Heroin Hits Small-Town America
Chicago Tribune
| Published May 4, 2003 The Thomases now finance their vending machine business on
low-interest introductory credit card offers, switching to new
cards every 6 months. Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune
`We're up to our eyeballs in
it'
By Tim Jones |
LEXINGTON, Ohio --
A costly struggle against heroin rages in the comfy,
cedar-paneled home on West Hanley Road, and everyone inside is
losing.
The adult sons of Steve and Chris Thomas have stolen more than
$50,000 from their parents' business to support their heroin
addictions. The Thomas home is in a lockdown state, with money
and other valuables that could be traded for drugs kept away
from the boys. A bolt lock protects the master bedroom.
Last week a Richland County judge arraigned Mark, 22, and Matt,
18, on felony drug possession charges. The next day Mark Thomas
was caught by his parents using heroin again and, as has
happened before, was thrown out of the house. It's a war with no
victory in sight.
"I don't know what we're going to do," Chris Thomas
said.
This is but one snapshot of a rising tide of small-town heroin
abuse in the Midwest, occurring in tidy little communities with
town squares, bicycles on front lawns and American flags
flapping in the breeze. Hospitals and drug counselors note an
alarming spike in overdoses, and overmatched police agencies are
scrambling to address a drug onslaught once deemed the exclusive
purview of big cities and longtime addicts.
In the northern Ohio railroad town of Willard, population 6,800,
police are investigating five fatal heroin overdoses since
December, two of them on a recent weekend.
"All of a sudden it blossomed," is how Capt. Robert
McLaughlin of the Huron County Sheriff's Department described
the arrival of heroin. "We're up to our eyeballs in
it."
Although marijuana, sheltered among the tall stalks of
cornfields, and crack cocaine, brought in from Detroit, had long
been the mainstays in the tightly defined universe of illegal
drug users, police officials and treatment experts say the
heroin market has expanded beyond the predictable clientele.
More troubling, the price of heroin is dropping, the
availability is increasing and the purity of the drug is rising.
"It is much stronger than what abusers are used to,"
said Mansfield Police Chief Phil Messer, who leads a 10-county
drug task force called METRICH.
This region of Ohio, described ruefully by one undercover police
officer as "conveniently located" amid the inverted
urban triangle of Detroit, Cleveland and Columbus, is especially
susceptible to drug trafficking because of easy access to
several major highways. Formerly isolated and exclusively rural
communities are now primarily bedroom communities. It was often
considered the "Crossroads of America," but many of
Ohio's small towns have lost their insularity and are now part
of interstate drug traffic.
Deb Kline, a nurse in rural Crestline, said the number of
intravenous heroin addicts treated at Freedom Hall Treatment
Center, about an hour north of Columbus, has quadrupled. Worse,
Kline said, the universe of drug abusers is expanding from
hardened addicts in their 40s and 50s to people in their early
20s.
"Kids who come from upper-middle class families, kids who
had pretty decent high school careers," she said. "I
wish I knew why."
Few people wonder more than the Thomases, who built their home
15 years ago amid the tall pines in rural Lexington, population
4,200. As Steve Thomas put it, they came to raise their boys
"away from the bull-crap of the city." He was building
what would become a thriving vending machine business.
"We're first-generation success," the 54-year-old
Thomas likes to say, pointing to the 61-inch Sony TV in the
living room. The TV is a symbol of achievement, he said. Leading
by the example of hard work was the best teacher for his boys,
Thomas believes.
Early signs of trouble
There were early signs of drug trouble with Mark, who started
smoking marijuana at 14. Steve Thomas said he would occasionally
smoke marijuana in front of his boys. "I knew when to stop
and I expected the boys to be just as responsible with drugs as
I was," he said.
They weren't.
Then teenagers, Mark and Matt would help their parents empty the
coin trays from pop, cigarette, candy, pinball and other
machines. Every night the Thomases would bring bags of coins
home. They said they wanted to be home for their boys.
The skimming began at least two years ago--a few hundred here
and there that would soon end up in the eager hands of heroin
dealers on the east side of Columbus, about an hour away. Both
boys had cars and every other day would make the run to
Columbus.
"Steve would come home and wonder where the money was
going," Chris Thomas said. "We never dreamed our kids
would take it."
