Mon 25 Jun 2007
PROLOGUE
How are this teenager and rogue chemist in Mexico linked? By a mega drug suspected of killing her and hundreds of others in metro Detroit.
BY JIM SCHAEFER and JOE SWICKARD
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS
They call him El Cerebro.
The Brain.
Ricardo Valdez, rogue chemist, never met Bloomfield Township teenager Lauren Jolly. Or retired Detroit autoworker Fred Lee Rogers. Or Shelby Township bowling prodigy Brandon Hilgendorf.
But they might have known his handiwork.
Valdez spent 11 years in a U.S. prison for making a synthetic drug called fentanyl, which is like heroin times 50. And when he got out, he quickly set up shop in Mexico.
He cooked another batch, 22 pounds, authorities claim — enough to get 80 million people high if it didn’t kill them — and sent it across the border. The drug’s trail is easy to trace.
More than 1,000 dead nationwide. More than 300 in metro Detroit alone.
Suburban kids, city kids, a musician, folks like your neighbor or hard-luck cousin. Nowhere did fentanyl hit harder than Detroit.
“If you want to blame me for it, I guess it’s convenient,” the chemist protests from prison in Mexico.
Free Press reporters tracked El Cerebro, fentanyl and hundreds of drug users over the past year. From Detroit flophouses that rent rooms by the hour, to the suburban life of Lauren Jolly, whose death showed that affluence, family affection and a good school can’t always shield children from killer drugs. From a Chicago street gang to an exclusive interview in a Mexican prison with fentanyl’s most notorious chemist, this is their story.
It’s the tale of a killer no bigger than a few grains of salt, the swath it cut through the heart of America and the reality that it could happen again.
Chapter 1: The teenager
Authorities say an outlaw chemist in Mexico made a drug that may have killed not just Lauren Jolly but hundreds more
In the basement, anything goes. That’s where everybody buys their dope. They can shoot it, snort it or smoke it down there. They can turn tricks to earn money for more drugs. It’s all good.
Except tonight, something’s bad. There are shouts from upstairs, and smacking sounds. And now water is dripping through the basement ceiling.
In this lair of strangers, where Detroiters get high next to users from Sterling Heights, Royal Oak, Pontiac and Ferndale, all of them drawn together by the pangs of heroin addiction, this is something different.
This is something alarming.
“Lauren!” someone shouts from up above, on the ground floor at 20152 Keating St. in Detroit. Then more of those smacks. “Lauren, wake up!”
“Sit her up!”
A guy known as Tommy comes through a side door with bags of ice, which he hauls upstairs.
The basement people watch him climb out of view.
What’s going on?
Ralph, the man upstairs selling the drugs tonight, assures the people below that the girl’s OK. Ralph is in charge of the dope house right now. And as lawless as a drug den might seem, there are rules. And one of them is: Customers don’t go upstairs. She’s OK, Ralph tells the basement people.
And so they return to their business. This isn’t their sister or their classmate or their daughter. It’s just another doper in a dope house, and, reality is, people overdose.
She’ll be OK.
And the water drips. Someone moves over a bucket.
But it’s not OK.
Upstairs, Ralph is shaking Lauren Jolly, a 17-year-old with a pretty face and light, shoulder-length brown hair, a former Brownie Scout, a junior at Birmingham Groves High School, a heroin addict her friends can no longer help.
It’s May 24, 2006, and she is about to become the public face of fentanyl, a nasty laboratory concoction often mixed with heroin that exploded on the streets of Detroit, ending the lives of hundreds of metro-Detroit drug users, and more than 1,000 people nationwide.
The drug stole a once-promising young bowler from Shelby Township, a retired autoworker from Detroit, an ex-logger from out state and the lead guitarist in a rock band.
Inside the house in Detroit, a 21-year-old from Pontiac named Ben puts his fingers to the neck of the Bloomfield Township teen and feels a slow pulse.
Someone draws cold water and pours it over Lauren.
The girl is still breathing, but her pulse is faint, her blood pressure plummeting. Her eyes roll back … and she is somewhere else.
Chapter 2: The chemist
Drug investigators begin to focus on a lab outside Mexico City, and a chemist with a history of bad intent.
Distribuidora Talios is easy to miss.
There is no sign outside the blue, sheet-metal structure in Lerma, 45 minutes from Mexico City. Just a loading dock and a small yard bounded by a high, barbed-wire fence. The only clue that there was a business inside is an address plate hanging from the fence that reads, “Av. San Rafael No. 72.”
As fentanyl-related deaths peaked across the United States in May of last year, stymieing health officials from St. Louis to Philadelphia, authorities focused on a nondescript lab run by a self-taught chemist named Ricardo Valdez-Torres amid the chemical warehouses and taco stands of this dusty industrial town.
With his salt-and-pepper hair and owlish features, Valdez could pass for a prep school English teacher — in many ways a man more American than Mexican.
His family left Mexico for San Diego when he was seven. When his father walked, Ricardo looked after his five brothers and sisters, a brood that grew to include young nephews after his drug-addled sister stopped caring for them. There was homework to check, movie outings to chaperone and, as Valdez grew into manhood, a daughter he taught to ride a bike.
He was such a good provider, it was easy to ignore his rougher edges. The shifting from home to home. The casual cheating on his wife. The hodgepodge of college classes that led, seemingly, nowhere.
And then there was the gravest mistake of his young American life, the contours of which are contained in Case No. 92-0015-G, U.S.A. v. Ricardo Valdez, a drug trial in federal court in San Diego.
Standing before the judge in the spring of 1993, prosecutor Laura Birkmeyer described a man his relatives said they scarcely recognized, a man who ruthlessly manufactured a lethal street drug known as fentanyl. A man the government had chased since agents discovered more than two pounds of homemade fentanyl in a California apartment in 1988.
“Quite honestly,” the prosecutor told the judge, “he has a very dangerous knowledge, and I think we should do everything we possibly can to keep him from ever manufacturing any synthetic or a natural drug again.”
Valdez was sent to prison; he would be back on the streets in 2003.
Chapter 3: The drug
A synthetic pain killer used for cancer patients and surgery is transformed by rogue chemists into a lethal high.
Lauren Jolly would have felt a warm surge after snorting the house specialty: China White, a powder street dealers promoted as kicked-up heroin.
It was not. But the fentanyl sold to Jolly delivers the same dreamy haze, the same flush of euphoria, sending a drowsy sense of well-being to her fingers and toes, like the comfort of diving under an electric blanket. After the initial embrace, she would have gone on the nod, the familiar, consuming, dreamy state that heroin users crave.
Her arms and head grow heavy. Carbon dioxide builds in her blood, slowing her respiration like a brake slows a car.
Powdered fentanyl is so powerful, so toxic, an extra grain or two can render a dose lethal. Some people who shoot up can’t even slide the needle from their vein before they die, an end sometimes announced with a deep, final sigh.
One man who overdosed but lived to tell about it can’t recall anything at all.
Erik Wicks, 22, of Royal Oak said the last he remembers he was walking down the street. “I woke up in the hospital three days later,” he said.
In its legal form, fentanyl has been around nearly 50 years.
