Deadly Addiction Drug Series - Albuquerque Journal

FINAL

WEATHER ◆ D8

ARTS F1

BOOKS F4

CAREERS H1

CLASSIFIEDS G3

COMMUNITY E3

CROSSWORD E2, G3

DIMENSION C6

EDITORIALS B2

HOROSCOPE E2

LIVING E1

LOTTERY A2

MONEY C1

MOVIES F5

NEW MEXICO B1

OBITUARIES B4

REVIEWS F3, 5

REAL ESTATE G1

SPORTS D1

TRAVEL E6

TV D8

WEATHERLINE

821-1111

Albuquerque Journal online

ABQjournal.com

INSIDE

Home-owned and Home-operated ■ made in tHe U.S.a. FINAL ★★★★

Sunday Morning, auguSt 12, 2012132nd Year, no. 225 ■ 504 pageS in 40 SectionS Copyright © 2012, Journal Publishing Co. ■ $1.50

THE SUNDAY JOURNAL

JOLLY GOOD

SPORTS ■ D1

Games of London a five-ring success despite predictions of gridlock and chaos

NEW MEXICO ■ B1

Species saviorTed Turner, N.M.’s biggest private

property owner, honored for his conservation efforts

$9,999

$9,999

$9,999

IN SAVINGS INTODAY’S JOURNAL

$1,283

journal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comjournal.comYOUR SOURCE FOR BREAKING NEWS

As I write this, I hold in my hand a warm, fat breakfast burrito wrapped in foil

and brimming with cheese and red chile. So, excuse any sloppy typos as we talk about the New Mexico crisis de jour: The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiestas’s food fight.

The war that has been bub-bling like hot grated ched-dar for weeks now pits the board that runs our annual gathering of gliding gondolas against the men and women who wrap scrambled eggs, spuds, cheese and chile in

warm tortillas and hand over the bulging bundles of bliss to hungry balloon watchers for a week or so each October.

If you haven’t been follow-ing this particular Balloon Fiesta fiasco, allow me to catch you up. The Balloon

By Kasie HuntThe Associated Press

NORFOLK, Va. — Republican Mitt Romney anointed Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, an ardent conservative and devoted budget cutter, as his vice presi-dential running mate on Saturday, and the two men immediately embarked on a tour of campaign battleground states vowing to defeat President Barack Obama and repair the long-ailing U.S. economy.

America is “a nation facing debt, doubt and despair,” and a trans-formative change in leadership is vital, Ryan declared to a flag-waving crowd in the first moments after Romney introduced him as his partner for the fall campaign.

“Regrettably, Presi-dent Ob a m a h a s become part of the problem ... and Mitt Romney is the solution,” said the seven-term law-

A Real N.M. BrouhahaRomney, Ryan Hit the Road

Dear Readers:

First in a four-part series

Copyright © 2012 Albuquerque Journal

By Mike GallagherJournal Investigative Reporter

This isn’t Detroit. It isn’t Compton, Calif. We don’t have overcrowded and crumbling inner cities.

But when the Centers for Disease Control last November announced that death rates for prescription drugs had reached epidemic proportions nationally, New Mexico was at the top of the list.

Our death rate from prescription drug overdoses surpassed even our traditionally tops-in-the-nation death rate from heroin overdoses.

“This is the time to bring a sense of urgency to parents, schools, coaches, physicians and pharmacists,” U.S. Attorney Ken Gonzales said in an interview.

“Rio Arriba, Taos, (Bernalillo County’s) South Valley, the problem is ingrained in the lifeblood of the community,” Gonzales said. “Its more than a toehold, more than a foothold.”

And Gonzales said communities like Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights are in danger.

“In communities like the Heights, as devastating as the overdoses have been, it hasn’t taken hold in that community, but we have to act with urgency,” he said. “Or we’re going to lose it if we don’t.”

Why New Mexico?Is it our border with Mexico? Is it the state’s high

rate of poverty and the associated social problems?

New Mexico’s love affairwith drugsMore than twice

as many New Mexicans

die of drug overdoses as the national

average (per capita).

See ROMNEY on PAGE A6

DEADLY ADDICTIONDEADLY ADDICTIONDEADLY ADDICTION

See PRICE on PAGE A4

I’ve been watching drugs kill people for as long as I’ve been a reporter in New Mexico.In the 1970s, it was heroin.

Then, it was speed, methamphet-amine produced by bikers called “crankster gang-sters.” In the 1980s, it was cocaine. Later in the decade and into the 1990s, it was crack cocaine. Then, heroin made a comeback. Then, metham-phetamine again, this time made by Mexican cartels and called ICE. Then, oxycodone and hydro-codone. And now, we’re back to heroin again, with plenty of prescription drugs mixed in.Interspersed were drugs like

PCP, MDMA and so many others I can’t even remember all of them.Over the next four days, I’m

going to lay out some ugly sta-tistics and ugly stories about drugs in New Mexico.Maybe we can start a discus-

sion about what to do.Various events in New Mexico’s

drug saga have triggered press conferences, police raids, head-lines and trials.But there has been one con-

stant: People died.They died of overdoses. They

died of AIDS from sharing nee-dles. They died of stab wounds and gunshots in arguments over drug debts. Infants died from neglect. Drug-addled teens died in car crashes. And men in their 50s died from bodies rid-dled with hepatitis.I don’t have a lot of answers,

but I do know this: Things aren’t getting better. They are getting worse. It’s time for a real conversation about how to break New Mexico’s deadly addiction.

— Mike Gallagher

About the series

TODAY: New Mexico’s Deadly Addiction

MONDAY: Heroin — More Lethal Than Ever

TUESDAY: Painkillers Turn Deadly

WEDNESDAY: What Can Be Done?

The complete series will be posted on ABQjournal.com

About the author

Mike Gallagher has been an investigative reporter for the Albuquerque Journal since 1986. He has been a reporter in New Mexico since 1975, covering everything from Mexican drug cartels to political corruption.

See A REAL on PAGE A2

Leslie Linthicum

UpFront

RYAN: Nation “facing debt, doubt”

■ GOP presidential contender introduces running mate, vows to revitalize economy

OLYMPICS

W E I G H T L O S S S U R G E R Y P R O G R A M

Surgical Associates

IN SANTA FE (505) 913-3975 WWW.STVIN.ORG/BARIATRIC

THRE E LAPAROSCOP I CSURGERY OPT IONS

STATE

A4 The Sunday Journal DEADLY ADDICTION Albuquerque, August 12, 2012

Is it the criminal justice system?

While they may all play a role, the phrase used over and over again in response to Journal questions over the past eight months was “a perfect storm” that is leaving a trail of death in its path.

It turns out that in addition to all of New Mexico’s social problems, the state’s deadly love affair with drugs is fueled by three factors — price, purity and availability.

Just how cheap and pure was illustrated last year during a quick and dirty federal task force undercover operation that arrested 11 user/dealers in the area around Eldorado High School in Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights.

n Undercover agents bought grams of heroin for $100 — the same price as in 1977.

n The purity of the heroin agents purchased was three to four times the purity level of heroin sold just 10 years ago.

n The heroin was cheaper than prescription opiate painkillers on the street, which average $1 per milligram. That’s $10 for a 10-milligram hydrocodone pill.

Federal drug agents say the purity of the heroin and availability of prescription painkillers allow it to be smoked or snorted.

“Kids think they’re not a heroin addict if they’re not using a needle,” one federal task force agent said.

And those kids can buy heroin or prescription drugs near their high schools, as federal agents proved in last year’s roundup around Eldorado High School — several of those arrested were former students supporting their own addiction by selling to youngsters.

Attorney Joseph Riggs has represented criminal defendants for more than 30 years, including many drug addicts.

“What is shocking today is the frightening availability of heroin and painkillers,” Riggs said. “It is a communitywide problem, no longer confined to specific neighborhoods.”

Dr. George Davis oversees psychiatric services at the state Children, Youth and Families Department’s secure lockups in Albuquerque.

“The opiate overdose, call it suicide, rate is just an indicator of neglect, child abuse and broad social problems,” Davis said. “Abuse by parents using drugs drives our numbers of residents.”

And by any measure, New Mexico’s drug problem is widespread.

Among those measures:n Teen drug use in

New Mexico — heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine — is double and triple the national average, depending on the drug.

n The Department of Health estimates there are 25,000 needle-using addicts in the state.

n Department of Justice statistics show that more than half of the New Mexico inmates in state prisons and local jails are arrested for drug-related crimes.

Highest death rateIn 2008, New Mexico had

the highest heroin and prescription-drug overdose death rate in the country.

From 2000 to 2008, overdose deaths from opiates tripled.

Those numbers are not manipulated or estimated. They are counted in bodies on an autopsy table and in toxicology reports.

The conventional wisdom — testimony at the Legislature, interviews with law enforcement, families of victims — can lead the public to believe this epidemic is isolated to young people in their teens or early 20s.

Heroin and prescription drug overdoses do, tragically, kill bright young people.

While their tragedies grab headlines, teenagers abusing drugs are not the cause of New Mexico’s national standing in overdose deaths.

The vast majority of New

Mexicans dying of drug overdoses are ages 25 to 64.

Out of 2,200 drug-induced deaths from 2005 to 2009, just over 1,900 were men and women 25 years or older.

The median age of those who died of drug overdoses was 43.7 years.

Breaking the statistics down further shows that heroin addicts tend to die of overdoses in their mid-30s.

Prescription drug overdoses kill more people in their mid-50s.

That indicates to epidemiologists who study the problem that people become addicted to prescription drugs at an older age, probably because of health problems.

Heroin addicts tend to start using the drug at a younger age, in their late teens and early 20s.

The problem of widespread prescription or illegal drug use by teens is a long-term issue leading to the creation of another generation of addicts.

Two drug problemsPrescription opioid

painkillers and heroin pose two separate problems for law enforcement.

Heroin traffickers operate criminal organizations handling everything from the cultivation of poppies in Mexico to the sale of heroin

to user/dealers throughout the state.

Painkillers are manufactured in the United States legally and distributed legally through a regulated system. Prescription drugs become illegal only when the drugs are diverted out of the system.

“We are, from an enforcement and prosecution viewpoint, designed to deal with drug trafficking organizations,” U.S. Attorney Gonzales said. “Prescription drugs present a different dynamic.”

Keith Brown, assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement office in Albuquerque, put it this way: “There is no prescription drug cartel to target.”

But the two drug problems do overlap.

People who become addicted to prescription opiates often find they can no longer get access to the drugs, or their habits have become too expensive. Heroin is often a cheaper and readily obtainable alternative.

“You don’t have to look for heroin in New Mexico; it will find you,” Mike Salinas, a heroin addict trying to get clean, said in a recent interview.

Among factors contributing to heroin

overdose deaths:n Multigenerational

heroin addiction is part of the cultural fabric of communities in the Rio Grande Valley.

n Mexican cartels have been marketing cheap, high-quality heroin to younger users in affluent neighborhoods.

n Heroin production in Mexico has been at an all-time high over the past four years.

‘Pill-popping culture’Federal narcotics agents

raid drug dealers, not the family medicine cabinet.

As a society, we’ve been trained to take pills, from daily vitamins to cold tablets.

“We’re a pill-popping culture,” Jennifer Weiss of the Heroin Awareness Committee said.

“Once a kid gets addicted to prescription pills, it is a very short leap to heroin.”

“The development of a prescription drug habit is subtle,” the DEA’s Brown said. “Parents and family members have no idea what to look for.”

Dr. Harris Silver knows

just how subtle painkillers can be.

More than 20 years ago, they almost destroyed his career as a medical doctor, and now he spends his time educating other doctors, legislators, parents and anyone who will listen about the dangers of prescription painkillers.

“People don’t realize that one in 20 patients receiving a prescription for opiate painkillers is at high risk for addiction,” Silver said.

“It takes 11 days of daily use for someone to start showing signs of withdrawal if they stop taking the pills,” Silver said. “That’s how quickly addiction can happen.”

Silver was the lead analyst on a legislative drug task force report prepared by The Robert Wood John son Foun-da tion Cen ter for Health Pol-icy at the Univer sity of New Mex ico.

