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CELINA - Methamphetamine in the last few years has overtaken opioids as the dominant substance of abuse among area drug users, according to Mercer County Sheriff's Office personnel.
About five to six years ago, the county was in the grip of a deadly opioid epidemic that claimed the lives of at least three people in 2014 and another three in 2015, per county health department statistics.
Detective Sergeant Lance Crum talks about different drugs and how they are marketed locally Wednesday afternoon at the Mercer County Sheriff Department.
"Heroin will always be around," sheriff's office detective Lance Crum told the newspaper while offering a general update on drugs in Mercer County. "At our peak we had several (overdoses). I know one individual here in the county that has (overdosed) six times and came back. He's a real heroin addict."
However, due to a combination of factors, methamphetamine, an illegally manufactured synthetic stimulant, now reigns supreme.
"Talking to inmates … it's showing the only thing really out there is meth right now," Crum said.
Drug users in general began shifting their habits out of fear as the opioid epidemic played out locally. Seeing firsthand the deadly wreckage wrought by heroin as it snuffed out the lives of their friends and family members, many drug users, who also traffic to support their addiction, switched over to meth.
"Everybody that was involved in the drug world knew multiple people that died of drug overdoses," sheriff Jeff Grey.
"They're still using but … methamphetamine is what's out there right now," Crum pointed out.
Back in the day meth was much more costly to produce. It was made in a powdered form with a host of chemicals through a process called "shake-and-bake," Crum said.
Today it is manufactured on a massive scale and is dirt cheap and readily available in Dayton, a major drug hub.
"Right now, you can buy the meth in Dayton - and that is a key source - a lot cheaper than you can manufacturing it," he said. "It's everywhere right now."
"Dayton is the crossroads because you've got (I-70) that runs east and west all across the country, and you've got (I-75) north and south," Grey said.
People who solely traffic in drugs rarely surface on the radar of area law enforcement, Crum said.
"Most of our addicts are addicts more than traffickers. They traffic to support their habit," he explained. "We do have some of the big people but that's occasionally. It's very seldom we have one person who says, 'I'm a trafficker and I don't use my product.' That is a person we want to target because those are the ones who are selling it for a profit. The other ones are selling it to support their habit."
Some area drug users make daily trips to Dayton to score crystal meth.
"You can buy an ounce of methamphetamine for $200 and then they can break it down to … $80 to $100 a gram, and they're selling it around here," Crum said. "They just buy enough to support their habit and sell, re-up, get the money, then they make the trip again."
Crum said it's difficult to conduct surveillance on drug users suspected of "tripping" to Dayton to buy crystal meth because most of them live transient lifestyles with no stable addresses. Some couch-surf at friends residences, offering occasional "bumps" of drugs in exchange for staying there.
"How many times are you going to get burned?" Crum said of drug users wearing out their welcome by stealing or causing other problems. "Then they kick them out. Then where do they go? They go to the next place."
A large part of the county's drug users fall under this category, Crum said.
"Where's the address? We don't know because they're transient. They stay where they can stay. A lot of people say, 'We know who's tripping to Dayton. Why aren't you catching them?'" Crum said. "We don't know which car they're driving today. We can't set up on 20 cars."
Drug evidence collected by the Mercer County Sheriff Department.
Heroin and crystal meth each induce different states of mind and behaviors and can lead to ancillary crimes. Heroin users are typically more subdued and often steal to support their habits while crystal meth users can become highly agitated and engage in violence.
Crystal meth users commonly smoke the drug in a glass pipe a few times a day, Crum said.
It is an intense stimulant that can cause users to become wired, staying awake for days. It also tends to engender agitation, violent tendencies and paranoia.
"We interviewed a guy, he said he was up for 28 days," Crum said. "Normally it's … a week, then they crash for three days."
A heroin overdose can cause respiratory arrest. That's not the case with crystal meth.
"Heroin slows the breathing, just like morphine," Crum said, noting heroin can induce respiratory depression and death. "(Meth) is more stroke and heart attack. This is a very high stimulant that (gets) your heart beat going."
People high on methamphetamine are more likely to turn violent, posing a physical threat to those they encounter.
"The heroin, we didn't see as much violence because (users) mellowed out, basically, just slowed down, quit breathing if (they) were going to die," Grey said.
However, break-ins, thefts and other related crimes that are associated with heroin use are down in the county, Crum and Grey agreed.
"They're selling instead of breaking into places to support (their habit)," Crum said.
Grey and Crum said it's difficult to quantify the exact number of drug addicts living in Mercer County. Drug addicts, though, have frequent brushes with the law.
"Most of them are what we would refer to as frequent flyers," Grey said. "It's not like we've got thousands and thousands of them. It's a few hundred that are causing a lot of problems - and a lot of expense, obviously."
Arrests appear to be on the decline and law enforcement, at least at the moment, know which people are using drugs, Grey said.
"I think we're making less arrests. I like to believe it's because people aren't experimenting as much," Grey said. "The people that we are arresting are the people we've arrested before."
The main goal of law enforcement is to arrest the people putting drugs out on the streets, he said.
"At least if we arrest the users, the judge has the option of putting them in for treatment," Grey said about treatment-in-lieu-of-conviction.
Asked about the overall status of drug use in the county, Crumb said law enforcement has made strides over the years, pointing to fewer ODs.
"I hesitate to say that we're being successful here because I think we've got a long way to go," Grey said. "But I think today we're better than we were a few years ago."
Grey attributes that improvement to the collaboration of county prosecuting attorney's office, the courts and defense attorneys.
"The goal isn't, 'We caught you using, let's send you to prison,' which maybe was the mindset several years ago. Now it's, 'How do we get them off of it?'" Grey said.
For that to happen, addicts need help.
"You need support. Family support. You need mental health support. You need just a whole good structure," Crum said.
"And you have to want to do it," Grey quickly pointed out.
"They say three times - three times in the system before they even consider it," Crum added.
So far, Brianna's Hope: A Better Life, a participant-driven, faith-based addiction-support group hosted by Grand Lake United Methodist Church's St. Paul Campus in Celina, has proven to be the most successful recovery program, Grey said.
