Heroin

Ten people have been charged with drug possession after a raid on a Brooklyn Park house Tuesday night, Anne Arundel County police said Wednesday. Officers from the Northern District's Tactical Narcotics Team and Tactical Patrol Unit found cocaine and heroin in the house in the 200 block of W. Arden Road when they raided it about 9 p.m. Tuesday, police said. Officers also found devices to smoke crack cocaine, syringes to inject heroin, drug-packing materials and tally sheets to track the sales of drugs.

Baltimore man sentenced to 16 years on heroin charge A Baltimore man was sentenced this week to more than 16 years in prison, to be followed by five years of supervised release, for conspiring to distribute more than a kilogram of heroin, the U.S. attorney's office said. Javon Brewer, 26, was part of a drug organization that included Samuel "Mook" Price, Michael "Mike-Mike" Frasier, Steven "Beans" or "Bino" Boyd, Eric "E" Davis, James "E-Bay" Stewart, Lamont "L" Jones and Katie Eggleston, U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein's office said in a statement.

In separate federal trials this week, juries convicted three men on drug distribution charges, including two defendants who were targeted by prosecutors and city police because of their extensive criminal records. On Tuesday, Earl Gordon, 27, was convicted of possessing crack cocaine with the intention of selling the drug. A separate jury convicted Victor White, 49, on Wednesday of possession of heroin and cocaine and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Carlos Woods, 23, was convicted yesterday of drug possession with intent to distribute.

After more than a month of surveillance, plainclothes police officers raided a house early yesterday in Southwest Baltimore, arrested three men and seized a large amount of suspected heroin packaged for street sale. A police spokesman said the officers found 3,200 gel caps and a loaded handgun in the basement of a home in the 2500 block of W. Pratt St. when they entered about 6:45 a.m. The men were involved in a heroin-dealing operation that received large quantities of the illegal drug twice a day, police said.

Port Louis, MAURITIUS -- The sun set hours ago. Most everyone who sang and prayed in this concrete room with curtains that's still stuffy from body heat have gone home. Christabelle Piangnee, a 29-year-old whose life has become an incongruous mix of opiates, prostitution and thoughts of quitting both, stays behind and makes a confession of sorts. "I have it," she says. She means HIV. She doesn't say more. She simply sits in her black leather jacket, her open sandals revealing painted toenails, her pretty face a picture of fatigue and hopelessness.

Seventeen months ago, Jennifer R. Hart was sitting in a jail cell, a heroin addict whose downward spiral began in earnest when she worked late nights in a Baltimore restaurant surrounded by drugs and alcohol. Her drug use began with alcohol and marijuana, she said. Before it was over, she had developed a dependency on the potent painkiller OxyContin, which lured her to heroin. "The physical addiction to heroin is the worst pain I've ever felt," she said. "I didn't really know what it was when I first tried it, and it was cheaper than OxyContin."

Dr. Emmett Patterson "Pete" Davis, founder of a major methadone treatment program for heroin addicts in Baltimore, died of a cerebral hemorrhage Wednesday at his home in Chester, Va. He was 87. A longtime resident of Baltimore County, Dr. Davis was a family doctor in Northeast Baltimore in 1966 when he began to notice a growing number of patients seeking help with their heroin addictions. Baltimore and other cities at the time were experiencing a surge in drug abuse -- and with it, rising crime.

The first interim report on Baltimore's efforts to reduce heroin addiction through expanded use of a promising drug shows that the city's strategy is working relatively well, but that results could be even better with broader participation by doctors and hospitals. In a city with such abundant medical talent, that should not be an impediment to helping eliminate a major scourge. Baltimore's buprenorphine initiative is a worthy effort, led by the city's Health Department, to help addicts by using a synthetic opiate that is an effective antidote to heroin.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The heroin that killed singer Boz Scaggs' son on New Year's Eve is a potent form that during the 1990s has lured more people from various walks of life into using a drug once associated only with skid row junkies.In years past, when street-grade heroin was 3 percent to 5 percent pure, injecting it was the only way to get high.But during the past decade, purity has shot up to as much as 50 percent or 60 percent, while the price has fallen to as little as $40 a gram.The result: More people have been willing to snort and smoke it.While those methods don't produce as strong a high, they are less intimidating.

Kristopher Olenginski, a Westminster juvenile who was convicted as an adult for selling heroin to a schoolmate who died of an overdose, lost a bid yesterday in Howard County Circuit Court to have the case returned to juvenile court.Olenginski, now 17, was sentenced to 18 months in the Carroll County Detention Center in September 1998. He remained free pending an appeal of the waiver decision made by Carroll Circuit Judge Francis M. Arnold that allowed Olenginski to be tried as an adult.In June, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals remanded Olenginski's case, saying Arnold should have explained why he granted the waiver and state on the record his basis for rejecting the recommendation of Department of Juvenile Justice caseworkers to deal with Olenginski in the juvenile court system.

