By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
CARIBOU — Aroostook County’s drug problem has shifted dramatically over the past 15 years.
In 1998, for example, seven percent of arrests made by Maine Drug Enforcement Agency officers were in connection with prescription drugs. In 2008, 39 percent of MDEA arrests were connected to prescription drugs.
“I use those 10-year jumps to show the drastic jump that took place [with the prescription drug problem],” explained MDEA Commander Darrell Crandall, Jr. This year, from Jan. 1 up through November 30, about 46 percent of MDEA’s arrests statewide were related to the prescription drug problem.
“We’re creeping up on 50 percent of MDEA statewide arrests actually being directly related to prescription drugs … to think that in the mid-1990s would have sounded fictitious,” Crandall told the Aroostook County Commissioners during their meeting on Dec. 21 in Caribou.
Crandall and MDEA Regional Supervisor Shawn Gillen attended the commissioners’ meeting to provide an update on the drugs being used in Aroostook County and an update on MDEA taskforce activity in the county.
The two shared a wealth of information with the commissioners, including the fact that in 2011 (through Nov. 30) MDEA made 54 arrests just in Aroostook County, and 90 percent of those arrests were for felony crimes.
Of those 54 arrests, 28 were prescription drug arrests, 21 were methamphetamine arrests, four were heroin arrests and one was for marijuana.
Commenting that only one marijuana arrest was not indicative of decreased usage of the illegal substance, Crandall explained that investigations have become exceedingly difficult because of the new medical marijuana laws.
“There’s 58 pages of regulations regarding medical marijuana,” he said, adding that those regulations were drafted in such a way so that law enforcement officials have a lot of hurdles to jump now that weren’t there before when they undertook marijuana-related investigations.
“We’ve sort of taken the approach, because of the limited resources we have, to try to have the most impact we can rather than take the ‘shotgun’ approach — which is to lock up as many folks as we can,” Crandall explained, “We seem to have more impact with the cases that we take all the way to the top.”
The three main prescription drugs being used illegally are narcotics, amphetamines and tranquilizers.
Maine had two drug take-back events at over 100 sites throughout the state, providing individuals the opportunity to safely dispose of unnecessary medications.
Between those two events, nearly 20,000 pounds of prescription drugs were collected, according to Crandall.
“I think this lends some fairly decent credence to the folks that have been complaining about over-prescribing,” Crandall said.
He acknowledged that over-prescription is a contentious topic for many in the medical profession, “but I think it’s a fairly compelling statistic in favor of the fact that there may be a bit of over prescribing.”
Accidental drug overdose deaths (not including suicides) have risen from 34 in 1997 to 166 in 2007.
“It’s somewhat leveled off, but it’s stayed over 150 consistently and continues to outpace traffic fatalities in the state of Maine,” Crandall said.
Methamphetamine is also a largely abused illicit drug in Aroostook County. Strangely, Aroostook County is really the only region of Maine with a high level of meth usage.
As Crandall explained, his other three offices and the offices of southern Maine aren’t finding the methamphetamine tablets in their areas.
“It’s sort of odd — the demand is here, but it doesn’t seem to be widespread through the rest of the state,” he said.
According to Gillen, a single tablet of methamphetamine has a street value of $25 to $30.
MDEA agents have found that the meth tablets found in Aroostook County are being manufactured in clandestine Canadian labs.
“They’re being smuggled, every last one of them, across the border from Canada into Maine,” Crandall said, adding that the tablets are being sold here, used here, and they’re not being transported out of Aroostook County.
While methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse are just two problems that Houlton-based MDEA agents continue fighting to end, 2011 did bring about two notable victories for the good guys.
Crandall couldn’t speak too freely about one victory, as there will be a follow-up investigation, but MDEA agents were able to trace $100,000 going directly from central Aroostook County to Mexico, track over 5,000 dosage units of oxycodone that was being smuggled into southern California from Mexico and being shipped to Aroostook County, where it was being sold.
“Once we did our search warrant, did our sweep and made our arrests, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was quite interested in adopting the case because of the international and interstate nature of it,” Crandall said.
Gillen described the second successful operation that started in fall of 2010 and lasted for five months.
“Out of this investigation, we had 11 felony drug arrests, we seized 4,406 doses of methamphetamine, $20,536 in drug proceeds and we got one Canadian supplier.”
Commissioner Norm Fournier asked “what happened to that Canadian supplier?”
“He’s currently in jail right now — he hasn’t been arraigned yet,” Gillen answered. “We had enough evidence to get an arrest warrant for him and then we just waited for him to cross the border.”
Another positive indicator, MDEA’s lab team’s activity remains down, “Which is where we want it,” Crandall explained.
Since spring of 2005, the lab team has responded to about 75 different calls and has confirmed 23 lab sites. “Most of them were methamphetamine, and eight of those were in Aroostook County.”
The MDEA officials also informed the commissioners of the new drug in the region — bath salts.
While Aroostook County hasn’t been hit as hard by bath salt usage as Penobscot county, for example, Gillen says bath salts are here and MDEA agents are dealing with it.
Sharing a sad, yet funny anecdote, Crandall gave an example of just how hard Penobscot County has been hit with bath salts.
The new drug was marketed as a substitute for cocaine/crack cocaine — while bath salts don’t mimic the effects of cocaine, there is a high demand for cocaine/crack cocaine in the Bangor area.
“Believe it or not, we actually had a local cocaine trafficker calling our office in Bangor complaining that bath salts were affecting their business,” Crandall said.
Though bath salts are not a huge problem in Aroostook County, Gillen did note that pockets of usage have ranged all over the county, as opposed to methamphetamine usage, which has primarily just hit certain parts of the county.
Crandall said that MDEA has been fairly aggressive in addressing bath salts because the drug is fairly new “and we’re hoping to maybe, if we’re real aggressive and apply a lot of resources, we might get out in front of it because we never really had the chance for [the other drugs] and we’ve had some success,” Crandall said.
For example, MDEA agents seized several pounds of bath salts over the last few weeks and months, locking up a lot of the individuals that were bringing large quantities of the drug into the county from outside the country.
