AUGUSTA, Maine — In the basement of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, chemist John Bangeman inspects a roll of white powder compressed inside a small sheet of paper. It resembles an innocuous chunk of sidewalk chalk, but according to the Auburn Police Department, it’s a finger of heroin, the potent drug ravaging Maine and killing its people at an alarming rate.
Bangeman’s job is to conclusively identify the powder. He and two other chemists work in the state’s forensic drug lab, testing controlled substances — from prescription pills to methamphetamine — for all of the state’s law enforcement agencies. After the police make a drug bust, the evidence comes here to undergo sophisticated analysis to ensure drug dealers and users get charged with the appropriate crime.
The state lab’s chemists work on the front lines of Maine’s war on drugs, often among the first to spot new trends, from the illicit drugs of choice to new potencies and formulations.
“I’ve got a white powder, and I have no idea what it is,” Jamie Foss, another chemist at the lab, says as Bangeman breaks apart the finger of heroin with tweezers. “Is it cocaine, is it heroin, is it a crushed-up aspirin tablet? We test everything.”
Increasingly, it’s heroin. Or its astoundingly potent cousin, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid so strong — up to 50 times more potent than heroin — that an individual can overdose just from touching it.
“Fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin, which is another major concern for law enforcement,” Foss said. “You walk in and there’s all this white powder on the table. If it’s fentanyl, somebody could overdose if they’re not wearing gloves.”
Deadly trend
Heroin and fentanyl continue to claim more and more Maine lives.
During the first half of 2015, 105 residents died from drug overdoses, putting this year on track with 2014, the worst on record for drug fatalities in Maine, according to preliminary figures released Thursday by the Maine attorney general’s office. Of those deaths, 37 resulted primarily from heroin and 26 from fentanyl. In all of 2014, 208 Maine people died of drug overdoses, 57 primarily attributable to heroin and 43 to fentanyl.
U.S. Sen. Angus King will host a roundtable discussion of opioid addiction Tuesday in Brewer. Michael Botticelli, the federal director of national drug control policy, is due to participate.
Gov. Paul LePage also plans to convene a summit on Aug. 26 aimed at stemming the loss of Maine lives to substance abuse. He has emphasized law enforcement and the justice system in fighting the drug crisis, drawing criticism from those who believe the state must dedicate more resources to addiction treatment and recovery.
Roy McKinney, director of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency, wants to target criminals higher up in the drug supply chain. That means cracking down on both out-of-state traffickers bringing drugs into Maine in search of higher profits, as well as homegrown meth dealers selling in rural areas.
“We want to be more proactive in going after and identifying these drug distribution groups, gangs, whatever you want to call them,” he said.
A new threat
Clandestine labs out of state also are cooking up a less potent but still dangerous variant of fentanyl called acetyl fentanyl. In April 2013, Maine’s forensic drug lab was the first in the nation to positively identify the drug, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The lab analyzes about 2,000 cases annually, Foss said. The once-uncommon acetyl fentanyl, which is 15 times stronger than heroin, has comprised 3 percent of them since the beginning of 2015, Foss said.
Heroin is the heavy hitter, now making up 40 percent of the lab’s cases, he said.
Fentanyl used to crop up once or twice a year.
“Now we’re seeing fentanyl in 10 percent of the cases that are coming in to the lab,” Foss said. “We’re seeing fentanyl by itself, mixed with caffeine, mixed with heroin and acetyl fentanyl.”
Crack, bath salts and meth
Cocaine is another likely culprit when a white powder appears at the lab. Still common but less conspicuous in the face of the heroin crisis and the proliferation of crude methamphetamine labs, cocaine represents 23 percent of all cases at the lab, second only to heroin.
Travis, a 33-year-old Bucksport man receiving treatment at the Discovery House in Bangor, can attest to cocaine’s continued popularity on Maine streets. The BDN agreed to use only his first name in this report.
“Crack is huge up here, it’s probably the No. 1 thing that’s been around the last couple of years,” he said.
Also popular are benzodiazepines, Travis said, a class of mood-stabilizing prescription medications that includes Valium and Xanax.
All other drugs make up the remaining quarter of the lab’s cases, including meth and bath salts. Prescription pills still show up for testing, but less often than several years ago, evidence of the shift many drug abusers made to heroin after pharmaceutical companies reformulated narcotic painkillers to make them harder to crush and snort.
Street ‘chemistry’
The lab faces a backlog, typically requiring six to eight weeks to complete testing, Foss said. That’s improved from a six- to eight-month backlog previously, according to DHHS.