The young men who sell heroin in Baltimore have two ways of getting off the street: prison or homicide. The police arrest them or a rival shoots them, whichever comes first. There's a third way out - choice. Those who live long enough, and who survive prison, sometimes make a choice to go straight and get off the corners for good. By that time, they're usually in their late 20s. Some don't see the light until their 30s. A heroin dealer might even be in his early 40s before making the choice to quit "sellin' poison to my people," as one put it to me. Some never get off the street.

Police reports in Baltimore city and county: Southern Baltimore Bank robbery/arrests: Two men were arrested shortly before noon Monday after robbing the M&T Bank branch in the 3400 block of Annapolis Road. Police said money taken in the robbery was recovered. Details of the robbery and the names of the suspects were not available. Eastern Baltimore Drug arrest: Police responding to a report from Johns Hopkins Hospital security officers that a man was in possession of illegal drugs in the 900 block of N. Eden St. about noon Monday led to the arrest of Vernon Edwards, 40, who told police he was homeless.

Police reports in Baltimore city and county: Northern Baltimore Drug arrests : Three men were arrested Thursday in the 5700 block of The Alameda and charged with possession of heroin and possession of heroin with intent to distribute. Their names were withheld pending an investigation. Seized were three ounces of heroin, more than 1,500 heroin capsules and $1,424. Shooting: A man was shot in a hand Thursday during an incident in the 5000 block of Midwood Ave. and was taken to an area hospital for treatment.

So, give me that again: Heroin and cocaine are illegal - controlled, dangerous substances - because they are harmful to society, destroyers of bodies and minds, destroyers of families, even whole neighborhoods? Is that it? We have state and federal prohibitions against the sale and possession of these narcotics because, otherwise, we would have widespread dysfunction in American households and mayhem on our streets? We have devoted billions of taxpayer dollars and millions of hours of police work to stopping the illegal drug commerce because, without that effort, we think the United States would be a dangerous place?

Lisa Pulley's fourth daughter was born last week. She put the first three up for adoption long ago because she couldn't - really, wouldn't - stop using crack cocaine and heroin long enough to focus on them. n The eighth-grade dropout has never held a job. She has been too busy selling sex for drugs, living on the street so she could afford drugs. There was no room in her life for children. But this time, Pulley swears, she is ready. This time, she keeps telling herself, will be different.

Here's some new news about drugs in Baltimore: * A kilo of cocaine now costs $32,000, up a full $10,000 from 2006. Bulk quantities of the drug are more expensive here than in Washington, where a kilo costs $30,000, and in Richmond, Va., where it goes for $26,000. * Local drug dealers outsource even the final stages of turning powder cocaine into crack. * Dealers are increasingly steering away from highways to smuggle drugs, preferring package delivery services so they can track their shipments on the Internet.

Ten people have been charged with drug possession after a raid on a Brooklyn Park house Tuesday night, Anne Arundel County police said Wednesday. Officers from the Northern District's Tactical Narcotics Team and Tactical Patrol Unit found cocaine and heroin in the house in the 200 block of W. Arden Road when they raided it about 9 p.m. Tuesday, police said. Officers also found devices to smoke crack cocaine, syringes to inject heroin, drug-packing materials and tally sheets to track the sales of drugs.

Back in 1996, the manager of a downtown Burger King handed out discount coupons for ammunition and guns along with the Whoppers with cheese. A week ago, police told us you could buy cocaine from a Shell gas station in Severna Park. And now, the feds tell us your potato chips could come with a Beretta at the Utz kiosk in Lexington Market. I went to lunch Wednesday at the historic shopping stalls in an area the city is trying to revitalize, but all I got was a scowl from the clerk when I ordered a 9 mm. I watched customer after customer, but none left with weaponry.

The headline on Wednesday referring to a drug bust at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport grabbed my attention: "Dutch Goose Laying Heroin Pellets." On Tuesday, we had this: "Bird Soap Doesn't Fly with Baltimore." Earlier last month from an airport in Wilmington: "Delaware CBP Outruns Invasive Mile-a-Minute Weed." So nice to see tabloid journalism back. The author of these gems is Steve Sapp. I chatted with him briefly by phone, and he seems to be a mild-mannered, 43-year-old wordsmith in Philadelphia.

Baltimore police arrested the vice president of Baltimore's NAACP chapter Thursday afternoon after heroin and marijuana were recovered during a search of his car, though prosecutors declined to pursue charges. Police said Ellis L. Staten Jr., 44, who is also an executive committee member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Maryland conference, was in the driver's seat of a car that had stopped near Pennsylvania Avenue and Dolphin Street, which police say is a well-known drug market.