Silver found these contributing factors for prescription drug overdoses in New Mexico:

n Pharmaceutical companies deliberately downplayed the addictive qualities of prescription

painkillers in promoting their use for more than a decade, until sued by the Department of Justice. The lawsuits were settled for almost $1 billion.

n State Medical Board rules around the country, including New Mexico, put doctors in a position in which undertreating pain by failing to prescribe pain medication constituted malpractice. As a result, doctors sometimes prescribed more opioid painkillers than necessary.

n Patients, and for teen patients their parents, are unaware or uneducated about the dangers of prescription opioid painkillers.

n Well over half of prescription pain medications used illegally come from family members, according to federal studies.

“We are too casual in the use of pain medication,” Silver said. “There are risks with every patient receiving a prescription, and those risks can be extreme.”

Positive stepsThe news isn’t all bad.At the state and local level,

some positive steps have been taken and are showing some results. Among them:

n The number of drug overdose deaths were lower statewide in 2009 and 2010, down from a high of 500 in 2008 to 466 in 2009 and 477 in 2010.

n The State Board of Pharmacy voted in June to increase monitoring of prescription opioid

painkiller drugs.n The State Medical

Board is making voluntary guidelines on opioid drug prescriptions mandatory for doctors and others.

n Harm-reduction programs run by the State Department of Health are making more inroads into communities where heroin use has been widespread for decades.

n A U.S. Senate committee is investigating financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and “pain” lobbyist organizations that push back against regulators’ attempts to rein in the growth in the use of painkilling medications.

n Albuquerque Mayor Richard Berry and mayors around the country have joined in a campaign to educate parents about safeguarding prescription medications.

n Parents of teens who died of drug overdoses or who are fighting addiction have joined together to educate other parents and push for programs and reforms — much like Mothers Against Drunk Driving did decades ago to fight the state’s drunken driving problem.

“I don’t need to talk to a gymnasium full of kids,” the DEA’s Brown said in a recent interview. “I need to talk to gymnasiums full of parents. They’re the ones we need to educate.”

That’s not just a cop talking.

Mike Para works for the YDI Inc. Gang Intervention Program and has the tattooed “cred” and music chops to talk with any teen.

“Parents. Parents. Parents. They’re the ones who have to listen. They’re the ones who can provide the structure these kids need. They’re the ones we need to be talking to.”

SOURCE: National Vital Statistics System, 2008

5.5 - 9.49.5 - 12.312.4 - 14.814.9 - 27.0

DRUG OVERDOSE DEATH RATES BY STATE PER 100,000 PEOPLE (2008)

Rate per 100,000 people (adjusted for age)

MARICTNJ

MDDC

DE

MENHVT

NY

PAMI

IN OH WV VA

NC

SC

FL

GAAL

TN

KY

WI

IL

MO

AR

MSLA

MN

IA

ND

SD

NE

MT

WYID

UT COKS

WA

OR

NV

CA

AK

AZ NM

TX

OK

HI

drug series_US overdose maparchive x_maps_nm_drugsartist: cathryn cunninghamsize: 3 col x 19pdate of proof: aug 9, 2012

from PAGE A1

Price, Purity Fuel N.M. Love Affair With Drugs

Out of 2,200 drug-induced deaths from 2005 to 2009, just over 1,900 were men and women 25 years old or older.

drug series_Overdose Deathsarchive x_charts_artist: cathryn cunninghamsize: 2 col x 18pdate of proof: aug 9, 2012

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

New Mexico United States

Note: Deaths per 100,000 population, age-adjusted to the 2000 standard U.S. population.

SOURCE: New Mexico Department of Health

DRUG OVERDOSE DEATH RATES IN THE U.S. AND NEW MEXICO, 1999-2008

New MexicoNew MexicoNew Mexico United States

1999 2000 20072001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2008

United States

drug series_death rates by countyartist: cathryn cunninghamsizes: 4 col x 41p11 date of proof: august 9, 2012

San Juan Rio Arriba Taos Colfax Union

McKinleySandoval Santa

Fe

LosAlamos

Mora Harding

San Miguel

Quay

Curry

Guadalupe

De Baca

TorranceValencia

Bernalillo

Cibola

Catron Socorro

LincolnChaves

Roosevelt

Grant

Sierra

Otero LeaEddyLuna

Hidalgo

Doña Ana

* All rates are per 100,000, age-adjusted to the 2000 U.S. standard population. SOURCE: New Mexico Substance Abuse Epidemiology Profile

DRUG-INDUCED DEATH RATES* BY COUNTY, NEW MEXICO, 2005-2009

County not included due to the small number of deaths during reported period.

Less than 21.4

21.4 - 32.1

Greater than 32.1

11.4

21.4

10.8

11.4

12.5

13.5

14.0

15.1

15.6

16.1

16.3

16.4

18.1

18.8

20.0

20.2

22.4

23.1

23.5

24.0

24.8

25.8

26.5

26.6

27.9

28.0

51.1

Luna (13; 0.6%)

Curry (26; 1.2%)

Roosevelt (11; 0.5%)

McKinley (47; 2.1%)

San Juan (90; 4.1%)

Cibola (21; 1%)

Sandoval (93; 4.2%)

Dona Ana (155; 7.1%)

Lea (45; 2%)

Lincoln (20; 0.9%)

Santa Fe (141; 6.4%)

Otero (63; 2.9%)

Colfax (15; 0.7%)

Quay (10; 0.5%)

Socorro (21; 1%)

Sierra (16; 0.7%)

San Miguel (35; 1.6%)

Grant (37; 1.7%)

Taos (40; 1.8%)

Valencia (96; 4.4%)

Bernalillo (882; 40.1%)

Chaves (82; 3.7%)

Torrance (26; 1.2%)

Eddy (70; 3.2%)

Rio Arriba (112; 5.1%)

N.M. (2,199; 100%)

(Number of deaths; % of statewide deaths)

U.S., 2003-2007

drug series_high schools

artist: cathryn cunninghamsize: 2 col x 33pdate of proof: aug 9, 2012

United States

New Mexico

Albuquerque High

Atrisco Heritage

Cibola

Del Norte

Eldorado

Highland

La Cueva

Manzano

Rio Grande

Sandia

Valley

Volcano Vista

West Mesa

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT DRUG USE, 2009Percentage who reported using heroin, cocaine, or meth one or more times

heroin

cocaine

meth3%3%

4%5%

13%6%

4%15%

5%7% 19%

9%5%

14%8%

9%17%

11%4%

11%7%

6%13%

7%7%

8%4%

16%7%

9%13%

9%7%

14%9%

7%13%

7%7%

11%8%

9%16%

10%

13%

SOURCE: New Mexico Youth Risk and Resiliency Survey, 2009; UNM Center for Education and Policy Research

STATE

STATE

The Sunday Journal DEADLY ADDICTION Albuquerque, August 12, 2012 A5

When the Heroin Awareness Committee looked around at what it could do to spare other parents and teens the pain of addiction and death, it would have been easy to get overwhelmed.

“There were a lot of needs,” Jennifer Weiss, one of the founders, said.

Education was a glaring deficiency. Getting the state Legislature’s attention was another.

Weiss and the other parents forming the committee have children either lost to drug overdoses or who in recovery. Like the parents in Mothers Against Drunk Driving, they have political credibility. Politicians of both parties listen.

Whether they have the long-term staying power of MADD remains to be seen, but a long-term goal they have decided to address is the lack of drug addiction treatment programs for teens.

“The resources simply are not adequate,” Weiss said. “Inpatient beds are limited in New Mexico and out-of-state care is expensive. Thirty to forty thousand dollars for a 30-day stay is out of reach.”

The New Mexico Drug Policy Task Force, with members appointed by legislators and Gov. Susana Martinez, found:

n New Mexico ranks No. 1 in the nation, “by far,” for unmet treatment needs for illicit and prescription drug abuse for the 12 to 17 age group.

n The state and municipalities have substantially reduced funding for prevention programs.

n There are not enough trained professionals to staff rehabilitation facilities that are needed but don’t exist.

n Inpatient addiction treatment is out of reach of many families because major insurers and Medicaid don’t pay for residential treatment.

“We are developing a plan for an adolescent treatment center,” Weiss said. “It will be presented to Gov. Martinez and Albuquerque Mayor (Richard) Berry.”

The goal, and it may be a long-term one, is to create a “comprehensive system” of care for teen drug addicts, she said.

“It is much harder for adults to get clean,” Weiss said. “It makes sense to attack the problem at an earlier age.”

Getting treatmentOne of the ironies in this

equation is that it is easier to get drug treatment once you’ve been arrested.

That conclusion didn’t come from some activist for legalizing drugs. It came from the head of the overcrowded Metropolitan Detention Center, Director Ramon Rustin.

“We’re back-end loaded,” Rustin said. “You enter the criminal justice system, and you receive treatment, but the arrest record can make staying clean that much harder.

“It is harder to get a job. Harder to find an apartment,” he said. “A lot of places won’t rent to a person with a drug arrest.”

“We can detox a heroin addict in two weeks,” Rustin said. “They get out sober but with no job and no place to live. What they have is the drug.”

There are 300 to 400 inmates each month who enter the drug and alcohol detox programs in the jail.

“That’s a significant number, and only those with the most extreme addiction go into the programs,” he said.

Rustin’s boss, Deputy County Manager Tom Swisstack, said it may not be a question of spending more money, but rearranging how and where money is spent.

“If you move resources to the front end of the criminal justice system, literally the booking desk, we may be able to divert people into programs they need,” Swisstack said.

— Mike Gallagher

Treatment For Teens Lacking

More than half of the New Mexico inmates in state prisons and local jails are arrested for drug-related crimes.*

* Department of Justice statistics

His friends call him “Gio,” and so will we.He has a lot of weight to carry, and having

his name in the newspaper would only add to that weight.

Gio, 15, has two early memories.“I was about 5. We lived in an apartment

near the State Fairgrounds, I was trying to get into the apartment and couldn’t open the door,” he said.

He remembers running to the apartment of a neighbor, who came to his aid and helped open the door. They found Gio’s mother passed out from using heroin.

Another time, when he was a little older, he and his younger brother were playing in the median of a busy street near East Central late at night. His mother was at an apartment high on heroin.

He remembers the back of the police car. His mother was in the back of another police car.

Then, there is the memory of coming home when he was 11 and finding his mother dead of a heroin overdose.

He called the ambulance.“Heroin is really bad stuff,” Gio said in an

interview at the YDI Inc. Gang Intervention Program. Present were program director Judy Pacheco, a counselor and his grandmother.

Gio’s grandmother said, “I did what I could. Took her to rehab. Took her to the emergency rooms. Sometimes she went to jail, and the dealers were waiting for her, knocking on her door, when she got out.

“They should charge heroin dealers with murder; they’re killing kids,” she said. Gio looked at her and said, “The kids kill themselves.”

He came to YDI because it had a hip-hop stage and recording program. He likes to sing and has a part in a recorded hip-hopera

called “Chasing Nowhere.”“I wanted to perform,” he said. “I found out

about it from a friend.”He’s one of more than 350 kids YDI’s Gang

Intervention program reaches each year. About 25 percent are referred by the Juvenile Court, but most are walk-ins like Gio.

Getting kids moving in a positive direction, instead of a self-destructive one, is the goal, said Rusty Rutherford, an intervention specialist.

“It doesn’t matter what side of town you’re from — preppy white kids from the Heights or gang members from the Valley,” he said. “We all have differences, and we all have problems.”

‘At-risk’ teenBy any definition, Gio is an “at-risk” teen.School, to say the least, hasn’t been easy.

But his grades are getting better.He was wearing an ankle bracelet monitor

at the time of the interview, because of some recent unstated trouble with the law.

“Its pretty easy to get into trouble,” Gio said. “You don’t have to go looking for it. It just happens.”

But if you think he’s unique, take a look at a series of maps prepared by the University of New Mexico Center for Education Policy Research called Mapping The Landscape.

Peter Winograd, the center’s head, says it paints a bleak portrait of the state’s educational system and the future for many New Mexico kids:

n Truancy rates for many schools are over 30 percent. Students with more than 10 absences are considered truant.

n Dropout rates of more than 30 percent.n Drug use two or three times the national

average.n Poverty rates in some areas above 30

percent.