Sophisticated but expensive new handheld devices that allow drug agents to test their own samples in the field and state-of-the-art equipment in the state lab have eased the delays. Foss acquired nearly half a million dollars’ worth of sophisticated testing technology at no cost to the state, signing the lab up as a beta tester to help the manufacturer certify the instruments for use in drug labs throughout the country.
Sometimes the samples the lab receives aren’t drugs at all. Dealers rely on an array of fillers to mask inferior product, including aspirin tablets, lactose or kitchen staples such as baking soda and sugar.
Foss has even analyzed powders that turned out to be iced tea and bouillon.
“I’ve tested 400 heroin samples so I have a pretty good idea what it looks like,” he said. “If I’m surprised, I’m surprised. I’m never upset when something isn’t a drug.”
But more often, other so-called chemists are working just as hard at the other end of the drug chain. Some hardly deserve the title, cooking up meth with common ingredients scored at pharmacies and causing explosive fires.
“You’ve got these guys who don’t have any chemistry experience, they don’t understand what they’re doing,” Foss said. “They’re putting everything into a soda bottle and shaking it up.”
But the criminal chemists manufacturing fentanyl are another story, he said. Their labs are much bigger and more sophisticated, stocked with special glassware and industrial chemicals that can spark even more dangerous explosions than those familiar at meth labs, Foss said.
Fentanyl has a legitimate use as a surgical painkiller and anesthetic, often administered in the form of a skin patch. Some of the fentanyl turning up in Maine is diverted from those uses, but most is concocted in clandestine labs outside New England, according to McKinney.
Fortunately, no fentanyl labs have appeared in Maine yet, he said.
His agency recently submitted legislation to make acetyl fentanyl a scheduled drug in Maine.
The clandestine chemists may boast some expertise, but the dealers cutting the drugs with other substances and selling them on the street don’t, McKinney said.
“This is people at the street level, not in the lab, not trained, trying to take a highly potent and dangerous drug and properly dilute it and hit the correct mixture,” he said. “If it’s too strong, it’s very dangerous.”
More potent, more plentiful
Hanging on the wall near Bangeman as he processes the suspected heroin is a chart you’d expect to spot at a salon, but hardly at a forensic drug lab. It depicts a range of hair dye colors, from nearly white blondes to jet black, each coded with a corresponding number to denote the hue.
Bangeman, Foss and the other part-time forensic chemist use the chart to code heroin samples, which vary in shades from nearly black to almost pure white. Heroin has no official color scale, so the chemists came up with one of their own, Foss explained.
“We looked at several scales and it just so happened that the hair color scale had the right range of colors that were representative of what we were seeing,” he said.
Bangeman records his sample as 12A, or “ultra ashe blonde.”
The lab has found no correlation between heroin’s color and its purity, Foss said.
Over the last three years, heroin confiscated in Maine has consistently tested at about 22 percent pure, Foss said. Once fairly diluted heroin sold in northern Maine is fast growing more potent, recently doubling in strength to about the state average, he said.
“We used to get no heroin samples from Aroostook County, it used to be primarily methamphetamine and bath salts,” Foss said. “But now we’re getting heroin from Aroostook County.”
LePage wants to warn Mainers about the potency of the drugs traffickers are smuggling into the state, he said in an Aug. 18 interview on radio station WVOM. That in many cases, “if you take it, it may kill you,” he said.
But even the threat of death won’t stop many people caught in the throes of addiction, Travis said. While some ease up after hearing about particularly potent batches making the rounds, others are even more eager to run out and buy some, he said.
“People start selling it more because they start cutting it themselves and realize they can make more money,” he said. “It can go both ways — it helps some people but it also creates more of a mess.”
Many think, “I’ve been an addict for years, I can handle it,” said Travis, who abused heroin and fentanyl, overdosing several times and experiencing a stroke during withdrawal. He credits methadone treatment with saving his life.
“When you’re an addict, you don’t think about that,” he said. “Once you’re over it, you think, ‘Wow, every time I could have died.’ But all you care about is not being sick or you just really want to get high.”
Even if the governor’s approach to the drug crisis results in more big busts and dealers in prison, drugs will still make their way into Maine and addicts will find them, Travis said.
“There will always be heroin,” he said. “Yeah, you can stop people here and there … The only thing you can do is pretty much focus on treatment … They’ve tried [the war on drugs] for 50 or 60 years now, it hasn’t helped at all.”