It was first developed by a Belgian drug company in the 1950s as an anesthetic for surgery. A synthetic alternative to morphine, it was 100 times more powerful than its opiate cousin, 50 times stronger than heroin and highly addictive.
It is still commonly prescribed as a skin patch, lozenge or intravenous drip for patients with cancer and other chronic pain.
Clinical fentanyl has sometimes been abused by doctors or medical workers, and hospitals developed elaborate safeguards to monitor supplies and stem its release onto the black market.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, outlaw chemists developed a new, more powerful twist on fentanyl in private labs. They called it China White, a name given high-grade heroin. This was no accident. It mimicked heroin’s high and satisfied the same cravings. Dealers frequently mixed it with heroin to attract buyers, and even hawked it as synthetic heroin.
Its staggering potency made it attractive for street sales. A few grains spread much further than heroin when mixed with fillers and cut into doses.
But making and mixing fentanyl is so dangerous that even breathing it can be lethal, which could explain why so few amateur chemists attempt it and why fentanyl epidemics occur only sporadically. Every couple of years, street fentanyl kills a dozen or so addicts somewhere in the United States.
But the outbreak that quietly began to percolate in northern U.S. cities in summer 2005 and would reach a crescendo in May last year was beyond anything law enforcement and health officials had seen.
Where was it coming from? Who was making it? No one could say. All they knew was that addicts were dropping from Wisconsin to Delaware.
And nowhere did fentanyl hit harder than in metro Detroit.
Chapter 4: The hooker
When drug dealers conspire to throw Lauren out like garbage, a prostitute tries to save her.
Debora Collins likes to turn her tricks by the afternoon, before the creeps come out, before heading off to Keating Street in Detroit, her day’s earnings in hand.
For two decades, heroin has been her only dependable lover. But it’s a tough love. Collins has a hard face. Pinches of skin sag beneath weary eyes. Her arms are free of the track marks and abscesses that plague many addicts. She is proud she can wear revealing blouses when she works. She keeps her drug life hidden by shooting heroin into her ankle.
Collins is adrift but not without bearings. Having raised three children, she has taken on the role of den mother in the Keating Street drug house, rescuing users when they push their addiction too far.
Like tonight.
She steps through the door.
“Thank God you’re here!” someone shouts. It’s Ralph, the dealer, who goes by Kilo. His panic worries Collins. She knows there’s new dope, the potent, fluffy, white stuff she’s seen around the house recently.
She hurries up a flight of stairs.
There, in the dining room is not the kind of junkie portrayed in movies. She is young, petite, with brown hair, cute. Collins knows Lauren Jolly well enough to know that she prefers to snort her fix rather than shoot it. Well enough to know Lauren is normally good for two $25 heroin packets at a time. At least she was before Lauren’s parents recently shipped her to rehab after she was arrested with drugs.
Worlds meet in Detroit drug house
The prostitute and the high-school girl are such Keating Street regulars, they sometimes help out by washing dishes together in the kitchen.
But their lives are worlds apart. Collins sleeps in a trailer park and motels along 8 Mile. The teen lives with her family in a sprawling ranch with a large landscaped lawn in Bloomfield Township, near the leafy Detroit Country Day School.
Worlds apart, yet both live lives of chance.
Even as a young girl, Lauren Jolly was adventurous and daring, as happy exploring the woods near her home as playing soccer. She made friends quickly; it was easy to see why. She didn’t judge people and was usually up for anything. Spontaneous, impulsive even, she was the girl who led her friends outside to jump and swim in ditches after a storm.
As she grew older, Lauren remained her own person, falling hard for older, trippy bands like Pink Floyd and the Cure. She enjoyed deep heart-to-hearts with friends. One boy recalls how Lauren spent hours comforting him when he feared his father would die.
At times, she confided a fascination with the drug world. She researched narcotics on the Internet, enthralled by the effects of different drugs. She was drawn to films with dope and rebellion, movies like “Trainspotting,” “Naked Lunch,” “A Clockwork Orange.”
Once, Lauren and some friends fantasized what they would do at the end of the world. Lauren said she wanted to walk the streets of Colombia, taking every drug she could.
By her junior year, Lauren found a new crowd. Word at Groves was she was on drugs, though she denied it. Friends said she looked pasty, washed out and thin. She sometimes spent class with her head on her desk.
Lauren went from enjoying friends to using them. When her parents tested her for drugs, she asked buddies to urinate in a cup for her.
Bloomfield Township is a world away from Keating Street, but not really. In 20 minutes Lauren could drive to the drug house, off I-75 just south of 8 Mile.
Sometimes Lauren showed up with another Groves student, Zack Vines, a handsome senior from an affluent family in Franklin.
The pair made odd junkies: good school, good families, plenty of money. But perhaps not so odd, after all. Young white suburbanites are among the heroin trade’s fastest-growing demographic. Heroin isn’t choosy, and once the drug grabs hold, it tends to squeeze and can pull anybody, privileged and otherwise, to a dilapidated dope house off the freeway.
Some days, Lauren and Zack skipped out of Groves at lunch in Zack’s Dodge Charger, raced to the city to buy drugs, and returned to class.
It was on one trip that undercover investigators, acting on tips from teachers and fellow students, stopped the Charger after a heroin buy at a cheap motel on 8 Mile. The pair were arrested, and Zack eventually was prosecuted on drug charges.
That was in April 2006. After a month in rehab, Lauren drove back to Keating Street, hungry for a fix.
Chapter 5: The sigh
A last gasp to breathe life into Lauren.
Collins usually knows what to do when guys in the house fall out. She strips off their pants and cups their testicles in ice. The adrenaline surge usually brings the men back.
Someone had already dumped Lauren into a bathtub and poured ice cubes on her. There was no change. She was carried back to the dining room in her underwear and lowered to the floor, soaking wet. She’s been like this, what? Thirty minutes? An hour? Two?
Looking down at Lauren, her eyes rolling, Collins curses the others for waiting so long to get help.
Ralph says Lauren snorted one pack tonight, not usually a problem, except this is fentanyl, not heroin. And Lauren’s stint in rehab is likely working against her, lowering her threshold for an overdose.
Collins leans down and pushes the girl’s hair back, trying to warm her skin, watching her eyes flutter.
Lauren sighs and is still.
Collins puts her mouth over the girl’s and begins to breathe.
Chapter 6: The prison
Ricardo Valdez-Torrez heroically kept his family together after a move to the United States, only to ruin his shot at the American Dream.
After his 1993 fentanyl conviction, the feds allowed Ricardo Valdez to start serving his drug sentence near his family at FCI Terminal Island, two hours north of San Diego.
Behind bars, he had much to consider. The mistakes he’d made. And the price.
His second wife filed for divorce. His nephews lost their surrogate father, their hero. His 11-year-old daughter, the one who told the judge she didn’t want to grow up without her daddy, disappeared from his life.
The funny thing is, his life had crumbled just as he was taking steps meant to improve it. After a series of dead-end jobs in the 1980s, Valdez enrolled at a San Diego community college to study business administration.
But he discovered his real talent was in chemistry. That education didn’t come with school credit.
He said his teacher was a fellow student who introduced himself one day in English class as Bob.
