Anti-opiate push by DEA includes West Memphis

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration announced Wednesday that West Memphis will be one of four U.S. cities targeted in a new effort to curb the "deadly cycle" of heroin and prescription drug abuse.

Law enforcement and medical experts have watched heroin usage trends closely in recent years. Numerous studies linked the heroin increase to the rise of prescription opiate abuse in the 2000s and the decrease in availability of those drugs in the past five years.

Opiates -- including oxycodone, hydrocodone, morphine and heroin -- are drugs derived from opium poppies. Heroin reacts in the body the same as prescription opiates, but it is much cheaper.

Along with West Memphis, the DEA program will operate in St. Louis, Milwaukee and Pittsburgh, where it started in November as a pilot. The agency said it must find alternative ways to combat opiate abuse.

"These are our families, our friends, our neighbors and our co-workers," James Shroba, special agent in charge for the St. Louis DEA office, said at a Wednesday news conference. "We can't arrest our way out of this problem."

The DEA "360 Strategy" takes a three-pronged approach. It coordinates efforts with local law enforcement agencies that target drug traffickers, encourages prescription drug distributors to prescribe drugs responsibly and tries to prevent the start of drug use by engaging schools and other community organizations associated with children.

According to a news release from the agency, 120 people overdose in the U.S. each day; half of those overdoses result from prescription opioids or heroin.

Chris Thyer, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, discussed the problem a year ago, calling prescription drug abuse a heroin "feeder."

"You can draw a straight line between the prescription drug problem we've been having for 10 years and the heroin problem," he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in January 2015.

Thyer also said imprisoning heroin users isn't the solution.

"This is not a situation where we can prosecute our way out of the problem," Thyer said last year.

A spokesman for Thyer's office did not return a phone call Thursday afternoon seeking comment on the new DEA program.

Heroin received much attention in central Arkansas after a string of overdoses in the region in 2011 and 2012.

Jared Maxwell, 19, of Little died after a heroin overdose Oct. 28, 2011; Dustin Harris, 25, of Cabot overdosed five months later, prompting a DEA investigation. The DEA linked nine overdoses over a six-month span to the same source -- Wallando Onezine of Cabot.

Onezine and eight co-conspirators have since pleaded guilty to heroin-trafficking charges in federal court. Onezine is serving a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence.

Information for this article was contributed by Linda Satter of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and by Alan Scher Zagier of The Associated Press.

Metro on 01/29/2016

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