Leaf through it, and the statistics get more depressing with each page, something Winograd freely admits.

“It is a difficult picture to look at,” Winograd said. “But you have to understand the extent of the problem before you can move forward.”

Solutions may not lie in spending more money, but in how to use the money available, Winograd said.

“You need to start the discussion somewhere,” he said.

But he said he isn’t a defeatist.“In my lifetime, the Berlin Wall was

torn down and segregation was broken,” Winograd said. “Those were significant achievements. This lays out another challenge.”

— Mike Gallagher

For At-Risk Teenager, It’s ‘Easy To Get Into Trouble’

When she and her friends started snorting “chiva” in high school, Alma Cortes says they told themselves they weren’t doing heroin.

“It was OK — we weren’t sticking a needle in our arms,” she said in a recent interview. “We were naive that way.”

That was 17 years ago in Grapevine, Texas, and heroin was the drug of choice at her high school.

“The first time I used, I threw up, got sick all the next day,” Cortes said. “But the high was so intense, I kept using it. The stuff was so pure, there were a lot of ODs.”

Since then, it has been 17 years of using heroin, kicking her addiction and using heroin again. She figures she’s kicked her habit 10 times and fallen back into the habit 11 times.

“I’d be clean for years and think, ‘I can get high just this once’, but you don’t, you like it too much,” she says. “I would stop and start. Each time, it was harder to stop.”

Now she’s 6½ months pregnant.

“I’ve taken college biology classes. I know what happens to the babies of addicts. I didn’t want that to happen. I tried never to get pregnant.”

But about five months ago she realized she was pregnant.

“I started to try and kick on my own. Not use for three or four days, or just enough to keep from getting sick.

“I knew what it was going to do to a baby. I didn’t want to have a baby in addiction.”

Living in Roswell, she had to travel to Carlsbad to see a doctor who was approved to use Suboxone, a drug used to help addicts stop using heroin.

“This is how crazy addiction is,” Cortes said. “You know that you can’t get high from heroin when you take Suboxen, but guess what, I had to try it. Tried it twice. Didn’t work. How crazy is that?”

Because she had “dirty” urine tests, her doctor said he couldn’t keep treating her.

“He was very frustrated with me,” she said.

Two months ago, she decided to seek out an inpatient program, and her mother took her to UNM Hospital, where she was

examined and evaluated. She’s now at the Milagro

program for pregnant addicts run by Bernalillo County’s Department of Substance Abuse Programs, the state Department of Health and the University of New Mexico.

There are eight beds, and mothers of newborns are allowed to stay in the furnished apartments.

She’s on Methadone, but the doctors tell her they know how to deal with babies born addicted to methadone.

“It wasn’t just luck to get in here; it was a miracle. I’m getting counseling. I’m getting the checkups. I’m in a safe place,” she said. “Now I’ve got to commit to being clean for my baby boy.”

She hasn’t decided on the baby’s name yet.

— Mike Gallagher

Heroin’s High Was Too Hard To Resist

PAT VASQUEZ-CUNNINGHAM/JOURNAL

A pregnant Alma Cortes, 34, talks about being a heroin addict and expectant mother at Metropolitan Assessment and Treat-ment Services, where she is enrolled in the Milagro program for pregnant addicts.

WEISS: Founding member of the Heroin Awareness Committee


Fifteen-year-old Gio, who lost his mother to a heroin overdose, works on his hip-hop singing at Youth Development Inc.’s Gang Intervention Program.

■n But expectant mom says she’s committed to kicking the habit

■n Parents group focuses on the lack of programs for youths


YDI’s Rusty Rutherford leads a rap session with teens as part of the nonprofit’s gang interven-tion outreach program.

FINAL

/A1

WEATHER ◆ D10

BRIDGE C2

BUSINESS OUTLOOK

CLASSIFIEDS D2

COMICS D9

CROSSWORD C2, D2

DAILY BRIEFING A6

DEAR ABBY C2

EDITORIALS A8

HEALTH C1

HOROSCOPE C2

LOTTERY A2

METRO & N.M. D1

MOVIES D2

OBITUARIES C3

SPORTS B1

TV D10

WEATHERLINE

821-1111

Albuquerque Journal online ABQjournal.com

INSIDE

SPORTS ■ B1

GOODBYE, LONDON The London Olympic Games come to a rocking

end as the torch is passed to Brazil

132nd Year, no. 226 ■ 50 Pages in 5 sections Copyright © 2012, Journal Publishing Co. ■ Daily 50 cents

Home-owned and Home-oPerated ■ made in tHe U.s.a. FINAL ★★★★

Monday Morning, august 13, 2012


A1

Part 2 of a four-part series.



During 2005, in the middle of wars in Iraq and Afghani-stan, the warnings from Drug Enforcement Administration analysts got lost.

Mexican heroin was becom-ing more abundant. Purity lev-els were rising.

The warnings in those inter-nal documents reviewed by the Journal were in stark con-trast to what the U.S. State Department had told Con-gress five years earlier — that Mexican poppy cultivation was at an all-time low and Mexico was no longer a major problem as far as heroin was concerned.

Some of the DEA warnings made it into the public arena in 2006, and they became louder in 2008. Other agen-cies, such as Homeland Secu-rity, took note that the purity of heroin seized at the border was increasing. The DEA found more and more Mexican heroin on the East Coast.

But that story was pushed to the background by the increasing violence between the Mexican drug cartels and the involvement of the Mexican army. Those stories dominated front pages, the Internet and the nightly news. The annual reports on Mexi-can heroin poppy cultivation in Mexico hardly caused a ripple.

But as cartel violence claimed the lives of more than 50,000 people, Mexican heroin production more than doubled between 2005 and 2007 from 9.6 tons to 21.6 tons as the total acreage under cultivation for poppies boomed.

From 2007 to 2008, heroin production estimates doubled again to 45.6 tons, according to the National Drug Intelli-

Dear Readers

TODAY’S HEROINDEADLY ADDICTION

Cheap, Attractive and Lethal

The demise of the Mexican her-oin trade has been announced at least three times during my career — in the early 1980s when cocaine grabbed the headlines, again dur-ing the crack cocaine epidemic and finally around 2000.But heroin never

went away.True, there is

a difference now. Black tar has been replaced by brown powder. It’s cheap, and the higher purity level means it can be smoked or snorted. That makes it a drug of choice for teens, in particular, who think it’s safe because they don’t need a needle. The higher potency makes it more addictive and easier to overdose.But while law enforcement priori-

ties changed like the wind, in New Mexico, heroin was always there.

Over the years, the official assessment of the problem seemed to ebb and flow with little con-nection to reality. At some point, I concluded that any announce-ment of the demise of the Mexican heroin trade was the same as using the phrase “war on drugs.” It was political rhetoric for political agendas.As long as heroin kept its place

in poor neighborhoods, killing people of color or homeless men who smell of urine, many bought into the myth that heroin was no longer a problem.But let heroin do its deadly

work in the vaulted ceilings of Albuquerque’s Northeast Heights — where the Nayarit Cartel targets affluent teenagers — and the myth is destroyed. Suddenly, heroin is real and it kills.In the world I’ve covered, that’s

always been the reality.

Mike Gallagher


Female heroin addicts wrap themselves in blankets while withdrawing from heroin addiction.

See TODAY’S on PAGE A4

Isotopes Settle Flyball CaseBall Struck Boy In Picnic AreaCopyright © 2012Albuquerque Journal

By Scott SandlinJournal Staff Writer

A state Supreme Court ruling in 2010 created “a whole new ballgame” with regard to liability for ballparks when a visitor is injured by a flyball.

It rejected the so-called “baseball rule,” which offered widespread immunity to ball clubs and stadium owners, and said they can be sued in New Mexico. The precedent-setting ruling also said baseball is a unique spectator sport and fans share responsibility for their safety.

The case that engendered the legal fight involving a 4-year-old boy who was struck on the head by a ball on the opening day of the season was settled last week.

The case stemming from the July 2003 incident was to have gone to trial before District Judge Alan Malott, who had issued recent rulings about the scope of evidence the plaintiffs could present.

The settlement amount is confidential, but the entire sum was paid by the Isotopes.

T h e I s o t o p e s w e r e defendants in the lawsuit, which stemmed from a player for the New Orleans Zephyrs hitting a ball into the stadium’s picnic area during pregame batting practice.

The attorney for the boy’s family said he regretted the case didn’t get a public airing.

“It’s just a dangerous situation out there,” said attorney Jake Vigil, who represented the family of Emilio Crespin, now 12. “Unless you’ve got a complete heads-up about what’s going on, you could end up severely injured or dead.”

He said one ball club official said in a deposition there are hundreds of injuries at the park each year, yet “they’ve never even considered

See ISOTOPES on PAGE A2

Veteran Examines APD Morale

Lt. Jay Gilhooly retired from the Albuquerque Police Department

on Aug. 3, three days before it notched its 25th officer-involved shooting since 2010 and three days after allegations surfaced concerning the use of cellphone cameras and private cellphones by high-ranking police officials at the home of deceased civil rights attorney/adversary Mary

Han.It was also the week one of

two ousted officers contin-ued his fight to regain his job before the city Personnel

Board after repeatedly kick-ing a downed and potentially dangerous suspect.

Meanwhile, other officers continued to bicker anony-mously on public blogs, some citizens continued to only half-joke that they were in fear of their police force and Chief Ray Schultz was out of town. Again.

“Morale,” Gilhooly said in what is certainly one of the

JolineGutierrezKrueger

UpFront

See APD on PAGE A2

Lt. Jay Gil-hooly retired this month after nearly 20 years with the Albuquerque Police Depart-ment. Gilhooly says he is proud of APD but says lead-ership, vision and commu-nication are lacking.

JOURNAL FILE

gence Center 2010 report.Instead of producing black

tar heroin — a process that uses less opium base — the cartels began refining the opium base into brown powder heroin of much higher purity.

What happened?The theory put forward by

several former DEA analysts is pretty simple.

The Mexican army was redirected from poppy eradication, which involved pulling the plants out by hand and generally making life difficult for the peasant “Gomeros” who grow the poppy and collect the dried poppy gum.

Instead, they were taking the fight to the drug cartels, attempting to keep the peace or making the violence worse, depending on your point of view.

That allowed the heroin poppy crop to sprout throughout the Sierra Madre from Durango and Sinaloa to Mexico’s southern border. Cartel chemists trained in the more sophisticated manufacturing of methamphetamine were enlisted to make better quality heroin.

They made a lot of it.And all that product had to

go somewhere.It came to the United

States.

Increased purityKeith Brown, assistant

special agent in charge of the Albuquerque DEA office, said his agents don’t see much black tar heroin these days.

“Just about everything we seize these days is brown powder,” he said. “The purity is much higher.”

Instead of 900,000 heroin addicts in the United States, a figure that had remained fairly steady for decades, federal drug agency estimates jumped to 1.5 million addicts by 2010.

The New Mexico Department of Health estimates there are 25,000 addicts using needles in the state, and heroin is the most commonly injected drug.

But you don’t need a needle to get high on heroin anymore.

“At the current level of purity, heroin can be smoked or snorted,” Brown said. “That wasn’t the case 10 years ago.”

That makes it more attractive to young people who shy away from needles.

Wholesale prices of an ounce of heroin have dropped from between $1,200 and $1,500 to a low of $500 an ounce, with an average price of $700.

Heroin at the street level is sold in “units” that go for $20. Roughly five units equal a gram.

“We have low prices and high demand,” Brown said. “Capitalism at its purest form.”

How many units an addict needs depends on how long he or she has been using heroin.

The body builds up a tolerance for opioid-based drugs so it takes more to get the “rush.” The more often a person takes the drug, the faster the tolerance builds up.

A gram-a-day habit isn’t unusual. Some addicts develop habits that can reach 3 grams a day. To support that habit, they normally start selling drugs and creating more heroin addicts.

The exact weight of heroin in a unit or a gram is guesswork, as is the purity. Street-level dealers are pretty unreliable when it comes to weights or cutting the heroin. There is no quality control.

That makes things risky for addicts. The difference between a “recreational” dose and a fatal dose is small.