“We just started talking,” Valdez would say later of Robert Giebink. “He told me he knew about heroin, you know? And about this synthetic stuff. …I said, ‘I probably could get it out on the market.’ ”
They were soon at work in makeshift laboratories. Valdez watched his friend mix things and immersed himself in this clandestine education, researching chemicals, experimenting with a recipe for his own brand of fentanyl, one that prosecutors claimed he first tested on rabbits.
By 1988, he was no longer dabbling. Valdez was creating a high-quality fentanyl and selling it. He even enlisted his drug-addict sister, Eusebia Valdez.
That year, federal agents raided an apartment in Chula Vista, south of San Diego, seizing more than two pounds of homemade fentanyl.
During their lengthy investigation, DEA agents arrested Valdez’s sister, who was selling fentanyl in plastic baggies, sometimes wrapped with pink hair ties.
Eventually, they traced the fentanyl to Valdez.
Valdez, a stranger in Mexico
The investigation revealed an elaborate operation. Valdez, the business administration student, created a front company in Las Vegas and used it to buy chemicals to make fentanyl.
He and his college buddy Bob leased a home in Fallbrook, Calif., and set up a lab.
Valdez, the supposed family man, even told an undercover agent his family would live in the home where the fentanyl was made.
“You’re looking at essentially the kingpin of an organization,” Laura Birkmeyer, the prosecutor, said at his 1993 sentencing. “You’re looking at a man who devised a method to create a synthetic form of heroin, a very potent and very lethal form of heroin.”
Valdez and his friend Bob went to prison. Valdez served 11 years. Paroled in May 2003, Valdez was deported to Mexico.
He settled into an apartment 40 miles southwest of Mexico City, in Toluca, known as the Detroit of Mexico for its U.S.-owned auto plants.
Mexico was a strange new land for a man who had not lived there since he was a child. But he was free and, before long, back in business.
He and an accountant friend formed a new company amid a cluster of factories in the industrial town of Lerma.
Valdez would be the director of operations for the new venture, which they named Distribuidora Talios.
It was, of all things, a chemical company.
Chapter 7: The scientist
A DEA chemist in Chicago finally figures out what’s been killing heroin addicts in the Midwest.
By late summer 2005, clandestinely produced fentanyl was turning up in the Midwest.
In Chicago, there was no shortage of dealers willing to sell it. Police say the Mickey Cobras street gang turned a south side housing complex into a virtual fentanyl supermarket, peddling packets of fentanyl-laced heroin stamped with names like Reaper and Lethal Injection.
The labels didn’t lie.
Drug agents pored over coroner reports, trying to account for a rising number of heroin deaths. Ambulance workers reported that, after years of using one dose of Narcan, which reverses heroin’s suppression of the respiratory system, they now needed four doses to counteract the new dope.
Federal agents at first thought they were seeing the fallout from a major theft of pharmaceutical fentanyl.
But no one knew for sure.
They put James DeFrancesco on the case.
DeFrancesco, 44, a Chicago-based U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration chemist, tended to find clues others missed and police and drug agents from across the Midwest sent street drugs his way.
On most mornings, he rode an elevator to his office behind locked doors and a guard in a Chicago high-rise.
Safely inside a DEA laboratory, the forensic chemist with a doctorate from Michigan State University checked his intake box for green folders.
That’s how narcotics always arrived. As the region’s point man for fentanyl testing, DeFrancesco tried to tackle a confounding question: Were people stealing this fentanyl from pharmacies? Hospitals? Or was someone making it in a lab?
He knew that commercial fentanyl, the kind doctors prescribe, was readily identified by its purity.
The kind made on the street, no matter how talented the chemist, invariably carries flaws or impurities or different ingredients altogether, altering the molecular structure of the drug.
The answers were inside those green folders.
Sitting at his workbench, DeFrancesco carefully opened the folders and mixed the powder with solvents to create a fluid sample.
Using a syringe, DeFrancesco shot the fluid into a small vial, which he inserted into a microwave-size machine called a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, or GC-MS.
The liquid swirled through 15 meters of glass tubing. As the GC-MS heated up, DeFrancesco watched intently on a video monitor as the components in the fluid began to separate. The machine’s computer scanned through patterns until it identified everything that went into the powder.
When DeFrancesco finished, the results were unmistakable.
The fentanyl killing people didn’t come from a pharmacy or hospital.
Someone, somewhere, was cooking the stuff up in a lab.
Chapter 8: The morgue
After Detroit Police find fentanyl on city streets, the county medical examiner weighs what to do next. Meanwhile, death only enhances fentanyl’s appeal to addicts.
A few weeks later, in October 2005, Tiffany McKaye, a forensic chemist with the Detroit Police Department, was running a packet of suspected heroin through her lab’s GC-MS.
The department’s chemical analysis unit churns through 6,000 drug cases a year, an important but tedious task dominated by the Big Three: heroin, cocaine and marijuana.
In most cases, heroin is heroin, the only variable being how much it’s cut with baby formula or other fillers.
“It didn’t seem any different than the heroin we were seeing. Nothing to set it apart,” Gayle O’Neal, McKaye’s supervisor, said of the powder under scrutiny that day. It was even sold like heroin, folded up in a lottery ticket.
But when McKaye scanned the readout, she realized this was not heroin.
“We weren’t looking for fentanyl, but she recognized it right away,” O’Neal said. “She brought it to my attention.”
This fentanyl had the markings of a street chemist. Police did not know where it was from. But they knew this: Only a few extra grains of fentanyl could kill a person. And they wondered, was this stuff killing addicts?
Within a week, two or three more samples came back as fentanyl.
The chemists warned the narcotics squad to be on the lookout — and use caution.
Police chemist Michael Williams called the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, alerting its staff that fentanyl was on the streets.
Silent killer makes its return
Up to then, Carl Schmidt, the medical examiner, had noticed what his colleagues across the country had seen: Heroin was back. It had been for more than a decade, silently killing at alarming rates. Silently because attempts to make the public aware of its resurgence had mostly failed. Silently because nobody seemed to acknowledge that heroin had moved beyond city addicts to middle- and upper-class suburban kids.
If people were overdosing on fentanyl, they were probably seeking heroin. Without closer testing, victims likely would have been lumped in with heroin victims.
Metro Detroit was not much different from other communities. Its health and police agencies had no organized method for talking to each other about emerging drug trends like fentanyl, and most labs didn’t even test for it.
Schmidt’s office would keep a lookout, but getting final test results could take weeks.
Meanwhile, heroin overdoses, or what was assumed to be heroin, kept the morgue busy through the end of 2005 and into the new year: bodies from Dearborn and Allen Park, Canton and Detroit.
They were quick deaths, investigators noted, almost instantaneous. A 30-year-old woman discovered in the fetal position, a needle still in her arm. A man, 44, facedown on the floor of his home. A 54-year-old with Love and Hate tattooed on his knuckles and a cocktail of drugs in his blood.
Morgue technicians used long, hypodermic needles to draw blood, urine and fluid from the bodies, squirting the samples in vials that were capped and tested.
And then they waited.
In November, Detroit’s DEA office sent out a press release warning that undercover agents had discovered potentially lethal amounts of fentanyl mixed with heroin on the city’s streets. The information was faxed to all the local media outlets but didn’t make much news, if any.
