldsby, with the S.C. Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services, pointed to research in Vermont, showing that people don’t seek treatment until having been addicted for about eight years. But of people who sought treatment at DAODAS-funded centers throughout the state, the most prominent demographic was males 25 to 34.

Taking a measure for how many lives are affected by the drug is difficult. “Of all those folks who are just now deciding to abuse heroin, we’re probably not going to see them for help or treatment for several years,” Goldsby said.

Why now?

The increase is based on simple supply and demand.

The heroin in South Carolina comes from Mexico. And although marijuana is still the Mexican cartels’ biggest cash crop, the market for heroin is changing the game, Murphy said.

“We’ve got Mexico turning marijuana fields into growing poppy (which is used to make heroin), which we’ve never seen before in the last five years,” he said.

Infrastructure also plays a role. Transporting drugs is costly, and it doesn’t help that marijuana is big and bulky. By contrast, heroin is easier to conceal.

Distributors in Richland County have pounced on the boom, Godfrey said. Those who used to sell cocaine are now selling heroin, or are selling both heroin and cocaine.

Some smaller, rural areas quickly could be ground zero.

Kershaw County Sheriff Jim Matthews, who was with the DEA for 22 years before becoming sheriff, said his community has felt the sting of the needle just like the rest of the state. Matthews also worked narcotics for the Lexington County Sheriff’s Department, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department and the Columbia Police Department.

“It seems like two years ago, we started seeing heroin we had not seen before – arresting users with heroin, then some people who had enough heroin in their possession to qualify for them being distributors,” he said.

Part of the reason people switch from painkillers to heroin is that it’s cheaper to get the same high. Matthews said he has seen oxycodone pills go for $60 to $80 on the street, depending on how strong each tablet is. By contrast, the sheriff said a dosage unit of heroin might go for $10.

Frank Sheheen knows the high that comes with shooting up – and has refused it for 33 years. He abused heroin for 10 years starting in his mid-20s, until his wife kicked him out and his father fired him from the family grocery store.

Sheheen is now director of the Recovering Professional Program, part of the Richland- and Lexington-based nonprofit LRADAC, and has mended the relationships hurt by the drug. “I haven’t used any psychoactive chemicals in over 33 years, and I find that it’s very much a gift,” he said.

Sheheen said heroin abuse is growing among women. Once again, it comes back to prescription medications – he said doctors tend to more willingly prescribe painkillers to women rather than men.

That prescription-to-the-street path has also played a part in spreading the drug across all socioeconomic statuses, according to Godfrey.

The demons come back

One Kershaw County woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, knows the human cost of heroin use firsthand. Her son died of a heroin overdose three years ago, after fighting addiction for more than a decade.

“He stayed clean for about 14 years, but then the demons came back to haunt him,” she said.

His journey started as a teenager in a hospital room. After a severe surgery, doctors put him on a morphine drip, then sent him home with pills. With his mother’s blessing, he left home for a treatment program in North Carolina, which successfully completed. After he found his health, he found love.

“I prayed for a good Christian girl, and he found her,” his mother said. “They got married.”

Their bliss came to an end when he started hanging out with old associates who had been part of his drug abuse in his teenage years. An autopsy revealed several drugs in his system, but it was heroin that stopped his heart, his mother said. She urged parents to get their children help if they suspect drug use, and urged youngsters not to flirt with death.

“It only takes one time,” she said.

A more powerful high

Both the DEA and Richland County investigators have found heroin on the streets being cut with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate that delivers a more powerful high than heroin itself.

When users overdose, it doesn’t scare others away – rather, it causes them to seek out the dealer where the especially strong drugs came from, officials said.

South Carolina is an end-user state, Murphy said, meaning the drug comes here for consumption – it doesn’t travel through for distribution elsewhere. Much of the state’s heroin supply comes from Mexico by way of Atlanta, or from New York down Interstate 95.

But South Carolina is more fond of marijuana than heroin, according to a map compiled by Policy Mic in 2014. Meanwhile, residents in states such as New York and Pennsylvania report heroin as their most commonly used substance.

Still, numbers from the S.C. Revenue and Fiscal Affairs Office show 668 people getting a diagnosis of heroin abuse in emergency rooms across the state between 2012 and 2014.

This story was originally published February 20, 2016 at 6:45 PM with the headline "‘It was like overnight’: Heroin flooding Midlands."