Addicts can tell when heroin has been cut too much because they can smell the cutting agent when they “cook it” prior to injection.

“If it smells like coffee, you know they’ve cut the hell out of it with instant coffee,” Tim, a 32-year-old recovering addict, said in a recent interview. “Think

about putting that in your veins. When you don’t give it a second thought, you know you’re a stone addict.”

Business modelsThere are generally

three business models for distribution of heroin in New Mexico, keeping in mind there are no absolutes in the heroin economy:

n Mexican nationals who set up regional poly-drug distribution networks with direct ties to either the Sinaloa or Juárez cartels. They sell to local connections, often relatives who have some legal status in the United States, who then sell to lower-level American distributors. The heroin flow into Rio Arriba County comes from these networks.

n American trafficking organizations, like the Los Padillas gang, that have direct ties to Mexican wholesalers and operate in a specific geographic area. This type of operation has become rare because of increased competition and relentless law enforcement pressure.

n The Nayarit Cartel, which specializes in heroin and operates self-contained distribution networks in midsize American cities from Phoenix to the East Coast. The Northeast Heights is a market targeted by these distributors.

Federal narcotics agents believe the Nayarit Cartel intentionally seeks to expand heroin distribution into more affluent suburban areas in mid-American cities.

The Nayarit Cartel created a system of independent cells made up of young illegal Mexican immigrants who live together and do nothing but deliver daily heroin supplies to American user/dealers.

They are deliberately nonthreatening and nondescript. They don’t carry guns. They don’t dress like gang-bangers. They tend to drive cars like 5-year-old Mazdas.

They make deliveries to busy shopping center parking lots along major thoroughfares during the day and stay in their rented apartments or houses during the night.

Over the years, their delivery routes in Albuquerque moved north from the rougher trade near East Central to strip malls on Lomas Boulevard to shopping centers along Montgomery NE and now as far north as Paseo del Norte.

The delivery boys get paid $400 to $500 a month and a bonus of several thousand dollars when they return to Mexico after working six months to a year. Half of them seem to be nicknamed “Junior.”

They don’t know the real names of the people they work for and seldom see them.

“We’ve seen the same pattern all across the country,” the DEA’s Brown said. “They move into an area, then focus on neighborhoods where the money is.”

Federal drug task forces are good at rolling up drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) like these.

Any review of federal court files shows that’s true. Few, if any, cases go to trial. Defense attorneys focus instead on downplaying the role of their clients in the trafficking organization to get sentences below 10 years instead of 20 years.

The problem is that as fast as federal narcotics agents and the local agencies working with them roll up one organization, another is ready to take its place.

Veteran criminal defense attorney Joseph Riggs was called on to represent one of the ubiquitous heroin

delivery drivers from Nayarit, Mexico.

“We were just getting ready for this fellow to get sentenced in federal court, about a year after his arrest,” Riggs said.

“I got a call from the federal Public Defender’s Office about representing another defendant who had just gotten arrested,” he said. “When I looked at the complaint, it showed my new client was involved in the same sort of operation working out of the same house in northwest Albuquerque. My original client hadn’t even been sentenced, yet.”

“As a citizen,” Riggs said, “I just found that offensive.”

Heroin drives cartels“They always forget about

heroin,” retired DEA agent Phil Jordan said in a recent telephone interview.

“The people who run drug policy always push it down the priority ladder,” he said. “Then, it comes around to bite them.”

“Heroin trafficking is at the core of the Mexican cartels,” he said. “It isn’t sexy. It isn’t pretty. But they’ve been moving heroin for decades, and they make money at it.”

Over the course of his career, Jordan ran the cocaine desk in Washington, D.C., and the El Paso Intelligence Center. He was the special agent in charge of the Albuquerque office, and later he held the same post in Dallas.

He brought so much

publicity on the leader of the Juárez Cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, that many people believe Carrillo had Jordan’s younger brother killed.

Jordan believes that.He is an iconoclast who

never had many friends in the DEA hierarchy but was highly regarded by field agents, particularly those who worked undercover.

“They never cared for the truth in Washington,” Jordan said in a recent telephone interview.

Jordan, who grew up in El Paso and played basketball at the University of New Mexico before joining the DEA, said honchos in Washington never viewed Mexican heroin as a serious problem because the market was mostly in the southwestern United States.

The current high-quality heroin in New Mexico reminds Jordan of a situation in the mid-1990s in the Dallas area.

“We had a serious problem with high-purity heroin hitting the wealthy suburbs,” Jordan said. “Good kids from good families, high school basketball players, overdosing on heroin.

“No one wanted to believe it. Everyone was in denial.”

Heroin, he said, should always be a priority in federal narcotics agencies.

“Guys like Chapo Guzman, the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, cut their teeth running heroin,” he said. “Heroin is the trunk, and every other poison these guys smuggle are branches from that tree.”

A4 Albuquerque Journal DEADLY ADDICTION Monday, August 13, 2012

STATE

/A4

A4

About the Series

SUNDAY New Mexico’s Deadly Addiction

TODAY Heroin — More Lethal Than Ever



The complete series will be posted on ABQJournal.com

from PAGE A1

Today’s Heroin: Cheap, Attractive and Lethal

drug series_Poppy Cultivationartist: cathryn cunninghamsize: 1 col x 17pdate of proof: aug 10, 2012

measured in acreshectares

2005 -- 3300

2006 -- 5000

2007 -- 6900

2008 -- 15,000

2009 --19,500

acres

8,154.5

12,355.3

17,050.3

37,065.8

48,185.5

MEXICO POPPY CULTIVATION2005 TO 2009

Source: United States State Department

8,154

48,185

37,065

12,35517,050

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

COURTESY OF DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

Federal and local narcotics agents seized cash and pounds of brown powder heroin from Mexican national drug dealers who set up shop in Albuquerque.


An inmate is checked into the Metropolitan Detention Center after his probation was revoked for failing a urine test.


Female inmates detox from heroin at a cell pod at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where inmates are under watch 24/7 in case of seizures or other health problems while “kicking” their habit.

The New Mexico Department of Health estimates there are 25,000 addicts using needles in the state, and heroin is the most commonly injected drug.

There is a brutal honesty about Mike Salinas, leavened by a quick wit and laugh.

He walked into the county Metropolitan Assessment & Treatment Services program to get “clean” from heroin.

“I had a revelation that I was going to die,” Salinas said. “A moment of clarity.”

Now 34, he was introduced at age 12 to lines of methamphetamine in the back of his older brother’s van.

“I used meth for 15 years,” he said. “But you don’t know what addiction is until you run into heroin. It grabs you by the balls, excuse my language.”

When he was 27, Salinas ran into heroin accidentally when a stranger asked him for a syringe. Salinas happened to have one and the stranger gave him his first taste of heroin.

“When I was doing meth, I was working all the time, installing floors. I was always arguing with my wife or my girlfriend. I was always angry.

“Once I got on heroin — man I felt great. There was nothing like it. I wasn’t angry anymore. It solved all my problems, I just didn’t care anymore. Just cared about getting high again,” he said during an interview at the MATS offices in Southeast Albuquerque.

But the life of a heroin addict became not about getting high, but not getting sick.

“Heroin gets into your bones,” Salinas said. “You need it. You hustle

all day to get the money to get well. You’re not getting high, just not sick.”

When he was using methamphetamine, Salinas said he did all sorts of “crazy things.”

But on heroin he avoids police at all costs.

“You go to jail and you have to kick cold turkey and you’re sick, really sick,” he said.

Another reason he came to MATS was so he could use Suboxone to step down from heroin addiction by using lower doses each day.

It also allows him to see how heroin twists the way he and other addicts see the world.

“This is the way your brain works on heroin,” he said. “You hear about somebody dying of an overdose and instead of feeling sad, you wonder where did that guy score. That must have been some really good stuff.

“Sick way of looking at things, but that’s what it does.”

He has also learned something about the drug culture hierarchy: at the bottom are heroin addicts.

“I got out of MDC (the Bernalillo County jail), and I texted my brother. He had gotten clean of the meth when I was still using, but we were brothers.

“I texted him and told him I was on the black — heroin. He cut me off right there. Haven’t talked to him since.”

— Mike Gallagher

Probation for repeat offendersLocal law enforcement officers are privately critical of sentences handed down to repeat offenders in Bernalillo County.

Some plea deals reached by the District Attorney’s Office and defense attorneys guarantee a probationary sentence, even for habitual offenders, when presented to a state judge.

Here are three recent examples:

ROBERT SANCHEZ, 43, was known to federal and local narcotics agents for two decades as a member of the South Valley Los Padillas gang and a heroin dealer.

Despite four state trafficking convictions dating back to 1993, Sanchez had served less than a year in county jail. His first federal conviction got him almost four years in federal prison.

In 2010, he was on state-ordered probation for 2007 drug convictions when he sold undercover agents a half-pound of heroin and seven guns were found in his home.

He pleaded guilty in federal court this year and was sentenced to more than 24 years in prison.

BERNANDO HERNANDEZ, 50, was serving a sentence under the state’s Drug Court program for 2009 convictions of auto theft and criminal damage to property under the name of Jose Burrek.

Probation officers told prosecutors they didn’t think Burrek was a good fit for Drug Court because of his criminal history. Burrek was put into the program anyway. Turns out the probation officers were right.

In October 2011, agents from Homeland Security Investigations got a tip that Hernandez/Burrek had heroin hidden under a Jacuzzi in his home.

The federal agents contacted state probation officers, who decided to inspect Hernandez/Burrek’s Southeast Heights home, accompanied by federal and State Police agents. They found more than 11 ounces of heroin, 11 ounces of methamphetamine and a .380-caliber pistol.

He pleaded guilty in federal court, and U.S. District Judge Judith Herrera sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

JOHN ANZURES, 39, was on probation after pleading guilty to state drug charges when police began looking for him on another felony charge.

They found him with a child in the back seat of his car and a loaded .40-caliber pistol under his seat. They also found a small amount of heroin in his car.

Considering Anzures had a history of state felony convictions dating back to 1992 for offenses including possession of heroin, aggravated assault, burglary and escape, this was bad form.

He was indicted on one count of being a felon in possession of a firearm, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.

Albuquerque Journal DEADLY ADDICTION Monday, August 13, 2012 A5

STATE

/A5

A5


Angela Sandoval, 32-year-old mother of three, is headed to prison again.

She was interviewed through the glass of her cell door at the Metropolitan Detention Center while awaiting transport to the women’s prison in Grants.

“This is your life on drugs,” she said.“Two years in prison and five years’

probation,” she said. “I’m owned by the state of New Mexico.”

That was her message to anyone who cares to hear it.

It is a message to her daughters, including her youngest, Arianna, who had a message for her mother.

Sandoval held up the letter from her daughter, who in large letters begged her mother to stop using drugs. Sandoval could hardly talk about the letter through her tears.

Sandoval is a testament to the fact

that the state criminal justice system has limits when criminal defendants won’t obey the rules of their probation.

A short summary: Sandoval was convicted in 2001 of robbery and put on probation. That probation was revoked, and she was sent to Drug Court, which she failed to complete. In 2008, she had another conviction for robbery committed to support her drug habit, and she was put on probation, which she violated and was sent to prison.

In 2011 and 2012, Sandoval faced four separate indictments for possession with intent to distribute heroin and methamphetamine, among other charges. She was sentenced to prison again.

She didn’t want to talk about how she got here, other than she was caught trafficking. Where she’s going, you don’t talk about that. You especially don’t use names.

The most she will volunteer is that she fell in “with the wrong crowd” and

started using drugs.“The wrong crowd” translates

in most jails as hanging with gang members or drug dealers or a boyfriend with his own raging addiction.

Sandoval became pregnant at age 14, and her daughters are in the care of their grandmother.

Her big concern now is her oldest daughter, who is 17.

“She’s gotten a job, her driver’s license,” Sandoval said. “She’s doing good. I keep telling her and her sisters, I wasted half their lives getting mixed up with drugs.

“They have to do something better,” she said, looking around her cell. “Anything is better than this.”

She is not sure what the future holds.“Prison didn’t help the last time,” she

said. “It made things worse.”But she added, “I have to treat this as

an opportunity to get things right.”