Meanwhile, in the drug houses and on the street corners of Detroit, rumors were circulating that a new brand of heroin was killing people.
In most industries, rumors of death are bad for business.
To heroin dealers, death was marketing gold.
Deadly risk lures drug buyers
They began stamping their drugs with names like Suicide Packets and Drop Dead.
They knew their audience.
Addiction creates its own logic, and if a drug kills someone, it must be pretty damn good. Addicts go to frightening extremes to score the best high. If they can rationalize stepping into a drug den filled with guns and criminals, then chasing killer dope can make sense, too.
“If someone OD’d,” Harvey Madden, a Detroit drug counselor at Elmhurst Home Inc., recalled about his days as a user, “you’d shake them and ask them where they got it … Why? Because you know that had to be some good stuff and you figure, ‘I can do it better.’ ”
“Every junkie,” he said, “wants a breath-taking high.”
Addicts on 8 Mile, in Detroit’s Cass Corridor and near housing projects didn’t always know why heroin carried an extra kick. When they found good stuff, they often chalked it up to good fortune, not fentanyl.
The first proof that fentanyl was killing Detroit-area addicts rolled in around December 2005, as test results from earlier deaths trickled into the medical examiner’s office.
Five fentanyl-related deaths in September. Seven in October. In November, the number climbed to 16.
Schmidt would say later that even that news didn’t raise a panic, given that the overall level of heroin deaths in Wayne County was largely static.
“I compare it to when you’re flying a plane and it’s dark outside,” Schmidt said. “And the plane starts making small changes in attitude. If the change occurs in this small increment, you may not be aware that the plane may be pointed to the ground.”
He and other officials may not have seen a crash coming, but people on the streets of Detroit began to sense peril.
In January 2006, the daughter of a 52-year-old overdose victim called Schmidt’s office, alarmed, not just by her mother’s death, but that other heroin addicts in her neighborhood were dropping, too.
That February, toxicologists in Schmidt’s office noted at their weekly conference that fentanyl deaths were continuing to rise, but the news still wasn’t made public.
Not yet. Many more people would die first.
Chapter 9: The trail
Fentanyl hits the East Coast hard.
Death moved east.
By April 2006, emergency workers in Philadelphia, Camden, N.J., and Delaware were swamped with overdoses. Heroin laced with fentanyl and sold as Al Capone, Flatline, Rest in Peace, Rolex and Exorcist was dropping addicts everywhere.
As in Chicago, Philadelphia emergency workers were going through an astonishing amount of Narcan.
“Today, when we give people Narcan, they’re not coming out of it,” Philadelphia Fire Capt. Richard Bossert said.
“We had no idea what we were getting into.”
Across the river, New Jersey was also counting dead bodies and, as in Philadelphia, addicts died with needles in their arms, unused dope still in the syringe. Emergency responders were handling 60 overdoses a day, compared with the usual 10 cases.
Minutes after New Jersey health officials posted the jump in overdose deaths in an Internet alert, an official from Maryland called: People were dying there, too.
Chapter 10: The dead
Fentanyl is taking out heroin addicts all over metro Detroit – an ex-logger, a professional bowler, an autoworker. It’s time for health officials to go public.
In Wayne County, fentanyl killed 16 people in January of last year, including a man found with his face in a bowl of food, and 17 in February.
Fred Rogers proved on Feb. 4 that high-rise riverfront living doesn’t lend immunity to the ravages of drug abuse.
Rogers, a 50-year-old Chrysler worker with a disability retirement, was found facedown on his kitchen table in his apartment near Belle Isle in Detroit.
When the medical examiner’s office blamed his death on fentanyl, his sister, Carrie Williams, a retired practical nurse, was incredulous.
“Doctor,” she protested, “you’ve got my brother confused with somebody else.”
The day after Rogers collapsed, Glen (Eddie) Bostic, a former logger, blacked out and crashed his pickup in Detroit after using fentanyl. He was taken to a hospital, but he checked out the next day.
His sister called Bostic that morning to check on him. She said she loved him. It was their last conversation.
Bostic went straight to the tow yard to retrieve his pickup and promptly shot up again.
This time, the fentanyl killed him.
Brandon Hilgendorf broke his family’s heart, too.
Seven years ago, a Free Press article praised Hilgendorf for his bowling prowess when he was 14. The kid had the kind of smooth stroke that some predicted would land him on the professional bowling tour one day.
He turned pro, but pills, crack cocaine and other drugs consumed his life.
Broken life, lost promise
In March 2006, one day after his 21st birthday, Brandon broke down crying, telling his mother how much he regretted ever doing drugs.
Gail Hilgendorf-Alexander told her son he had a choice: Return to bowling or succumb to drugs. “One or the other, Brandon.”
Five days later, Brandon was discovered in a friend’s Macomb County bedroom, sitting at a computer, head tossed back, mouth open, veins full of fentanyl-laced heroin.
The dope came from Keating Street.
Another man died with his head in a trash can.
Others fell with needles in their arms, tourniquets still tied tightly. They died in bathrooms, underwear pushed down, hypodermics in their groins.
Fentanyl took a trucker visiting his niece. A woman dog-sitting at a friend’s house. A guy in a Wayne State University men’s room. A man slumped at the wheel of a running car on I-96.
By May of last year, fentanyl’s toll could no longer be ignored.
On May 19, Schmidt walked into the Wayne County morgue to a room filled with bodies.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
Schmidt walked through the autopsy room checking body after body — eight in all.
He couldn’t wait for more test results. He went back to his office and contacted Wayne County health authorities.
It was time, finally, to sound the alarm.
That afternoon, the area’s top public-health officials held a news conference to announce the death toll. It was big news.
Five days later, Lauren Jolly started up her car and headed to her favorite dope house anyway.
Chapter 11: The lab
Authorities catch their first break. Closing in on the dusty industrial town of Lerma, Mexico, they find their man.
As the number of fentanyl deaths exploded in metro Detroit in May of last year, drug agents caught a break. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration received a tip from someone in Chicago about a drug smuggling operation in a small town near Mexico City.
U.S. drug agents called their counterparts to the south, who agreed to move in.
It was Sunday, May 21, 2006, a sunny spring day, when 10 Mexican agents, carrying guns, bolt cutters and a video camera, burst through the gate of Distribuidora Talios, past a barking guard dog, and into the building.
The men wore gas masks and protective suits from head to toe. Gun battles and lurid, drug-related killings are endemic in Mexico, so the agents came prepared for war.
But the raid proceeded peacefully.
Inside, agents found a room about the size of a large kitchen. There was a lab table in the middle with a sink and a triple-neck flask, an instrument outlawed in the United States because it is commonly used to mix chemicals in clandestine drug labs.
A classroom-size periodic table of elements hung on a wall. There were barrels of aniline and pyridine — fixings for a deadly recipe.
One agent swept the room with an air monitor, testing for toxic fentanyl dust.
The agents’ video shows a bespectacled, middle-age man wearing a beige jacket, golf shirt and blue jeans.
It was Ricardo Valdez, the company chemist. He looked tired, resigned even.
“This stuff, what do you call it, this final product?” a voice from behind the camera asked.