Their sons had stolen at least $50,000, but Round 2, the
in-house war, had only begun. More thefts followed--money,
alcohol, prescription drugs, keys to vending machines. After
throwing the kids out of the house, they changed the locks. Mark
and Matt crawled through the attic and dropped in through a
ceiling entry.
"We don't keep any money here, and what we do have we hide.
We don't keep keys to anything here," Steve Thomas said.
"It's like the enemy living right beside you, right under
your nose."
Chris Thomas, 52, rattles off the specific dates, seared in her
memory, of devastating events in the family's war with heroin.
The car accidents, multiple DUI charges, the credit card
spending binges, the relapses into drug use, the days they threw
their sons out, and last New Year's Eve--when they were arrested
for possession of heroin--are recounted, sometimes by the time
of day. The question "Is he alive?" has worked its way
into the daily vernacular.
`I feel very betrayed'
Steve Thomas said he could shoot the person who turned Mark onto
drugs, but he won't.
"I feel very betrayed, especially by my oldest son. They
should give loyalty to their parents. They deceived me," he
said. "I don't understand why my son doesn't have this
hunger for knowledge and growth and achievement."
And he doesn't understand how anyone could take heroin.
"And you never will because you're not an addict,"
Chris Thomas said.
Their anger is mixed with guilt and second thoughts about all
the long hours spent building a business. Chris Thomas clings to
hope, however frail, and pulls the lyrics of music that Mark
recently wrote, expressing remorse for his addiction:
"I was so numb and had no feeling to feel,
I was so dumb because I never realized this was real.
I still didn't care when you gave all you could give,
I just got around and got high with no reason to live."
That hope withered last week when she found a bag of heroin in
Mark's room. Once again, Mark is out of the house. He is living
temporarily in a family-owned apartment in nearby Mansfield,
paying $20 a day to his parents. "I told him that was the
last kind gesture," Chris Thomas said. "That was hard
for me."
For now, Matt stays at home with his parents. He passed a
milestone Friday. He has been drug-free for 90 days. That gives
his mom cause for hope.
But neither parent expressed much confidence about their sons'
future. They've been through too much to be optimistic. "I
really get the feeling that Mark's never gonna quit," Steve
Thomas said. "With Matt it can go either way.
"We just want the boys to get on with their lives so we can
get on with ours," he said.
The nightmare for the Thomases reflects, in part, the new
availability of illegal drugs. The reasons for the surge in
heroin use vary--a poor economy, proximity to big cities and
increased competition among dealers.
Sgt. Rick Sexton of the Willard Police Department said the
annual influx into the region of migrant workers from Mexico, a
country that is a major source of illegal drugs, is also a
factor. Some police officials point to the post-9/11 obsession
with terrorism, saying it has diverted attention from the drug
fight.
Availability increasing
"The feds are claiming there are more drugs being seized at
the border. But we haven't seen the effects of that locally. We
haven't seen a spike in prices that would occur if interdiction
efforts were working," Messer said.
"The availability is increasing. We're seeing a lot of
young people--high school kids--using heroin," Messer said.
That analysis is confirmed by addicts, who were accustomed to
dealing with older adults and driving an hour to get their fix.
"When I first started, I had to go to Cleveland or Columbus
to get it," said a heroin addict who now does undercover
drug buys for METRICH in Mansfield. "It's much easier to
get now. I don't have to run all over the place to find it. Now
it's just down the street.
"People figure they can deal drugs because of terrorism and
the war. They figure everybody's got their minds on that,"
the addict said.
An old industrial city of 50,000, Mansfield offers a grim
reminder of possible consequences of drug trafficking--three
state penitentiaries and the now-abandoned gothic prison used in
the movie "The Shawshank Redemption." At SCCI
Hospital, emergency room doctors have a ringside seat to the
effects of the drug trade.
"We see a ton of prescription drug abuse, and I've seen
more heroin in the last two years than I've seen in the previous
10," said Dr. Anthony Midkiff.
To be sure, heroin is not the only drug threat in the region. In
some rural counties, crystal meth is a bigger problem. In
Richland County, it's crack cocaine.
Paul Jones, an investigator with the Richland County Coroner's
Office, said drug users are mixing prescription drugs. When
combined with heroin, the powerful pain reliever OxyContin or
methamphetamine, an addictive stimulant, "it can be just
enough to push them over the edge, and they don't realize
it," Jones said.