— Mike Gallagher

Drug-Troubled Mom Hopes To ‘Get Things Right’

‘Heroin Gets Into Your Bones’

Opiate-Blocking Drug Saves Lives

The state District Court in Downtown Albuquerque is just across Lomas Boulevard and a few hundred feet from federal court.

But they are a world apart in their handling of narcotics cases.

In state court, most of the 2,500 felony drug cases end with defendants receiving sen-tences for probation or refer-rals to Drug Court.

In federal court, a defendant is much more likely to end up in prison. For a long time.

There are many reasons for the disparity:

n Federal sentencing laws are more severe, and federal prosecutors get first choice of cases brought by narcot-ics task forces that get federal funding.

n Federal law enforcement agencies can bring together the manpower to work wire-taps, a labor-intensive investi-gative tool, and focus on large-scale drug networks.

n Most drug cases involve search warrants and seizures of property. Restrictions on law enforcement set out by state Supreme Court rulings are much tougher on police than federal court rulings.

There are 16 legal issues in which the federal courts come down on the side of police, while state court rulings favor a defense lawyer’s stricter interpretation of search and seizure allowed under the New Mexico Constitution.

Example:A drug dealer tosses evi-

dence of his illegal business into the trash bin at a motel where he’s staying. Under federal court rulings, police can search the trash bin for evidence without obtaining a warrant. Under state law, a search warrant is needed for the evidence to be used in court.

For narcotics agents, the choice is a “no-brainer” —

take the case to federal court when you can.

As a result, big drug cases go to federal court, and lots of little drug cases are indicted in state court.

Last year, in response to a public outcry over teens over-dosing in Albuquerque, feder-al and local narcotics agents focused their efforts for a few weeks on street-level heroin dealers.

Normally, the agents target heroin wholesalers and orga-nizations with direct access to the Mexican drug cartels, on the theory that street-level dealers don’t get much prison time and are selling to support their own drug habits.

Out of the 13 arrests made in the operation, only two result-ed in prison sentences longer than a year. Others resulted in probationary sentences, and several are pending plea negotiations.

U.S. Attorney Ken Gonzales didn’t expect anything more than that.

“We wanted the public to know we were paying atten-tion to the drug overdoses in the Northeast Heights and let the drug dealers know we were paying attention,” he said.

Federal Courts Tougher on Drugs


County jail inmate Angela Sandoval, 34, shows a letter written by her daughter begging her mother to stop using drugs. San-doval was awaiting transport to the state women’s prison in Grants.

The heroin overdose death rate in New Mexico could be a lot higher.

“Thank God for Narcan,” one senior drug enforcement official said. “I’d hate to see what the death rate would be without it.”

Narcan is one of several brand names for the drug naloxone that counters the effects of a heroin or opiate drug overdose in less than a minute.

Opiates depress the central nervous system and respiratory system, in an overdose both shut down. Naloxone blocks opiate effects in the brain, causing an almost instantaneous withdrawal.

It takes less than a minute to work.

In New Mexico, it is widely used by fire and ambulance paramedics and emergency rooms.

It is also distributed by the state Department of Health’s Harm Reduction Program directly to heroin users and/or family members as part of the department’s needle exchange program.

In hospital emergency rooms, it is injected intravenously for fastest action. On the street, Fire Department paramedics inject the drug into the shoulder muscles because finding a usable vein on a heroin addict can take too long.

In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a qualified study saying that, based on reports from programs around the country, the use of naloxone had reversed 10,000 potential overdose deaths.

It is not an urban legend that heroin addicts don’t react well to somebody who has messed up their “high” with naloxone.

The Journal recently interviewed a group of heroin addicts in detox at the Bernalillo County MATS program.

Four out of the five were revived with naloxone, and all four said their immediate reaction was not gratitude.

“You come out and it’s like, you ruined my high,” Alma Cortes said.

Mike Salinas said, “I was pissed. I hustled all day to pay for that unit. I let them know it.”

— Mike Gallagher


Mike Salinas, 34, says heroin is everywhere. “You don’t need to find it. It finds you,” he says.

drug series_CasesIndictedartist: cathryn cunninghamsize: 1 col x 18pdate of proof: aug 10, 2012

2010 2011

Cocaine 935 781

Ecstasy 21 24

Heroin 642 640

Marijuana 340 233

Meth 475 395

Other 155 98

Prescription 219 306

Psilocybin 2 6

INDICTED DRUG CASES

Source: Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office

by the Bernalillo County District Attorney's Office

FINAL

WEATHER ◆ D6

BRIDGE B5

BUSINESS B1

CLASSIFIEDS C5

COMICS C8

CROSSWORD B5, C5

DEAR ABBY B5

EDITORIALS A6

EDUCATION B4

HOROSCOPE B5

LEGALS C7

LOTTERY A2

METRO & N.M. C1

MOVIES C5

OBITUARIES C3

SPORTS D1

STOCKS B2

TV D6

WEATHERLINE 821-1111

Albuquerque Journal online

ABQjournal.com

INSIDE

SPORTS ■ D1

UNM women’s basketball team is shut out from MWC TV coverage

BUSINESS ■ B1

Retail uptickNew stores for national chains spur metro-area construction

EDUCATION ■ B4

In transitionLobos benchedFor students in transition years, kids and parents may need a little extra guidance



Tuesday Morning, augusT 14, 2012


A1

Dear Readers:

DEADLY ADDICTIONDEADLY ADDICTION

It used to be pretty simple.Heroin was heroin. Cocaine

was cocaine.Now, federal and local

cops have to use the Physi-cian’s Desk Reference — PDR for short — to identify the pills they seize in drug arrests. Or collect at the scene of fatal drug overdoses.Are the blue pills oxyco-

done or OxyContin? Is this Valium or hydrocodone? It’s often up to police to iden-tify the pills because the people involved couldn’t tell an aspirin from

suppository.We hear stories of young

people raiding the family medicine cabinet, going to parties where they throw the pills into a bowl — antidepressants, sedatives, decongestants, painkill-ers, muscle relaxers and anything else they found in the medicine cabinet or got from a friend. They play games and take pills from the bowl like candy rewards.You can dismiss the sto-

ries as urban legend, thinking that the behavior is too bizarre to be true.Then a kid dies at one of

these parties and it’s no longer urban legend. It’s the new reality of the drug world.

Mike Gallagher


Tim Gallagher says prescription painkillers got him started on his heroin addiction.

Third in a four-part series



Harris Silver, M.D., and Tim Gal-lagher (no relation to the reporter) are both in recovery.

That’s where the similarity starts and ends.

Both have battled the euphoria and warm sense of well-being that addicts describe when taking opi-oid drugs. Some describe it as a “cocoon” against all troubles.

Silver was a prac-ticing surgeon when he became addicted to painkillers.

He was prescribed the drugs for pain from a bulging disc in his neck.

Like a lot of profes-sional people who become addicted, at some point he started “doctor shopping” to get prescriptions for the drugs.

That was more than 20 years ago.He got caught, not by a doctor but

by a pharmacist.“I was a dumb doctor shopper. I

kept taking the prescriptions to the same pharmacist,” Silver said. “He called my boss, and that began this long road I’ve been on.”

Silver lobbied the Legislature this last session for tougher regulations on prescription painkillers and was the main analyst for the state Drug Policy Task Force.

He does educational programs for doctors on the prescription painkiller addiction problem and is involved in national symposiums on the problem.

And when he needed surgery recently, he had to take painkillers and then come off them with a lot of help from his sponsor, doctor and others.

You don’t stop being an addict or

See PAINKILLERS on PAGE A4

SILVER: Sur-geon became addicted to painkillers

By Olivier UyttebrouckJournal Staff Writer

Top Albuquerque officials Monday urged councilors to approve a $50 million bond pro-posal to pay for a new Paseo del Norte/Inter-state 25 interchange, warning that a public election on the issue would be expensive and legally risky.

The warnings came during a special meet-ing at which councilors voted to consider the bond proposal, which would eliminate the need for a public vote on the proposed bonds. The nine-member council will consider the pro-posal Sept. 5. and will need a seven-vote super majority to approve the bond sale without an election.

City officials had planned to list the question on the general election ballot on Nov. 6, but the city’s election plans were thrown in turmoil last week after Assistant Attorney General Tania Maestas raised questions about whether New Mexico law allows a municipal question on a general-election ballot.

But several councilors said Monday night they preferred to stick to an earlier promise that voters would have a chance to approve or reject financing for the project.

“My biggest concern is that we voted 9-0 to send it to the voters,” said Councilor Ken San-


By Dan McKayJournal Staff Writer

Activists trying to raise the minimum wage in Albuquerque by a dollar an hour coupled with automatic cost-of-living increases say they have gathered enough petition signatures to force a vote on the issue.

They turned in the last of 25,156 signatures on Monday, said Becca Glenn, a spokeswoman for the wage coalition. That’s more than twice the number required to move the ordinance forward.

The City Clerk’s Office now has 10 days to verify the validity of the signatures, which must be from Albuquerque voters.

“We’re confident we have enough signa-tures,” said Matthew Henderson, executive director of Olé New Mexico, a nonprofit com-

Councilors Urged To OK Paseo Bond

Petition Seeks To Raise City’s Minimum Wage

City Council To Consider Proposal at Sept. 5 Meeting

See COUNCIL on PAGE A2

See MINIMUM on PAGE A5

See SEEDS on PAGE A5

DEAN HANSON/JOURNAL

Patrice Harrison-Inglis, left, and Deborah Mon-toya in Peña Blanca’s grand experiment — a field of sunflowers.

PEÑA BLANCA — Few grand experiments are as pretty as the two acres on the north side of Deborah

Montoya’s horse corral.Montoya had intended to plant

the land in pasture grass when the whole sunflower thing came up. “This field hasn’t been rotated in about 10 years,” Montoya said on a sunny morning as she picked her way through the mud of a just-irrigated field.

This stretch of the Rio Grande Valley, on the east side of the river in the shadow of Cochiti Dam, is

about as small as small farming gets — families that can trace their roots to Spanish immigrants who came to the valley 400 years ago and Pueblo communities that go back even longer. It is common to find farm plots here that have been carved ever smaller over the years, land divided as it passed from parents to children.

Drive State Route 22 through Peña Blanca or any of the other country lanes in the valley between Bernalillo and Cochiti

John Fleck

UpFront

Seeds of Sunflower Dream Sown in Peña Blanca

Prescription DrugsKill More in N.M.

Than Heroin

WINDOWS & DOORS

Call TODAY for a FREE In-Home Consultation 248-2470Visit our showroom 5504 Menaul NE

Window & Door Installation Experts

CALL TODAY FOR A FREEIN-HOME CONSULTATION 248-2496Home Resort Living Inc. Lic. 91738

WALK- IN TUBS BY

Visit our showroom 5504 Menaul NEASSEEN ON

TV

• Easy access, offering safety equipment suchas grab bars, seats, non-slip floors

EASY FINANCING AVAILABLE

Buy 4 Windowsand get 1 FREEof equal or lesser value OR

5 YEARSNO INTEREST*

*OAC Some restrictions may apply,call for details

SAFETY, SECURITY & INDEPENDENCE

WeProudlySupport

A4 Albuquerque Journal Tuesday, August 14, 2012

stop being in recovery.“I am enthusiastic about

being in recovery,” Silver said.

That’s something Gallagher is trying to learn.

Gallagher, 32, doesn’t walk the halls of the Roundhouse in Santa Fe. Until recently, he was hustling for his next heroin fix — an addiction that grew from his use of painkillers.

“Started out when I was about 17 with painkillers from my dentist,” he said.

After that, things get a little hazy.

Family members had a history of drug abuse, and he was introduced to injecting heroin by a family member.

“You work but you get fired because you have to score or think about scoring,” Gallagher said. “Once you’re into heroin, you don’t think about anything else.”

At the time of an interview with the Journal, he was at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Assessment & Treatment Services facility to detox.

He had just graduated from Turquoise Lodge, a Department of Health inpatient rehabilitation program.

“I graduated three days ago,” he said. “I immediately forgot to concentrate on my recovery.