“I call it heroin,” Valdez said softly. “Synthetic heroin. It’s formulated in the laboratory.”
He is asked, “What effect does this have on the person who consumes this substance?”
“The same as if they’d injected heroin,” Valdez replied.
How much have you made?
“Perhaps five kilos,” Valdez answered.
Valdez and three others were taken to jail. Distribuidora Talios was out of business. American drug agents toured the facility in the days that followed.
Sometime after the raid, U.S. authorities said, Valdez upped his estimate from 5 to 10 kilos, or 22 pounds. That’s enough for 80 million doses on the street.
But authorities found only residue inside the building.
The fentanyl itself was long gone.
Chapter 12: The lie
The prostitute takes Lauren to the hospital, but doesn’t come clean.
Three days after the raid in Mexico, Donald Cunningham begins to panic on Keating Street. Cunningham, who helps run the drug house with his brother, is pumping on Lauren Jolly’s chest while Debora Collins, the prostitute, gives her mouth-to-mouth.
Pump, pump, breathe, breathe. No response.
Cunningham knows this is trouble. He can’t have the police over here. There’s dope everywhere.
Get rid of her, he tells Collins. Put some dry clothes on her. Drive her somewhere. And ditch the car.
Collins keeps extra clothing at the house. She grabs blue sweatpants and a blue shirt and dresses Lauren. She takes the teen’s wet clothes — shoes, a shirt and pants — and throws them in a black garbage bag.
Cunningham lifts the teen over his shoulder and carries her to her blue, 1999 Chrysler. He tells Collins: Dump the car anywhere and take a cab back. He hands her $30 for cab fare.
Collins drives off, but she can’t bring herself to leave the girl on some street corner. She couldn’t live with herself, she would say later.
Instead, she steers Lauren’s car to St. John Hospital on Detroit’s east side. Collins drives silently. She is scared.
“In my heart I knew she was gone.”
She tosses the bag of wet clothes into a garbage bin and takes Lauren to the emergency room entrance.
Doctors insert an IV into the left side of Lauren’s neck, but they are too late.
DOA.
Lauren Jolly is one month and two days past her 17th birthday.
When police arrive, Collins lies. She tells them she had been walking along the street, working, when she noticed a car parked on East 8 Mile with an unconscious girl inside. She said she recognized the teen “from the area” and drove her to the hospital.
The police take Collins at her word. They log in a report that there are no signs of foul play.
And Collins thinks that is that.
Chapter 13: The truth
A detective’s hunch pays off.
A few weeks later, the story still wasn’t sitting right with Detroit Police Lt. Charles Flanagan, who works closely with homicide investigators.
Flanagan reviewed what he knew. Collins had told police she’d found Jolly unconscious in a car on East 8 Mile, that she’d recognized the teen from the neighborhood.
But Flanagan wondered.
Why would an eastside hooker recognize this kid from Bloomfield Township?
And where was the evidence the girl did her dope in that car?
Flanagan suspected Collins knew more. His officers rounded her up near John R and 8 Mile and drove her to the old 9th Precinct on Gratiot.
The prostitute finally came clean.
“I’ve been wanting to get this off my chest,” she told them.
Within hours, Detroit police and a DEA agent raided the Keating Street home. They found 13 people, including Donald Cunningham and his brother, James Edgar Coleman.
The authorities arrested them and ticketed 11 others.
The crowd inside the Keating home that night reflected the egalitarian pull of heroin addiction. Six of 11 customers were from the suburbs. Five were black; six white.
Chapter 14: The reckoning
Sitting in prison once more, the chemist protests the latest fentanyl charges, but seems resigned to his fate.
El Cerebro says they have the wrong guy.
Sitting inside the Reclusorio Norte prison this February on the northern edge of Mexico City, where agents have held him since the raid on his lab last year, Valdez , who police nicknamed The Brain, was polite but defiant.
He said he has cleaned up his life since his 2003 prison release and ran an honest chemical company.
Or did until his arrest.
“It doesn’t sit well with me that I’m being accused of manufacturing a drug that’s killed a lot of people,” he said.
“I was raised in the United States. I’m more American than Mexican. … If you want to blame me for it, I guess it’s convenient.”
He agreed to an interview, he said, to try to clear his name. He invited a visitor to sit with him on a bench in a common area. The room was deep within the fortress-like facility, beyond the massive outer doors, six guarded checkpoints and a maze of razor wire and tunnels.
Other prisoners milled about or leaned against walls while guards kept watch, collapsible batons clipped to their belts.
Valdez, 53, looked crisp and at ease in beige slacks and short-sleeve collared shirt.
“I ran my company as the director, within the law,” he said.
Later, over the phone, he is reminded about that videotape, the one in which he confessed to Mexican authorities.
“I gave these fools over here something so they wouldn’t whoop my ass,” he replied.
He said the agents punched him in the kidneys to encourage his “confession,” a claim Mexican authorities did not respond to.
“That’s what they do down here,” he said.
“They knock you around and say this is what you’re going to do.”
Valdez said Distribuidora Talios made thinners and solvents and that he shouldn’t be judged on his past.
He has learned his lesson.
“Eleven years,” he said of his earlier prison stint. “My daughter grew up. I never been around my daughter. I lost my second wife. A decade behind bars.”
Valdez and his codefendants await their fate in Mexico’s byzantine judicial system.
He faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.
And his future could grow worse.
American prosecutors want to extradite him to face charges in the United States, which could put him behind bars for life.
Chapter 15: The requiem
Lauren’s family and friends say goodbye.
More than a year has passed since Lauren Jolly’s death.
Her family bade her good-bye May 29, 2006, in a memorial mass at St. Regis Church in Bloomfield Hills.
Days later, community activists and school district administrators mailed a stark message to 4,500 families in the Birmingham school district.
“We have failed,” the note read.
“We have let a child that has grown up in our midst go to her grave believing drugs were worth living and ultimately worth dying for.”
But even as community leaders resolved to do better, fentanyl’s killer reputation still beckoned.
On Aug. 4, Louie Awdish, 25, and a friend piled into a maroon 2000 Hyundai in Royal Oak and headed to the same neighborhood where Lauren found her dope, searching for fentanyl.
“Jackpot,” said Oakland County toxicologist Gary Kunsman.
“They found it.”
Awdish died the next morning, gasping in a pool of black vomit.
Others would follow, after the media storm passed.
Three weeks ago, the Class of 2007, Lauren’s class, graduated from Groves.
As the school year ended, Lauren was remembered in ways large and small.
A video montage was shown at school, a series of snapshots set to music.
There was Lauren, maybe 7, in her soccer uniform. There she was in face paint.
In an evening gown. Mugging with friends.
Phone numbers for drug and alcohol hot lines were imposed on the screen.
Some students thought the video too much for a girl who had lost her life in such a foolish pursuit.
Others expressed guilt that they hadn’t done more to intervene.
Corinne Smith, who had known Lauren Jolly since kindergarten, wondered if anyone could have prevented Lauren’s spiral.
“I just hate people assuming she was a bad person,” Corinne, 17, said. “She’s not a bad person.
“She was just someone that was really determined and curious. Some people get into alcohol when they’re teenagers. But she chose heroin. Maybe that’s a bad comparison, but all teenagers are really curious, and they’re going to try things. …
“I’m sure she didn’t think she was going to die,” Corinne said.
