LAWRENCE, Massachusetts — Through the outrage Mayor Daniel Rivera and others expressed last week over Maine Gov. Paul LePage’s allegation that black and Latino dealers here are helping fuel the opioid crisis in his state, one fact was buried: Whatever the truth about the racial element of the governor’s remarks, Lawrence is a regional hub for distribution of heroin and fentanyl.
The proof of that played out during a three-month sting that ended in mid-August, when police here and in three neighboring municipalities, supported by state police and agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, made seven sweeps through Lawrence that resulted in the arrests of 233 people for drug possession or distribution, almost all of it heroin and fentanyl.
Of the 233, just seven had come in from Maine, providing anecdotal evidence that Lawrence is not a significant source of heroin and fentanyl in that state, as LePage alleged.
But 156 of those arrested — two-thirds — in the summer-long sweeps were from outside the city, including 104 who gave New Hampshire addresses.
In North Andover, the number of out-of-towners who overdosed from heroin over the first six months of this year outnumbered locals by 4-to-1, a significant reversal from earlier periods. Police said the spike was caused by the stepped-up enforcement in Lawrence, called “Operation Blue Crush.”
“People are buying there and getting out to use,” North Andover police Lt. Eric Foulds said. “We’ve had several [overdoses] in parking lots.”
Operation Blue Crush
No major dealers or distributors at the top of the heroin food chain were arrested in the Lawrence sweeps. But they’re here, along with users at the other end of the chain who buy their doses with 5- and 10-dollar bills.
A fire that destroyed an abandoned Summer Street house Aug. 25 was a drug den, officials said. Four neighboring buildings were badly damaged, leaving 62 people homeless.
Operation Blue Crush wrapped up two weeks ago. A week later, the Maine governor made his remarks.
“They’re Hispanic and they’re black and they’re from Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts; Waterbury, Connecticut; the Bronx and Brooklyn [in New York],” LePage said recently while attending a conference with other New England governors and Canadian premiers whose purpose was, in part, to address the opioid crisis.
“I didn’t make up the rules,” LePage said. “That’s how it turns out. But that’s a fact. It’s a fact. What, do you want me to lie?”
Governors, mayors and state legislators in Boston, Hartford, Augusta, Lawrence and Lowell reacted immediately and with bipartisan outrage, including in Maine, where the protest was so intense that LePage briefly considered resigning.
“The governor would be better off finding a solution for the many people in his state that are in desperate need of detox beds, counseling, and treatment,” Rivera, the mayor of Lawrence, said in an email to reporters a few hours after LePage’s remarks.
Rivera said the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit in the Lawrence Police Department works with state police from Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont and the Drug Enforcement Administration to combat the heroin crisis.
Rivera’s list did not mention Maine law enforcement agencies or address LePage’s allegation that Lawrence is a regional supplier.
On Friday, Rivera acknowledged the heavy drug trade in his city, and reiterated that demand in Maine and elsewhere is helping fuel the crisis.
“We definitely do have a marketplace for drugs,” Rivera said. “But — there’s a big ‘but’ — what the governor from Maine wasn’t saying was, ‘Hey, our problem is that our people are using.’”
LePage wasn’t addressing the complexity of it, Rivera said.
“He was saying that if Lawrence and Lowell would go away, so would his problems. So there is fundamentally no truth in what he’s saying,” Rivera said. “It’s not just that he has a drug problem in his state. These things intertwine.”
‘Many tentacles’
Lawrence City Councilor Marc Laplante pointed out that 75 percent of opioid drug arrests in Lawrence are out-of-towners.
“We can’t stick our heads in the ground and pretend that drugs aren’t a part of what’s happening in our city,” he said.
Law enforcement officers call Lawrence a source city, he said, like others elsewhere in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and elsewhere in New England.
“It’s a complex problem that has many tentacles and law enforcement is doing the best it can in our city to reduce the supply,” Laplante said. “Our police officers are working closely regionally with federal and state officials to deal with this significant problem.”
Much of the federal assistance comes from the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program that Congress created in 1988 to help coordinate drug-combatting efforts. The agency’s New England headquarters is in Methuen, Massachusetts. The agency has identified 14 counties across six states where trafficking is heaviest, including Essex County in Massachusetts, Rockingham County in New Hampshire and Cumberland County in Maine.
Lawrence went missing in action in the war on drugs for three years beginning in 2010, when then-Mayor William Lantigua dissolved the Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit along with several other special police units to patch a budget crunch.
An influx of state and federal aid allowed Lantigua to reconstitute the unit in 2012. Today, the unit has five detectives and a lieutenant, and it is commanded by Capt. Roy Vasque.
About 60 percent of the 800 or so people the unit arrests annually are from New Hampshire and “very little” are from Maine, Vasque said.
Once heroin arrives in Lawrence, buyers will travel to the city to spare themselves markups of as much as 300 percent they’d face if the same drugs were delivered and sold in their home state. For dealers in the illicit drug market, travel equals risk and risk equals reward, Vasque said.
‘Ample supply of heroin’
A spot check of the police stations and jails along Interstate 95 from Portsmouth to Portland showed only a small fraction of those they arrest or are holding on drug charges are from Lawrence.
Last week, the two jails in Maine’s southernmost counties — Cumberland and York — were holding five people from Lawrence on drug-related charges, less than 1 percent of the 684 in custody.
Despite the numbers in Lawrence and Maine, South Portland police Sgt. Steve Webster said he believes LePage is right to point a finger at Massachusetts.
“I’m not saying Lowell and Lawrence are bad cities,” said Webster, who was assigned to the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency from 2000 to 2006. “What I’m saying is that Lowell, Lawrence, Fitchburg are known in Massachusetts for having an ample supply of heroin.”
Vasque said Lawrence suffers from a bad reputation. And he said Maine’s opioid problem also is rooted in loose controls on prescribed painkillers.
“It’s easy for politicians in other states and cities and communities to blame Lawrence for everything, instead of trying to deal with their own issues,” Vasque said. “But instead of dealing with their people and their addictions, it’s easy for them to turn around and blame Lawrence for their heartache.”
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