“I started worrying about a job and getting a car. Next thing I know, I wake up facedown in the street and can’t remember how I got there.”

Gallagher checked into the detox facility as soon as he could get his act together.

“Tell everyone, this isn’t easy,” he said.

Fatal medsMore people in New Mexico

are dying of prescription painkiller drug overdoses than from overdosing on heroin and cocaine. A typical victim is middle-aged and female.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called it a national epidemic last November. The New Mexico Drug Policy Task Force, with members appointed by the Legislature and Gov. Susana Martinez, goes one better: “In New Mexico, we have a substance abuse epidemic of monumental proportions.”

The warnings that prescription painkillers were a threat date back to 2001, when federal agencies noted large increases in emergency room visits for people who had overdosed on oxycodone or hydrocodone.

Both narcotics are “controlled substances” under federal law, but oxycodone is a Schedule II drug and hydrocodone is Schedule III. Oxycodone is slightly more powerful and is considered more subject to abuse. As a result, prescriptions for oxycodone cannot be “called in” to a pharmacy like hydrocodone prescriptions.

Add to that the growing current concern that prescription pain medication has become a “gateway” to heroin addiction for young people. In New Mexico, heroin overdose deaths among people 25 and younger doubled from 2009 to 2010.

But that recent concern masks other problems in New Mexico.

Among them:n Deaths from prescription

opioid drugs tripled from 2000 to 2009.

n The majority of people dying of prescription drug overdoses are between the ages of 44 and 64.

n More women die of prescription drug overdoses than overdoses of illegal drugs.

n Prescriptions for pain medications in New Mexico increased more than 350 percent for oxycodone and more than 150 percent for hydrocodone from 1999 to 2009.

The state Drug Policy Task Force concluded there were several reasons for what it called a “glut” of opioid prescription medication in New Mexico.

Among them:n Overprescribing

prescription painkillers like Percocet (oxycodone) and Vicodin (hydrocodone) by doctors and dentists.

n The “medicine cabinet”

problem, in which unused prescription painkillers are stored unsecured and accessible to others, especially to teenagers.

n Prescription forgeries and doctor shopping by people who are addicted to the pills or who want to sell the pills to other addicts.

High-risk patientsMany people addicted to

prescription drugs come by it honestly — through medical treatment for cancer, complications from surgery, spinal cord injuries and other medical conditions for which doctors prescribe painkillers.

Because patients taking opioid painkillers build up a physical tolerance to the drugs, the addiction needs to be carefully managed in a way that requires the attention of the doctor and patient.

Patients with a history of substance abuse or mental health problems can be difficult to manage.

“One in 20 patients are at high risk for addiction if they are prescribed opioid painkillers,” said Silver, the physician analyst for the Drug Policy Task Force. “We have to do a better job of identifying those patients at high risk.”

Once treatment begins,

other challenges present themselves.

Problems with insurance coverage can interrupt the doctor’s oversight or make it hard for people to legally obtain the drugs. If a patient has to see multiple doctors for different health problems, addiction management can become difficult as the patient receives different drugs for different medical problems.

And doctors can miss signs that a patient’s use of pain medication is spinning out of control.

The state Medical Board wants doctors to do a better job of explaining to all patients receiving prescriptions for painkillers how addictive the drugs are.

Jennifer Weiss of the Heroin Awareness Committee said that is one of her group’s goals.

“I know from personal experience that I never got an explanation of how addictive the painkillers were,” Weiss said.

Her son, Cameron, died of a heroin overdose after he became addicted to painkillers prescribed after he had a series of high school sports injuries.

Looking for abuseThe Heroin Awareness

Committee didn’t have much

luck with its legislative agenda last session.

New Mexico regulations governing prescription drugs are in line with those of most other states, but some, like Washington, have already tightened regulations in response to opioid drug overdose deaths.

“We ran into opposition from medical societies,” Weiss said. “They opposed limits on prescribing pain medication.”

The group did manage to pass amendments to the Pain Relief Act that require state agencies to create rules on pain management and continuing education for those who prescribe opioid medications.

The committee seems to be having better luck with regulatory agencies.

In June, the State Board of Pharmacy approved changes that will expand the board’s prescription monitoring program.

One change was to make it a “real time” computer program that would allow pharmacists and doctors and others to check on a patient’s prescription history. The board has had a monitoring program since 2005, but it was used primarily by board investigators, who are both pharmacists and trained law enforcement officers, to look for patterns of prescriptions that would indicate forgeries, doctor shopping or other signs of illegal diversion of prescription medications.

The Pharmacy Board investigators are highly regarded by law enforcement.

“They do amazing work,” said DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge Keith Brown. “They either initiate or aid all our diversion investigations.”

The Legislature didn’t fund the expansion of the program, but the board found grant money to do it.

Responding to the state’s top-in-the-nation ranking for prescription overdose deaths, the state Medical Board last week enacted regulations governing prescription practices for opioid painkillers.

They require doctors prescribing the narcotic painkillers for more than 10 days to use the Board of Pharmacy’s prescription monitoring program to determine if patients are getting painkillers from other doctors.

Physicians also must document the treatment plan for patients receiving painkillers for longer than 10 days and see long-term patients at least every six months.

Some doctors objected to the changes as “heavy-handed,” but board Chairman Dr. Steven Weiner said the board was responding to a statewide “public health crisis.”

The regulations would require ongoing education for doctors on prescription pain medications.

‘Pain lobby’So is Big Pharma pushing

pain meds too aggressively?The U.S. Senate is

investigating the role of drug manufacturers in promoting painkillers within the medical community and the public.

Sens. Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent letters to pharmaceutical firms saying evidence suggests the epidemic of addiction and accidental deaths from narcotic painkillers is due to companies “promoting

misleading information about the drugs’ safety and effectiveness.”

The senators are asking for financial information about links between drug companies manufacturing painkillers and what they called the “pain lobby.”

During the 1990s, Congress held numerous hearings on the “undermedicating” of cancer patients and others with painful chronic medical conditions, such as spinal cord injuries.

A major complaint was that the regulations of state medical boards — which license doctors — restricted physicians from prescribing adequate amounts of narcotic painkillers to patients with diseases such as cancer.

One result of the hearings was a liberalization of state regulations on prescribing powerful painkillers for “acute” pain, which covers a much larger universe of patients — from minor surgical procedures to sports injuries.

About the time the changes went into effect, the number of overdose deaths from prescription painkillers and emergency room admissions for overdoses began to increase.

One of the arguments in favor of loosening state regulations was that the new generation of painkillers was not as addictive as older drugs.

Two companies that produced the most widely used painkillers — hydrocodone and oxycodone — were sued by federal prosecutors in 2006 for misleading doctors about how addictive the drugs are.

The lawsuits were settled for almost $1 billion, with the companies promising to market their products using more accurate information saying that today’s painkillers are just as addictive as older medications.

The companies also have taken some steps to modify opioid painkillers to make some of them more difficult to snort or smoke.

STATE

/A4

A4

drug series_obtain piechartartist: cathryn cunninghamsize: 2 col x 21p4date of proof: aug 13, 2012

Source: National Surveys on Drug Use and Health, 2010

WHERE PAIN PRESCRIPTION OPIOIDS WERE OBTAINED

Bought onthe Internet

Bought fromfriend/relative

Free/tookfromfriend/relativeOther

Drug dealer/stranger

More thanone doctor

One doctor

Other

Drug dealer/stranger

More than one doctor

One doctor

Bought from friend/relative

Free/took from friend/relative

55%

14.8%

17.3%

79.4%

7.3%

4.9%

3.3%

3.5%

1.6%

6.5%

0.4%

4.4%

1.6%

Where friend/relative obtained

Where respondents obtained*

*most recent nonmedical use among past-year users ages 12 or older

About the seriesSUNDAY: New Mexico’s Deadly Addiction


TODAY: Painkillers Turn Deadly


The complete series will be posted on ABQjournal.com

Deaths from prescription opioid drugs tripled from 2000 to 2009

Painkillers Kill More in N.M. Than Heroin


MDC Corrections officer Juan Zamora checks inmates for drugs during intake.

EDDIE MOORE/JOURNAL

Dr. Steven Jenkusky and other members of the New Mexico Medi-cal Board last week approved new rules for prescription painkillers.

from PAGE A1

MARICTNJ

MDDC

DE

MENHVT

NY

PAMI

IN OH WV VA

NC

SC

FL

GAAL

TN

KY

WI

IL

MO

AR

MSLA

MN

IA

ND

SD

NE

MT

WYID

UT COKS

WA

OR

NV

CA

AK

HI

AZ NM

TX

OK

3.7 - 5.9

6.0 - 7.2

7.3 - 8.4

8.5 - 12.6

AMOUNT OF PRESCRIPTION PAINKILLERS SOLD BY STATE

SOURCE: Automation of Reports and Consolidated Orders System (ARCOS) of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), 2010

Kilograms of prescription painkillers per 10,000 people

drug series_US painkiller sales maparchive x_maps_nm_drugsartist: cathryn cunninghamsize: 3 col x 20pdate of proof: aug 9, 2012

per 10,000 people (2010)

Albuquerque Journal Tuesday, August 14, 2012 A5

STATE

/A5

A5

By Mike Gallagher Journal Investigative Reporter

Clinica De La Gloria was a busy place.

In one year, Gloria Vigil wrote prescriptions for 700 patients. Eighty-nine percent of those were for oxycodone, hydrocodone or methadone.

A man who had dropped off one of her prescriptions at a pharmacy told Drug Enforcement Administration agents that the prescriptions had cost him $150 — $50 for a go-between and $100 for Vigil. The man told agents he used 15 different names for prescriptions written by Vigil, a 62-year-old nurse practitioner.

Another DEA source told agents he would pay Vigil $250 a prescription for 180 tablets of 30-milligram oxycodone.

The source also told agents he obtained prescriptions from Vigil under multiple names, but could use each name only once every four weeks to avoid drawing the attention of the state Pharmacy Board.

The man was sent to Vigil’s office on Bridge SW

twice by DEA agents to buy prescriptions. During the recorded meetings, the source purchased five prescriptions for oxycodone in five different names.

Vigil later admitted in her guilty plea that she created phony medical charts in the names of people she never treated to help cover her tracks.

Clinica De La Gloria is a South Valley version of a “pill mill.”

DEA investigators first interviewed Vigil in 2008 about prescriptions for opioid painkillers she had signed for several young men while operating the medical practice from her home.

In 2009, she opened Clinica De La Gloria in the 1700 block of Bridge SW.

In 2010, DEA agents put

Clinica De La Gloria under surveillance and began interviewing employees of pharmacies about prescriptions written by Vigil for Percocet and other painkillers, according to federal court documents.

Her case is a sad one on more than one level.

As a child, Vigil was struck by polio, which left her with lifelong physical problems. Those ailments became worse as she grew older, according to court records.

Despite that, she obtained a nursing degree and earned the right to prescribe medications working in public health clinics in Santa Fe and Las Cruces and in mental health hospitals.

When she was arrested, Vigil cooperated with federal agents.

Her attorney later wrote to the sentencing judge that Vigil told agents she “wanted to call them several times because she didn’t know how to get out of the situation.”

Vigil’s sentencing was scheduled for earlier this year but has been delayed.

Friend to friendVigil’s case is an exception

to what narcotics agents find when investigating the diversion of prescription pain pills into the illegal market in New Mexico.

More typical is a person with a legitimate prescription using half the pills for their medical condition and selling the other half.

Prices for oxycodone or hydrocodone fluctuate wildly in the illegal street market from $1 per milligram to sometimes as high as $2 a milligram. In one case, 49 tablets of 30-milligram doses sold for $900 or $1.63 a milligram.

“A lot of what we find is a guy with a computer printing forged prescriptions with two friends passing them at pharmacies,” DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge Keith Brown said.

“Sometimes it gets a little more sophisticated than that, but not often.”

700 Patients Used ‘Pill Mill’

Call 911

The “medicine cabinet” issue is not urban legend; it is real. And one the Heroin Awareness Committee made a priority.

“Educating parents, students and even medical professionals about the danger of these drugs is a priority for us,” Jennifer Weiss said.