“I’m sure she didn’t want to die.”
Epilogue: Fatal scourge could return
A string of arrests, but authorities still search for millions of suspected fentanyl doses.
Has the epidemic of fentanyl finally played out?
Or, as some experts surmise, have fentanyl dealers and users simply gotten better at using it?
And if Ricardo Valdez really did create 10 kilos, where is the rest?
Drug experts from Washington to Detroit say they simply don’t know.
The theory offered by authorities is that drug mules brought Mexican fentanyl directly to Chicago. What route they took is anyone’s guess. The Mexican border stretches from Texas to California.
Once in Chicago, federal prosecutors say, the Mickey Cobras gang sold some of it on the streets, with the rest going to Detroit and other areas.
Police in Philadelphia say they still see fentanyl, often combined with cocaine.
In Chicago, deaths are way down, but officials said they think fentanyl is still around. It’s just being used more cautiously. A massive police raid on a Chicago housing project last year produced scores of arrests and major drug indictments in the spring, charging gang members, a man accused of bringing fentanyl to Detroit, and Valdez, the chemist.
In metro Detroit, fentanyl’s presence is harder to gauge. Long after it vanished from other cities last year, it peaked again in the Detroit area, killing another 29 drug users in Wayne County in November.
Detroit drug dealer Daren Reese, meanwhile, received at least six years in prison after sheriff’s deputies discovered that he was mixing fentanyl with other drugs in a coffee grinder, just the kind of crude science that can kill an addict.
James Coleman, who ran the Keating Street drug house, is serving a 30-year prison term. His brother Donald Cunningham was returned to prison on a parole violation.
Lauren Jolly’s companion Zack Vines pleaded guilty to felony drug possession stemming from their arrest in April 2006. Vines received probation and is seeking treatment for his addiction. Since the New Year, fentanyl deaths have largely disappeared, said medical examiner Carl Schmidt. But that’s happened in other years, too.
“I think it will reappear again,” Schmidt said. “It has done so in the past.”
A FATHER’S HARROWING TALE
‘Honey, our son is a heroin addict’
At the family’s request, the Free Press has agreed not to identify the author of this account or his son.
The words out of my wife’s mouth were like a telephone pole crashing through my gut. “Honey, our son is a heroin addict.” No way. Not him. Not us. For the next few days, on a supposed Easter family vacation, I got to see my first born, now 18 years young, go through cold turkey heroin withdrawal. When he wasn’t vomiting or experiencing spasms, he would sleep. When he slept, I was on my BlackBerry trying to learn anything I could about heroin.
Did you know the term “kicking the habit” came from heroin withdrawal? Your legs kick involuntarily. Funny, until you see it.
We knew something was wrong with our son even before his arrest for heroin possession. He was, past tense, the kid we didn’t worry about. He was smart, ambitious, funny, good looking and more mature than his peers. The first sign that, as my wife kept saying, something was eating Gilbert Grape, was when we discovered he had become bulimic. A little heavy from age 10, he had had enough of the fat jokes and comments. My wife was working with him on a diet and exercise regimen, but that would take too much time for him.
Like me, he’s ADHD and we don’t like to wait for anything. The results were fast and in his mind, great. He lost 50 pounds in months during his junior year and suddenly he was catching the eye of the girls. This smart, funny, good looking kid was now thin. For the first time, I started finding condoms in his wallet and that inner debate we have as parents was running rampant in my mind: Should I be mad that he is doing it, or should I be happy he is practicing safe sex?
My wife and I would learn later than eating disorders often lead to substance abuse and that there is a “high” experienced when you stick your finger down your throat. We didn’t know what to do. By this time we knew we needed outside help and got him in front of expert after expert, from mental health professionals to those that specialized in eating disorders.
At the same time, my son’s behavior was rapidly changing. The perennial honor roll student’s grades were falling his junior year. He was skipping classes regularly despite repeated groundings, loss of wheels and no allowance. Most important, he had a new set of friends completely different from his past friends. The new group was like cloned sheep. Broken homes, estranged from at least one parent, thrown out or quit school, in and out of rehabs and some suicidal tendencies. None of them had a job.
We were drug testing him randomly. Why? His new set of friends looked stoned all the time, so why not our son? He always passed except two times. On the first, there wasn’t actually a test. I was getting ready to make him, as they say, drop for me, when he told me to save the money because he had smoked some pot the night before. What a great kid, wants to save his old man the $34.95 and is honest enough to take his lumps. Honest? Anything but, really. He didn’t want the test because it might show pot, but it would certainly show the use of an opiate.
Oh, did I tell you my son is a liar. All addicts are. They have to be to maintain their addiction. My son would lie about everything, even when it wasn’t necessary. He also became a thief. All addicts are. Take a check out of the checkbook and write it to yourself. Three hundred dollars? Good amount for a couple of days. Can’t find the checkbook? Better sell the new video game mom and dad bought me. My brother’s $900 guitar? As Tigers announcer Dan Dickerson would say, gone! Two hundred bucks out of my uncle’s wallet? Gone!
The second test he failed, he actually took in January of 2006. It showed signs of opiate use. What? My son went crazy and said there was no way that could be true. I couldn’t believe it either. Not my son! Like a fool, I went back to CVS and bought another test. Two hours later, he passed. Whew, what a relief for me, I selfishly thought. No, what a relief for my son. Fooled us again. The fact is the passage of that extra time and my son’s devout use of so-called energy drinks and tons of other garbage fluids were flushing his system at an alarming and unhealthy rate.
Then, a day before our vacation, our son was busted – though he initially told my wife it was pot, not heroin. Small comfort.
On the flight the next day, my wife noticed that he had vomited on himself. That’s when he admitted to her it wasn’t pot he was arrested for, but heroin. He needed his heroin fix and wasn’t going to get it.
“Honey, our son is a heroin addict.” Please God, wake me up from this nightmare.
We returned from our “vacation” and were determined to get our son back on the straight and narrow. The experts said an out-patient rehab was best for him. A few days a week, a couple of hours in each session and random testing.
We would count the days he was clean and would cheer him on. Twenty five, 30, run kid run. We told him we were there for him and loved him. Get an urge to use, call us, we won’t be mad. Then, the wheels came off the wagon.
The call came from the cop who had previously arrested him. My son’s friend had died of an overdose of what was later identified as fentanyl-laced heroin. Incidentally, he would lose 14 other friends from his drug circle over the next few weeks and months. After the call from the officer, I rushed to get in front of him. I took him to lunch to talk about his feelings. On the outside he was calm. I learned later that on the inside, he was devastated.
His first relapse was just days away and looking back, the signs were starting to emerge. He was very happy one moment and very depressed another. The day before his first relapse, I told him we were giving him his allowance in a different fashion. No longer would he get his weekly allotment up front, but we would spread it out on a daily basis. He went berserk. “What’s the difference,” he shouted, “It’s the same amount of money.” Later we discovered his weekly allowance was actually the amount he spent on his daily fix. He got the other money by selling his video games and simply stealing it from us, other family members, relatives and friends.
My wife called my office. She was crying. “He’s using again!”
