Heroin 'apocalypse' shadows New Hampshire primary

MANCHESTER, N.H. — A day after the heroin and opiate epidemic claimed one more life here last week, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and police officers were charging up the creaky stairs of a ramshackle rooming house to reach the unit at the end of the narrow hall where Eric Piccard was clearly in distress.

The 35-year-old unemployed drywall worker — roused back to consciousness by the clamor at his door — had collapsed on the bed earlier that evening after snorting a $20 heroin dose, prompting his mother's panicked 911 call when Piccard repeatedly failed to answer his cellphone.

"I know it's not right,'' Piccard told Manchester police officer Guy Kozowyk, tears tunneling down his wind-burned face. "I just wanted some peace, to go to sleep.''

The addict's plight, at once terribly sad and dangerous, nevertheless brought a small measure of relief for local authorities who have been encountering waves of overdose fatalities and hundreds of others teetering on life's precipice with uncommon regularity.

New Hampshire State Police: Lab swamped by heroin, opioids

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National politics, as it does every four years, has taken center stage here. Yet there is no ignoring the national public health crisis that has been raging for years in the very idyllic New England communities where Democrat and Republican presidential hopefuls are now stumping for votes.

Overdose deaths attributed to heroin, fentanyl (a powerful synthetic opiate at least 30 times stronger than heroin) and other opiate abuse has spiked from 14 in 2013 to 69 last year, according to city records. The grim numbers do not account for the hundreds of other non-fatal overdose calls that have flooded local public safety agencies, stressing the city's capacity to respond.

And in many places, streams of firearms also are emerging in dealer investigations, making the deadly mix even more lethal. Manchester Police Chief Nick Willard said some dealers are demanding payment in firearms, only to traffic the guns to strict gun-control states like New York where criminals are willing pay a premium.

'It is an apocalypse,'' Willard said in an interview with USA TODAY.

The scourge of heroin and fentanyl addiction, recently described by Democratic New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen as a “pandemic,’’ has been sweeping the country. The rate of heroin-overdose deaths between 2002 and 2013 nearly quadrupled, claiming more than 8,000 lives in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But it has hit like a sledgehammer throughout New England and in tiny New Hampshire, where at least one person dies every day of an overdose, many only blocks from the local headquarters of barnstorming presidential candidates. Statewide, at least 400 people died last year, and the final count could could climb to more than 430 when toxicology analyses are completed, according to the New Hampshire State Police Crime Laboratory.

At rallies, town hall gatherings and in debates, candidates have been forced to confront the worsening crisis in the same way they are addressing the threat posed by the Islamic State and the uneven economy. While there is little disagreement among Republican and Democrat contenders that drug treatment is needed, local officials argue that it cannot come fast enough, as the casualties continue to mount.

Willard, who testified two weeks ago before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the problem's growing urgency, later lamented that the panel's only presidential candidate — Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — was a no-show.

"I expected to see him there,'' Willard said. "You would think he would make the effort, knowing how important this is.''

Cruz did address the issue Thursday night at an addiction forum in Hooksett, N.H., where he recounted his own half-sister's slide into addiction, his effort to pull her from a Philadelphia crack house and her subsequent death due to an overdose.

"It's something I know something about,'' Cruz told the group.

Last week, the Obama administration announced a plan to seek $1.1 billion to pay for drug treatment, invoking a now-common refrain that heroin and other opioid abuse is responsible for more deaths than everyday car crashes.

The chief said the commitment, while needed, represents "a drop in the bucket'' to contain the national devastation.

"I have never seen anything like this,'' said Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., who with Shaheen has proposed legislation to dramatically expand treatment and recovery services for addicts. "This is about real people dying.''

A dangerous new mix

On the streets of Manchester, a troubling measure of desperation has entered the combustible mix of drug addiction: guns.

While the extreme gun violence that accompanied the national crack cocaine epidemic of the 1990s has so far not materialized here in the current heroin crisis, firearms are surfacing in unsettling and dramatic ways, authorities said.

Guns continue to be used by dealers to protect their drug supplies. Yet some dealers, police said, are eschewing cash and accepting firearms as payment from addicts. The firearms are being used to supply dealers' parallel gun trafficking operations that have streamed firearms to New York and other states where guns are more strictly controlled.

In the past year, according to Manchester police, at least three members of a New York street crime group were arrested in connection with a drugs-for-firearms scheme in which the guns were later showing up back in New York.

"Guns have become just another form of currency,'' Manchester Sgt. Chris Biron said, adding that the threat only escalates with prospect of unstable addicts targeting caches of firearms to trade for their next fix. "Drugs and guns are going hand in hand.''

Drugs were involved in two non-fatal shootings within an hour one day last week in Manchester, a period that Officer Kozowyk described as evidence of the despair that has taken hold in pockets of the city. One of the two wounded victims miraculously survived after a bullet passed through the man's neck.

"It was a little freaky,'' said the 35-year-old officer, who joined the department three years ago from a full-time gig as a member of a touring metal band.

In a search of a known heroin/fentanyl "shooting gallery'' last week, near the epicenter of the city's busy drug trade and just a few blocks from police headquarters, officers entered the darkened third-floor apartment with guns drawn only to find rooms littered with rotting food, dirty needles, scorched spoons and candle remnants used to transform the granular heroin and fentanyl into injectable poison.

"It can be frightening because you really don't know what kind of pile you're stepping in until it's too late,'' Kozowyk said, referring to the mix of guns, dealers and desperate addicts.

The troubling emergence of firearms, Willard said, has prompted a new collaboration with the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives. Within the past month, a Manchester officer was deployed to an ATF task force to assist with an uptick in shootings and other gun-related crimes.

"Guns are turning up in a majority of our drug raids,'' Willard said. "We're hoping that the federal resources — the intelligence and analysis — can help,'' he said.

'Same Americans are dying'

The addicts appear on the darkened sidewalks of downtown like shuffling zombies, directionless unless they are headed for their next dose. And Kozowyk knows most, if not all of them, by name: Reuben, Tatyana, Liliane, Chris, David. The list goes on with almost all of them traveling a similar path to addiction, graduating from a dependence on painkillers to cheaper yet powerfully addictive heroin and or fentanyl.

Jane Burleigh, the mother of 26-year-old David, said her troubled son who has been battling heroin addiction for the past decade is now in jail on criminal trespass charges. And Burleigh couldn't be happier.

For the time being, Burleigh said, the young man who has overdosed multiple times and once attempted suicide is "safe and sound and has a place to sleep.''

"I don't have to worry about where the heck he is and what he is doing,'' the visibly exhausted mother said.

Reuben, meanwhile, who declined to provide his full name, is left to battle the demons on his own, homeless and panhandling just across the street from the hotel hosting the Clinton campaign entourage.

For Willard, who regularly encounters family members of the dead and addicted, the devastation has become very real.

On Thanksgiving Day,  he fielded a call from a friend at loose ends for how to manage his hopelessly heroin-addicted son.

"This is dangerous,'' the chief said. "If 69 people (the number of fatal overdoses recorded last year in Manchester) died from Ebola in this country, you know the full weight of the U.S. would be mobilized to eradicate it. The same Americans are dying here.''