“There are a lot

of prescriptions for hydrocodone or oxycodone for 30 days, when the pain is gone in a week,” Weiss said.

For a great many people, the side effects of opiate-based painkillers — nausea, constipation, disorientation — outweigh the effectiveness of the drug and they simply stop taking it.

The pills get put into the medicine cabinet next to other unused drugs.

“That’s where teens can find them,” Weiss said.

A federal survey of nonmedical drug use in 2010 found that more than half of opioid painkillers people used came from a “friend or relative” for free and were prescribed by a doctor.

Fewer than 5 percent of those surveyed said they bought the drugs from a stranger/drug dealer. Almost 15 percent purchased the painkilling medications from friends or relatives.

— Mike Gallagher

Most Abusers Get Pills From Friends, Family

JOURNAL FILE

These pills were collected in a drive by the state Department of Public Safety to get unneeded painkillers out of homes.

Get the pills out

■■ Nurse practitioner admitted creating phony medical charts

Getting rid of the unused pain medication in the medicine cabinet — or the kitchen cabinet — can be a problem.

The Drug Enforcement Administration runs a program once a year in which people can dispose of prescription medication at prearranged locations.

The Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t want the

medication flushed down the toilet because the drugs may work their way into drinking or irrigation water.

But Harris Silver, M.D., has a simple suggestion.

“Break the tablets up, mix them with coffee grounds and then add vinegar,” Silver said. “You can throw it away in the garbage, because the opiates have been neutralized.”

The 911 Good Samaritan Law provides a limited immunity from drug possession charges when a drug-related overdose victim or a witness to an overdose seeks medical assistance.

Several drug addicts attempting to get clean asked that the public be made aware of the law.

“There’s no reason for people to leave someone overdosing to die,” said Mike Salinas, who was in the county detox facility. “They

need to call 911. Everyone needs to know about the Good Samaritan law.”

The state Drug Policy Task Force said in its report to Gov. Susana Martinez and the Legislature that many people and law enforcement agencies were unaware of the law.

The task force concluded that the law’s effectiveness had been hampered because it does not protect probationers, parolees, people facing trial or people with outstanding warrants.

Seeds of Sunflower Dream Sownfrom PAGE A1

DEAN HANSON/JOURNAL

Sunflowers are a big crop in the Great Plains, and a group of middle Rio Grande farmers are experimenting to see if they can be a success here.

and you’ll see corn, some chile and other odds and ends spread across farm fields. Mostly, though, you’ll see the green patchwork of fields planted in alfalfa, the valley’s dominant crop.

But if you look along the roadsides and ditch banks, that splash of late-summer yellow you see is indeed the plant known as Helianthus annuus — the wild sunflower. It’s native to the region, a wildflower adapted to our arid climate, according to University of New Mexico biologist Tim Lowrey. And the sunflowers grown by farmers are hybrids of that lovely wild plant.

“It’s really the only native seed crop that originated in North America,” Lowrey said.

It was that connection — fields of farmed sunflowers she saw on a trip to California followed by wild ones lining the ditches on her return — that first got Peña Blanca farmer Patrice Harrison-Inglis thinking.

“I thought, ‘Ya know what? Those hybrids would probably grow pretty well here,’ ” Harrison-Ingis recalled.

When Harrison-Inglis gets hold of an idea, there’s an exuberant energy behind it. “I took a chance,” Montoya said with a laugh recently as she and Harrison-Inglis stood in the horse corral looking over at her 2 acres of

dazzling yellow. “Patrice is very good at convincing us to do a new adventure.”

At this point, the adventure is now two years into the Sandoval County sunflower experiment, with 35 acres between Santa Clara and Cochiti planted in sunflowers this year. And Harrison-Inglis, Montoya and their neighbors are inviting you up to Peña Blanca the last weekend in August to check out the results, for the first Peña Blanca Sunflower Festival.

Sunflowers seem to make sense as a New Mexico crop, according to Janet Jarratt, a Los Lunas dairy farmer who has experimented with a variety bred for beauty and used for cut-flower displays. “They really are a great plant because they are indigenous,” Jarratt said. The problem, Jarratt said, has always been the chicken-and-egg problem of economies of scale — getting enough acreage in sunflowers to support the

processing plants needed to turn them into a marketable commodity. Each needs the other. Which comes first?

As a rotational crop, sunflowers are perfect for New Mexico’s alfalfa farmers, according to Del Jimenez at New Mexico State University’s ag science center in Alcalde. Alfalfa, typically baled for animal feed, is a relatively low-maintenance crop. But you can’t leave a field in alfalfa forever, Jimenes said. Alfalfa puts nitrogen in the soil, and sooner or later sustainable farming practices require you to switch it out for a crop that takes the nitrogen back out, said Jimenez, an ex officio member of the Peña Blanca sunflower posse.

You can grow them for their oil, or for eating.

Sunflowers are a huge crop in the Dakotas, with over a million acres in production last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Our neighbors in Colorado grow sunflowers, along with California (where farmers grow pretty much everything) and six other states. But they’re not even a blip in New Mexico’s agricultural economy.

For now, Harrison-Inglis hopes to package the Peña Blanca sunflowers as a boutique local crop for eating, to be sold at local stores. If the harvest is large enough, it could be shipped

to one of the large sunflower processors in the Great Plains sunflower farming states.

But Harrison-Inglis had a glimmer in her eye as she let slip the dream — enough sunflowers to support a plant, in Peña Blanca, to turn the seed into pressed sunflower oil: “What if Peña Blanca could have a mill?”

While that’s just a distant dream, in the meantime you can check out the dazzling yellow experiment Aug. 25 and 26.

UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. Comment directly to John Fleck at 823-3916 or [email protected]. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.

a00_jd_14aug_pena blancaartist: cathryn cunninghamsize: 1 col x 19pdate of proof: aug 13, 2012

BWCOLOR

Peña Blanca

Albuquerque

Cochiti Pueblo

Bernalillo

JOURNAL

40

25

10 miles

N

10 miles

N

SUNFLOWER FESTIVAL

Peña Blanca

Albuquerque

Cochiti Pueblo

Bernalillo

JOURNAL

40

25

SUNFLOWER FESTIVAL

40

25

Albuquerque

Santa Fe

N.M.

map area

40

25

Albuquerque

Santa Fe

N.M.

map area

550 550

22 22

Minimum Wage May Go on Ballotfrom PAGE A1

munity group involved in the effort.

The proposal is expected to trigger fierce debate if it makes the ballot. The Great-er Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce said it’s ready to fight the measure.

The proposal would amend the city’s minimum-wage law to require pay of $8.50 an hour, starting next year. That’s up from the $7.50 an hour required in Albuquerque now. The federal requirement is $7.25.

Supporters of the wage hike are working under a rarely used provision of the City Charter that allows “direct legislation through voter ini-tiative.” They had two months to gather signatures from 12,091 voters.

If the clerk certifies they have met the requirement, the ordinance must be proposed to the City Council. If the council rejects the ordinance, amends it or fails to act within a cer-tain period of time, the pro-posal must be scheduled for an election within 90 days, according to the charter.

Supporters say they want the ordinance to go on the general election ballot Nov. 6.

But it’s not clear that will happen. Just last week, an assistant attorney general advised state election officials that she believes the general-election ballot, by state law, is supposed to be reserved for state- or county-wide ques-tions, not municipal issues.

If the wage question can’t go before voters in November, then a special election would be scheduled. But state law says there can’t be other elec-tions 42 days before or 30 days after a general election. That might push a vote on the wage ordinance to December.

Glenn said putting it on the November ballot makes the most sense. It would avoid the cost of a special election and the county clerk has “technol-ogy (that) allows her to have the minimum wage on only municipal voters’ ballots,” Glenn said.

Henderson said activists cir-culating petitions found plenty of support for the wage hike.

“The minimum wage hasn’t gone up in Albuquerque in three years,” Henderson said

in an interview. “It’s already out of date. The economy is in such a sour state, a lot of peo-ple think that in order to boost consumer spending, this is the kind of thing that can help.”

The proposal, he added, would “put a lot more money in the hands of low-wage workers who will spend it right away.”

Terri Cole, president and CEO of the Chamber of Com-merce, said the proposal would hurt Albuquerque.

“The Chamber is ready for battle if this one makes it on the ballot,” she said in a writ-ten statement. “Increasing the minimum wage will elimi-nate jobs, lower benefits and increase prices in Albuquer-que. In a nutshell, Albuquer-que will become much less competitive.”

She said the chamber will oppose the proposal “because no one wants an uncompeti-tive city. The proponents of this effort ought to join us and work, instead, on educa-tion reform. Let’s increase the quality of life for all by lower-ing the dropout rate and clos-ing the achievement gap.”

The ordinance calls not only for raising the minimum wage in 2013, but also for cost-of-living increases each year after that. There also would be new requirements that apply to employees who receive tips.

The coalition working on the wage proposal includes AFSCME, El Centro de Igual-dad y Derechos, New Mexico Voices for Children, the Res-taurant Opportunities Center and Working America.

City Clerk Amy Bailey said her staff is already working to verify the signatures. About 60 percent of those checked so far have been valid, she said.

If that rate holds up, the wage ordinance will have more than enough signatures to move forward.

“The Chamber is ready for battle if this one makes it on the ballot.”

T E R R I C O L E ,

P R E S I D E N T A N D C E O O F

G R E A T E R A L B U Q U E R Q U E

C H A M B E R O F C O M M E R C E

If you goWHAT: Peña Blanca Sunflower Festival, with food, art, music, and hayrides to see the sunflower fields

WHEN: Aug. 25 and 26, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

WHERE: Peña Blanca Community Center, 776 N.M. 22, Peña Blanca

HOW MUCH: $1

/A1

WEATHER ◆ D6BRIDGE B5

BUSINESS B1

CLASSIFIEDS C4

COMICS D5

COUPLES B6

CROSSWORD B5, C4

DEAR ABBY B5

EDITORIALS A6

FOOD B4

HOROSCOPE B5

LEGALS C6

LOTTERY A2

METRO & N.M. C1

MOVIES C4

OBITUARIES C3

SPORTS D1

STOCKS B2

SUDOKU C5

TV D6

WEATHERLINE 821-1111

Albuquerque Journal online ABQjournal.com

INSIDE

SPORTS ■ D1

Eastdale rompsAlbuquerque Little League softball team wins 12-1 in World Series; in title game tonight



Wednesday Morning, august 15, 2012


A1

Dear Readers:

DEADLY ADDICTION

The breathtaking scope of New Mexico’s deadly drug addiction is downright depressing. Some-times, it seems hopeless.

It isn’t.Despite the

slow pace and horrific set-backs, we as a state have made headway in our long struggle with drunken driving. We’ve made headway in curbing the use of methamphet-amine. We can do the same when it comes to heroin and pre-scription painkiller addiction.Once we begin addressing the

state’s opiate addiction prob-lem, other substance abuse problems like cocaine should follow.

Over the past several months, I’ve talked with many people about what approaches are work-ing and others that are just being discussed.There are certain non-start-

ers from my perspective: clos-ing the border; legalization of heroin; or shooting drug dealers on sight. None of those things is going to happen.But a concerted effort that

involves reducing purity and supply (like we did with ingre-dients for methamphetamine), public education campaigns, intervention and treatment pro-grams, legislation, and coor-dinated efforts of law enforce-ment and the courts can change this deadly equation. Like it did with DWI.We can’t afford not to try.

Mike Gallagher

Fourth in a four-part series



Ray Archuleta, 44, has been using heroin for more than 20 years.

The years haven’t been kind. The streets and heroin addiction have worn him down. A lot of heroin addicts his age are dead.

“I’ve quit a lot over 20 years, but it gets harder each time,” he said. “I have to accept that I want to be sober, I have to change my whole attitude.”

“Heroin. This drug, it’s a devil,” he said.

Archuleta’s many attempts over the past two decades show how hard it is to kick the habit. For this interview, he was in the volunteer county detox program called Metropolitan Assessment & Treat-ment Services trying to get clean, again.

He was on a five-day “taper” — the drug Suboxone for five days in decreasing doses to ease his withdrawal.

Suboxone and metha-done are drugs used both for detoxification of heroin addicts, allow-ing them to stop using heroin, and in long-term maintenance programs in which addicts use them instead of heroin.