My son was ambitious that day. Get up early, for once, and get to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting by 9 a.m. Great, we thought, he is doing so good! Yes he was going to an N.A. meeting, but only after a trip down Telegraph and a hefty dose of fentanyl-laced heroin.
By now, the fentanyl stories were a daily event in the local papers. Be aware, addicts, this stuff could kill you! Right. The stories of the fentanyl-laced heroin and cocaine were like an advertisement for addicts. Let’s see: more powerful so I can use less and that means less money. Tastes great, less filling! Brilliant!
When he was pulled over after swerving from lane to lane, the cops knew he was high. Luckily one of the cops didn’t want him in jail, but in the hospital. This was the first of the guardian angels my son would encounter.
We talked with the lead doctor in the hospital and his words were chilling. “Your son is very smart, perhaps genius level. That will hurt him as he believes he can outsmart this drug. He can’t.” As we left the hospital, my wife and I held each other, crying and realizing we were in for a long, long road and that this addiction would change everyone’s life forever.
My son became a liar and a con artist. That may seem redundant, but they are different. He conned the staff at the first in-patient rehab into believing he was road ready after only a week of treatment. Despite our protests, my wife and I had no say in the matter as he was an 18-year-old adult. Right.
He would tell us later he was thinking of using every minute he was there. Two weeks after he was out, in mid-June 2006, he was using again. My wife let him use her car for the first time since his release. “Just going to Taco Bell, mom.” He was back home in 30 minutes, almost exactly the time it takes to get a taco and return. Only thing is, he didn’t go there. He picked up a friend and they scored heroin.
This time he was careless and dropped a pack of smack in the car. My wife found it. I met her at the drug counselor’s office where he had an appointment and we confronted him. He cried the whole way home, calling himself a loser. It was now time for a more serious rehab out of state.
We are lucky that my employer, Chrysler, is such a wonderful company. Everyone from the top down supported us. My bosses told me flat out to focus on helping my son and to put my job as a much lower priority despite the pressures of my position.
I shared our struggle with everyone around me and many of my colleagues told me of similar stories somewhere in their family. A day didn’t go by without someone at work coming up to me and saying we were in their prayers.
The medical folks at work became guardian angels and got my son in the next rehab. Somehow a spot opened at the Hazelden substance-abuse clinic in Minnesota. As I drove my son to the airport from our home in Oakland County down Telegraph Road, he pointed out place after place he had bought his heroin. The first ten places he identified were between Bloomfield Hills and the southern end of Southfield. Before we took the exit on I-94, I had stopped counting after the 25th heroin “ATM.”
At this, the next stop in his rehab and the first out of state, some ugliness started to develop. He said he wouldn’t stay beyond the 28 mandated days, despite the pleas of the counselors.
He was mad at God, which we thought was kind of a positive as before he said he had stopped believing in God despite his upbringing. He hated the police. He hated about everything. Most of all, he hated the program, the rehab. He just wanted to get out and enjoy his, as he called it, “senior summer.”
No, he just wanted to survive the 28 days and get on with using.
And he did. We started to see sign after sign. Video games systems gone. “Oh, it’s at my friend’s house,” he would say. Money would be missing. Bottom line, he couldn’t keep his stories straight. His lies evaporated in a conversation, not within days.
Luckily and thankfully, we were getting smarter. Or at least we thought. Each treatment program told us, told our son, to get a new group of friends. He refused. They made him feel good. For him, he needed that as it was becoming more and more apparent that he didn’t like himself.
Two weeks before his sentencing, he did something that would become all too familiar. He sabotaged himself. A couple of his friends confronted him with us. They knew he was using. I almost physically had to force him to go in for his state-ordered drug test. He said I couldn’t come in with him. I did anyway and stood down the hall and watched the restroom door. Ten minutes later he came strutting by me with a receipt for his test. “Let’s go, I passed.” The exchange in the parking lot was ugly and physical. I had watched the restroom. He never went in. I forced him back inside. Sure, he had paid for the test, but didn’t take it – and nobody appeared to notice. He took a test with me there. He failed. Opiates. We later found he had done this routine three other times without getting caught. I guess there are bigger fish to fry in the system. He knew it and was playing it. And using.
His failure on this particular day made our outlook on his legal status very gloomy. The prosecutor called our lawyer two days before sentencing and said something like, “Looks like your boy blew it. See you in court.”
Our lawyer, a good man, was down like I had never seen him. As we went to court, my level of depression had spiked. But just when I expected the worst, another guardian angel appeared. The prosecutor. He approached our lawyer and me and said, “Your son needs some help.” Here’s a guy who I had loathed that was now going to help us save our son’s life. After my son was sentenced to probation and mandated in-patient care, I walked out with the prosecutor and my lawyer. I looked at my son’s latest angel and said, “You know, for the last five months I thought you were the biggest sonofabitch, but today I want to thank you for saving my son’s life. I’ll never forget it.” There were more angels in the wings, no pun intended.
Two months later, while he was in a halfway house out of state, I got a call from my son as I was headed into the office on a Saturday. He was crying. “Dad, I just need to know that everything is going to be OK.” I knew he was on the brink of usage or worse. Finally it hit me. “Son, I know it’s going to be OK because in the old days you wouldn’t call me. You’d just go use. But ya did call me. That’s why we won’t ever give up on you and that‘s why everything is going to be OK.”
We talked for about a half hour as I drove up and down Woodward, praying I wouldn‘t lose the signal to my cell phone. When he hung up, I was exhausted. Things were getting better. I thought.
Enter the final guardian angels, so far. My son was lucky enough to get into Recovery Court in Southfield, a program that focuses on recovery through a series of levels that start tough and get easier. It requires curfews and testing, counseling and N.A. meetings. He got there thanks to a tiny judge with an enormous heart. I grew quickly to love her dearly as someone who didn’t have to help my kid, but did.
His probation officers, both in the Recovery Court and at the Circuit Court level, are tough but care. Importantly, they are vigilant in their efforts. I am certain their pay doesn’t come close to matching their dedication and hours. His counselor, a former heroin addict herself, loves my son.
All good, right? Everybody loves him, but him. My son has had trouble getting past the program’s first level. The counselor told us he needed a long stint in rehab. My son was buying into it and was a day away from telling the judge he was going to go for it. The day before his Recovery Court date, guess what? That’s right, let’s use. Self-inflicted sabotage again. His counselor had warned us about this.
Jail? No. The guardian angel judge ordered long-term rehab when she had every right to throw him in the slammer. The prosecutor-turned-great-guy I had hated supported us. The judge at the Circuit Court level approved it.
He is now at his sixth rehab, his next, last chance.
Do we have a right to be mad at anybody? I don’t know. Nobody put a needle in my kid’s arm, although an addict/dealer in my son’s second rehab said, “We are going after kids like your son – kids from the suburbs who have the green.” I asked him how you get these “smart” kids hooked and he said, simply, “We give it to them for free at first.” How charitable.
But bitterness on our part doesn’t help anyone, especially our son. As they say, bitterness is a poison you take yourself. Through this excruciating journey, I am proud our family has stayed together despite the collateral damage we all have suffered. I believe what has kept us going is our faith, our friends and the host of guardian angels that didn’t have to help my kid, but did anyway.