Both can be abused, and both can lead to death by overdoses. But success means an addict is less likely to kick down your door and

See HOW on PAGE A4

How Can WeBreak Our Drug Habit?


By Hailey HeinzJournal Staff Writer

Albuquerque Public Schools board member Kathy Korte, saying she has had many frustra-tions with a few “lousy” teach-ers over the years, plans to vote against the teachers’ union contract tonight because she says it’s too cumbersome for principals to fire bad teachers.

“I registered my kids and see that my battles will continue at the schools because of a few rogue teachers who aren’t doing their jobs, and no one is forcing them to,” Korte wrote in an email last week to dis-trict administrators, the local teachers’ union president and the school board.

“Sleeping on the job; lack of a clear curricu-lum; lack of communication with parents; bipo-lar-like tendencies that tell kids to do one thing as they rush out the door when the bell rings

Copyright © 2012 Albuquerque Journal By Kevin Robinson-AvilaJournal Staff Writer

The Public Regulation Commission approved a new renewable energy rate rider Tuesday to allow Public Service Company of New Mexico to begin recovering its investments in solar, wind and other clean energy sources.

Customer bills, for the first time, also will carry a line item showing the cost of renew-ables along with an explanation that they reduce the amount the utility spends on fossil fuels.

The green energy charge could begin appear-ing on bills as soon as this month, depending on when the commission publishes its final order, said PNM spokeswoman Susan Sponar.

She said preliminary estimates indicate the average customer, who consumes about 600 kilowatt hours of electricity a month, could

When money got tight because of the recession, the Legislature searched the nooks and crannies

of government for unspent public funds that could be swept up and re-appropriated for what lawmakers considered to be more pressing needs.

One place it went looking for money was the New Mexico Finance Authority. It was a no-brainer; the authority has about $1.8 billion in assets, with a good deal of that in cash.

The Legislature got what it was looking for. During the past

three fiscal years, the NMFA has transferred about $43 million to the state’s general fund.

How the Finance Authority accounted for the transferred money on its financial statements has become an issue in an investigation of the authority by the state Securities Division.

The authority’s former controller and its current chief operating officer are accused of conspiring to disguise the transfers in a bid to mislead investors and potential investors in NMFA bonds.

The investigation of the Finance

Authority began last month with the discovery that a 2011 audit of the NMFA was never conducted and that the former controller ginned up a fake audit.

The Finance Authority said Monday that none of the money transferred to the state came from its flagship program, the Public Project Revolving Fund, which borrows money through bond sales and makes loans to state and local governments and agencies.

The revolving fund is the only

Korte Against APS Pact

■ Board member says teachers’ union contract makes it too cumbersome to fire bad teachers

KORTE: Calls process of fir-ing teachers cumbersome

NMFA Bond Program Wasn’t Raided

See N.M. on PAGE A2

See BOARD on PAGE A8

See GREEN on PAGE A8


Youth Development Inc.’s Judy Pacheco watches Nikko Vasquez, 18, create a song on a computer. YDI is credited with keeping young people like Nikko away from gangs and drugs.

ThomasJ. Cole

UpFront

Green Energy Charge To Hit PNM Bills

FOOD ■ B4

Turn fresh summer fruit into flavorful preserves

Pump up the

JAMStaying openUNM-county pact keeps North Golf Course open

METRO & NM ■ C1

In celebration of 25 years of serving NewMexico, special pricing isavailable on a limited number of vehicles, including Range Roversand Range Rover Evoques. Experience a test drive today.

IT'S OUR 25TH ANNIVERSARY,BUT THE GIFTS ARE ALL YOURS.

Land Rover Albuquerque505.797.3600LandRoverAlbuquerque.com

A4 Albuquerque Journal Wednesday, August 15, 2012

/A4

A4

haul off your property to sup-port his habit.

The strategies for breaking New Mexico’s deadly addiction to opiates must address how to help those already hooked and how to keep the ranks from growing.

U.S. Attorney Ken Gonzales puts a high priority on young people being targeted by Mexican cartel heroin pushers by aggressively targeting drug dealers. But he says that alone won’t turn the tide.

Kids need to understand the threat posed by heroin — just because they don’t need to inject themselves with needles (high-quality heroin can be smoked or snorted) doesn’t mean it isn’t deadly.

Many young people turned away from methamphetamine after education campaigns equating a frying egg with “your brain on drugs” and staring at the haunted and toothless faces after just a few years on the drug.

Not cool.New rules making it more

difficult to get meth-making ingredients — that’s why you have to sign for Sudafed at the drugstore — coupled with U.S.-Mexican cooperation that reduced supply and purity were effective.

At the top of the list, according to one veteran narcotics agent, kids need to understand “this isn’t your grandpa’s heroin. People think they know about heroin; they don’t.”

Time and again police and people working drug treatment said parents were completely ignorant about the drug threat their children face.

Some of their suggestions:n Develop drug education

programs designed to reach adults across the state who have school-age children. Education programs designed to reach young people have to stay current and innovative.

n Drug education needs to be designed to reach younger kids and specifically young girls, who experts say are particularly susceptible to peer pressure.

School districts need to coordinate anti-drug and substance abuse efforts with local treatment and intervention programs.

n Juvenile courts should require older teens sentenced to a state lockup to complete a GED before they are released.

Medical helpAccording to the Centers

for Disease Control and Pre-vention, New Mexico has the highest per capita death rate from drug overdoses in the nation. Although the numbers decreased slightly in recent years, the 477 who died of over-doses in 2010 surpassed New Mexico’s historically high drunken driving fatalities by more than 100.

Stemming the supply of painkillers not only would reduce the number of people who die of prescription drug overdoses, but also would curtail heroin use, because many people — especially teens — move from the medicine cabinet supply to the heroin dealer.

The state Medical Board took a major step last week in adopting new rules for doctors prescribing opioid painkillers like hydrocodone and oxycodone. New Mexico is at the top of the list for fatal overdoses on the painkillers.

Also, young people often start down the trail to heroin abuse by popping painkillers.

The new rules are more restrictive and require doctors to document painkiller prescriptions in treatment plans and to have follow-up visits.

Doctors prescribing pain medication will be required to attend continuing education classes to stay current on the use and abuse of the drugs.

The expansion of the Board of Pharmacy’s prescription monitoring system holds promise in getting prescription forgeries and doctor shopping under

control.But a successful

monitoring program can create more work for police agencies by identifying more prescription forgers. Are local police ready for that? Are local prosecutors? Do they have enough officers and prosecutors with the expertise to build the criminal cases? What priority would those cases be given?

Another suggestion under discussion is development of specific drug screening and intervention for people over age 50 who are at risk for addiction to prescription drugs.

Grass rootsThere are any number of

positive steps taken in the past two years.

Among them:n The formation of

a citizens group like the Heroin Awareness Committee can change the landscape, forcing politicians, judges, law enforcement agencies and a others to address the issues they raise.

If the groups develop

the staying power of an organization like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, their impact can be felt for decades. The Heroin Awareness Committee has made development of a permanent inpatient juvenile drug treatment facility in Albuquerque its priority.

n Youth Development Inc.’s Gang Intervention Program has aimed at high-risk kids for decades and measures success when graduates bring more teens to the program’s door for help. Some of those former graduates are adults who bring younger relatives in for help in dealing with gangs and drug abuse.

n The U.S. Attorney’s Office and federal law enforcement agencies — FBI, DEA, ATF and Homeland Security Investigations — over the past several years have made a point of working with local police agencies throughout the state to target longtime local drug dealers and armed career criminals.

n The multiagency approach to dealing with the heroin addiction problem in Rio Arriba County — a

problem that is a black mark on New Mexico.

Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies have cooperated in prosecuting large-scale Mexican drug organizations supplying heroin to the area, while at the same time cooperating with education and treatment programs for heroin addicts.

n At the MATS program, addicts can use the Suboxone taper detox twice a year because the drug is expensive and the program is not a drug maintenance program.

Katrina Hotrum is director of the Bernalillo County Department of Substance Abuse Programs and oversees MATS, a voluntary 48-bed drug and alcohol detox center in Southeast Albuquerque that was wracked by scandal a few years ago.

Over the last year she said her job was rebuilding trust in the program, communication with police and the medical community and coordinating with state and other local programs.

“Building the lines of

communication so we can work together is really a key to getting anything to work,” she said.

Treatment optionsThe state Drug Policy

Task Force concluded that tens of thousands of people in the state need treatment for substance abuse but are unable to obtain or afford services.

Some of the task force suggestions include:

n Create a centralized referral service available 24/7 for people seeking drug or alcohol treatment programs.

n Expand services at Turquoise Lodge in Albuquerque from the current 34 beds to 80 so it can offer long-term recovery services.

n Create three temporary 10-bed emergency regional treatment centers for juveniles for detoxification and residential treatment in Las Cruces, Albuquerque and either Farmington or Española.

n Increase the availability of opioid dependence therapy — that is, the use of Suboxone — through trained physicians throughout the state.

n Examine the role of commercial insurance carriers in restricting or cutting back private insurance coverage for drug and alcohol treatment.

n Require insurance carriers, including Medicaid, to cover methadone maintenance therapy — most patients pay out-of-pocket monthly costs averaging $330. Some companies pay for Suboxone therapy.

n Should the state run methadone clinics in areas not currently served by private clinics? There are currently clinics in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Española and Belen.

Law enforcementPolice arrest a lot of

people on drug charges, and literally thousands of people are taken into court.

n The question at the local level is whether police and prosecutors are compiling numbers or making cases that affect the drug problem in neighborhoods.

n Police, prosecutors and judges need to make a clear distinction between drug addicts and addict/dealers. In many instances the cases

are treated the same from arrest through prosecution and sentencing. Those suggesting the idea argue that addict/dealers do more harm to a community than addicts.

n Train police officers in smaller communities in the use of Naloxone for immediate treatment of people overdosing from heroin or prescription drugs.

n Broaden the immunity of people calling 911 for help for someone overdosing to include people on probation and parole.

n Develop programs in jails and prisons that release inmates to treatment programs directly from lockup. Make methadone and Suboxone step-down treatment available in jails and prison for new inmates with a history of heroin or prescription drug abuse.

n Create “wet houses” where homeless addicts and alcoholics can stay without requiring them to be sober.

In interviews with police, doctors, jailers, prosecutors, educators, defense attorneys, legislators and treatment professionals, the words “communication” and “coordination” were mentioned time and time again.

Each profession tends to look at the drug issue through its own prism made up of problems and issues facing their specific area of expertise.

The integration of law enforcement and the criminal justice system can’t be ignored in addressing how the state can reverse the addiction problem.

For example, the closing of one small treatment program can have ramifications in state courts that refer people on probation to it. That closure can increase the local jail population.

In the end, this is clear: There is no silver bullet. It will take everything from hard-hitting education programs to hard-nosed police work taking down dealers. It will take treatment and grass-roots efforts.

In the words of Gonzales, New Mexico’s top federal law enforcement official: “If we want to heal our communities, we have to work together.”

from PAGE A1

How Can We Break N.M.’s Deadly Habit?

The 477 who died of overdoses in 2010 surpassed New Mexico’s historically high drunken driving fatalities by more than 100.


Public defenders consult with clients before felony arraignments recently in state District Judge Reed Sheppard’s courtroom, where drug-related crimes made up a large part of the docket.

JOURNAL FILE

At an Albuquerque City Council meeting last year, members of the Heroin Awareness Committee display photos of family mem-bers who lost their lives to heroin addiction.


Katrina Hotrum, head of Bernalillo County’s drug programs, talks about coordinating programs with law enforcement agencies and health care providers.

About the seriesSUNDAY: New Mexico’s Deadly Addiction



TODAY: What Can Be Done?

The Journal is making the series “Deadly Addiction” available as a public service for easy sharing without registration. Just go to www.ABQjournal.com/drugs for all parts of the series including full-page replicas of the newspaper pages.


Ray Archuleta, 44, talks at the Metropolitan Assessment and Treatment Services center about the need for easier access to Suboxone.

ll

Documents

Deadly Addiction Drug Series - Albuquerque Journal