I tell my friends to please not feel sorry for us. We spend our days and weekends writing letters to our son, not going to a gravesite. Our son is alive. Considering the gravity of this drug, we feel lucky.
I know there is no parenting manual on this subject, so here’s my advice if I can be so bold. Don’t assume it can’t happen to you. The drugs are out there. The pressure on our children is enormous.
If your school who has a written policy to inform the parents at the first or really any sign of use or any other association with drugs, demand that they inform you. Our school had a written policy to do just that. It didn’t happen. But, let’s be honest, they have a lot on their plates.
However, take a stand against these wonderful privacy issues slanted against us as parents. One of my son’s doctor couldn’t tell us the drugs he was using despite the fact he was only 17. Seventeen, is that really an adult? Give me a break. My son wasn’t paying the bills. We were. And, my son wasn’t trying to save himself, we were trying to save him.
Look for behavioral changes – grades falling, skipping school, and a new set of friends completely different from the ones he or she normally hangs with. Some people will argue that it is an invasion of your kid’s privacy, but check their emails, MySpace pages and text messages from time to time. I do now and it actually led to our most recent belief he was using or on the verge of it.
For my wife and me, our son’s journey has been like the movie “The Sixth Sense.” We look back on all the signs we ignored or couldn’t believe and now say, “Remember when he did this? Remember when he did that?” The good news is we see clearer now. That’s why my son is in a good place for a long time that can help him. But we also know that we can’t do it for him and the rehab program can’t do it for him. He has to do it for himself.
If you are so inclined, please say a prayer for my son. I am praying for yours.
Mexican Lab raid
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070624/VIDEO01/70623006
Fentanyl timeline:1950 through today
FENTANYL WAS BORN OVERSEAS …
1950s
Fentanyl synthesized in Belgian lab as a fast-acting anesthetic up to 80 times stronger than morphine.
1960s
Introduced as intravenous anesthetic for surgery; later incorporated in skin patches and lollipops for relief from severe or chronic pain.
1970s
Black market develops for pharmaceutical fentanyl, with supplies stolen from such legitimate sources as hospitals and sold to drug abusers.
1979
Rogue chemist develops a stronger analog (or chemical cousin) to fentanyl, which hits the streets as China White and is sold as heroin in the western United States. More than 100 fatal overdoses are linked to sporadic outbreaks over the next five years.
1985
University of California-Los Angeles study identifies at least 10 variants of fentanyl, some 1,000 times more potent than morphine.
1988
China White outbreak in Pittsburgh kills 18.
1993
Illicit lab near Wichita, Kan., is busted and 40 pounds of fentanyl seized.
2000
Lab with more than 8 pounds of diluted powder and 16 ounces of high-potency liquid fentanyl seized near Big Bear, Calif., by agents hunting marijuana.
2005
Labs seized in San Diego and suburban Los Angeles.
2006
• Feb. 27: Customs and Border Patrol agents seize 2.6 pounds of 83% pure fentanyl and 41 pounds of ice methamphetamine at a checkpoint near Westmoreland, Calif., near the Mexican border.
• May 21: Authorities raid a clandestine lab in Lerma, Mexico, alleged to have produced and shipped about 22 pounds of fentanyl into the United States, leading to the loss of more than 1,000 lives.
• July 28: White House-sponsored fentanyl conference in Philadelphia held to battle outbreak.
2007
• May 9: White House announces regulation of the manufacture and distribution of N-phenethyl-4-piperidone, or NPP, a chemical used by clandestine fentanyl labs.
… AND SPREAD DEATH IN AND AROUND DETROIT
2005
FALL: Chicago gang members begin selling fentanyl, often mixed with heroin.
OCTOBER: Detroit Police chemist alerts the Wayne County Medical Examiner that fentanyl-laced heroin is turning up in Detroit.
NOVEMBER: 16 fentanyl-associated fatal overdoses are logged in Wayne County.
• Nov. 17: U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration issues a news release warning of fentanyl in Detroit, to little notice.
DECEMBER: 12 more fentanyl deaths in Wayne County.
2006
JANUARY: 16 fentanyl deaths in Wayne County.
FEBRUARY: Meeting of Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office and local health officials to address fentanyl as 17 more people die from it in Wayne County.
• Feb. 4: Fred Lee Rogers, 50, a retired autoworker, overdoses in his riverfront apartment.
MARCH: 18 deaths in Wayne County
• March 7: Brandon Hilgendorf, 21, a promising professional bowler, overdoses at friend’s home in Shelby Township. He’d bought his drugs at a Keating Street drug house in Detroit.
APRIL 8Wayne County deaths
• April 12: Lauren Jolly, 17, a Birmingham Groves High School student, and a schoolmate are arrested for drug possession after buying heroin at a motel near I-75 and 8 Mile in Warren. Jolly’s parents send her to drug rehab.
MAY: Fentanyl involved in at least 29 deaths in Wayne County, including at least 19 in a four-day span.
• May 21: A makeshift lab in a town outside Mexico City is raided by Mexican authorities following a tip from Chicago that the lab is supplying fentanyl to the United States. Ricardo Valdez-Torres, the chemist who allegedly made the fentanyl, reportedly says up to 10 kilos were made and sent to United States, enough to supply 80 million doses to drug users.
• MID-MAY: Lauren Jolly leaves rehab.
• May 24: Jolly, 17, of Bloomfield Township fatally overdoses at the drug house on Keating Street.
JUNE: 25 fentanyl deaths in Wayne County.
• June 21: Nearly 300 local and federal agents arrest more than 30 people in sweeps through the Dearborn Homes housing projects and other locations in Chicago. Many of those arrested are said to be part of the Mickey Cobra street gang, reportedly a major street dealer of Mexican fentanyl.
• June 22: Daren Reese, 45, arrested with heroin and fentanyl, charged with running a drug operation in the Jeffries housing projects in Detroit. He will later plead guilty and draw a 4- to 20-year term in state prison.
JULY: 11 fentanyl deaths in Wayne County.
AUGUST: 8 fentanyl deaths in Wayne County.
• Aug. 5: Louie Awdish, 25, overdoses in Royal Oak after buying drugs on Keating Street.
SEPTEMBER: 14 fentanyl deaths in Wayne County.
OCTOBER: 19 fentanyl deaths in Wayne County.
NOVEMBER: 29 fentanyl deaths in Wayne County.
2007
FEB. 22: James Edgar Coleman, 36, of Detroit is sentenced to 30 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to selling drugs through the Keating Street house.
MARCH 1: U.S. Attorney in Chicago announces two major fentanyl indictments. One charges rogue chemist Ricardo Valdez-Torres with running a major fentanyl lab in Mexico and Darnell Hurt with bringing the drug to Detroit.
The second charges members of the Mickey Cobras, a Chicago street gang, in the deaths of five drug users.
JUNE: More than 1000 U.S. drug deaths are attributed to fentanyl since summer 2005, with more than 300 in metro Detroit. American and Mexican drug officials say it’s likely the Mexican lab is responsible for the U.S. outbreak.
Visit the Link for more videos and info
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/99999999/news05/70621038/
Peace,
Seedless
Fentanyl
