LOWER ARKANSAS VALLEY — On a hot June night in La Junta, a group of Otero County sheriff’s deputies and local police officers stormed the one-bedroom apartment of a suspected drug dealer on the west end of town, hoping to find a bounty of heroin.
“Get on your stomach! … Don’t move!” law enforcement yelled before leading out five people in handcuffs.
After about two hours of searching through books, boxes, furniture and shelves, they had found little: a small rock of suspected black-tar heroin, a bit of methamphetamine residue and a mass of paraphernalia that included baggies, apparent pipes and a small scale.
“We better find more than that,” a deputy said as he rifled through a safe by hand.
But the raid became another frustrating reminder that it’s difficult for small-town officers to keep up with drug distributors as heroin spreads across the Lower Arkansas Valley, in communities from Fowler east of Pueblo to Holly along the Colorado-Kansas state line. The rapid rise in the number of addicts also adds pressure to the valley’s few health care providers, limited substance abuse programs and jails.
Heroin is entrenched in Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo, but it’s now also leaving its mark in rural corners of the state that lack the resources of their big-city counterparts. The Otero County deputies on the recent raid had no drug-sniffing dogs, months of wiretaps or experienced state prosecutors at their immediate disposal.
On Tuesday in Denver, federal and state authorities announced a year-long investigation into a heroin organization operating in the metro area that netted more than two dozen indictments and the seizure of over $2 million in drugs. In the Lower Arkansas, there are only a few drug investigators dedicated to covering a vast stretch of towns and highways.
“The challenge for us has been resources,” Otero County Sheriff Shawn Mobley said. “Budgets are tight.”
In big cities or small towns, heroin’s ripple remains the same: drug-addicted babies born with tremors, overdose victims who die surrounded by syringes and frustrated authorities who battle a threat that hides in the shadows.
“It’s everywhere,” said Deputy Tyerek Kirkland of the Otero County Sheriff’s Office, who has been tasked with halting heroin’s spread. “It’s all over our county. It’s not just in one town. It’s in every one of our towns.”
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Drugs aren’t new in the valley. Authorities have been fighting the spread of methamphetamine for years, but heroin has introduced a level of addiction more deadly and arguably harder to kick. Making the fight more difficult is that meth hasn’t faded away, but rather has combined with heroin to form a complicated mixture of problems.
“The difference is the lethality,” J.C. Carrica, a substance abuse counselor and chief of Operations for Southeast Health Group’s hub in La Junta, said of heroin. “It’s a Russian roulette. It seems like the dependency moves faster. Their lives are spiraling faster than the methamphetamine addiction. They’re losing everything faster.”
Heroin use has reached crisis levels across the nation, including in Colorado, where overdoses are up almost 350 percent in the past five years, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA says heroin has become its main focus in the state.
“Heroin is an equal-opportunity consumer,” Carrica said of how the drug ended up in the Lower Arkansas Valley. “That’s the hard part about it.”
In January 2014, federal agents stopped a vehicle in Flagstaff, Ariz., with almost five pounds of heroin that authorities say was heading for Rocky Ford. Since then, local authorities say heroin seizures have been much smaller, but use has continued to rise.
According to statistics from Southeast Health Group, a nonprofit, integrated medical care provider in the region, it served 22 injection drug users between July 2013 through the end of June 2014. That number jumped to 43 injection drug users between July 2015 and mid-May.
Drug overdose rates — though not just from heroin — rose sharply in southeast Colorado between 2002 and 2014, according to data compiled by the Colorado Health Institute.
In nearby Pueblo County, heroin-specific overdose deaths rose dramatically from five between 2002 and 2004 to 26 between 2012 and 2014, state health department statistics show.
The DEA considers Pueblo and the Denver area the two most concentrated areas of heroin distribution in the state. The heroin in Pueblo, which authorities say probably plays a role in the drug’s spread through the Lower Arkansas Valley, is considered by some users and treatment counselors to be more pure and potent than the heroin in Denver.
“It’s always been the strong stuff; Pueblo has always gotten it. That’s the same stuff that’s come through here,” said Geoff Gohen, a recovering addict and a substance abuse counselor at Resada in Las Animas, extreme southeast Colorado’s only inpatient drug and alcohol abuse treatment center.
“When you think of our communities, oftentimes if we need tile for our house or any of that stuff, the nearest place to get it is Pueblo,” said Sam Zordel, sheriff in Prowers County. “If you think of the people who will drive the two hours for that type of shopping, imagine what they are going to do for drugs.”
Last fall, Southeast Health Group installed a billboard along the heavily traveled highway U.S. 50. As drivers leave Pueblo and enter Otero County, they pass by the group’s message: “Problem with injecting drugs…. WE CAN HELP.”
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Heroin’s introduction into the valley was quick, authorities and former users say, hopscotching east from the town of Manzanola, which has a population of about 400. It then hit its bigger neighbor Rocky Ford before moving into La Junta and Las Animas.
Eventually, heroin made its way along U.S. 50 to Prowers County and Lamar.
“There was nothing of that magnitude, no heroin to be found in the area,” said Eric Gronemeyer, a recovering addict who serves as a peer drug counselor at Southeast Health Group. “All of the sudden in the summer of 2012 and 2013, it just exploded.”
Gronemeyer said the increase since then has been nonstop.
“The epidemic has gotten bad in this valley,” he said.
Law enforcement and drug counselors say the influx of heroin happened much like elsewhere in the country: As the availability of prescription opiates declined, heroin slid into its place.
“Five, six years back, everyone was doing pills,” Gronemeyer said in an interview at Southeast’s renovated wellness center in La Junta. “They were cheap. They were on deck all the time. … That dried up completely, and everybody was doing heroin.”
In Lamar, Sharon Headrick, vice president of behavioral health services and a substance abuse counselor at High Plains Community Health Center, said she has seen the same trend.
“They started out with pain pills for one reason or another,” she explained. “Then when those pills weren’t available anymore, heroin is very available on the streets here.”
When addicts know where to look, “it’s very easy for a drug user walking on the street and looking for a like-minded person,” Gohen said of heroin’s availability in the valley. “It’s no different than walking down the 16th Street Mall in Denver and looking for a homeless person selling dope.”
In Otero County, two deaths have been attributed in part to heroin since January 2014. One was a man found slumped over in a Rocky Ford home with a puncture mark at the elbow on his left arm who was surrounded by syringes. The other was a woman who overdosed on a mixture of heroin and meth at a trailer park in La Junta.
Coroner Robert Fowler says he has also completed autopsies on four other known heroin users over that span, one of whom died of mixed opioid drugs, another of mixed drug intoxication and a third from morphine toxicity. The fourth died of suicide but had the opiate hydrocodone in her system.
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Some in the valley have had trouble seeking help because of the stigma attached to addiction, said Diana Mann, Resada’s clinical supervisor. Since the community is so tight-knit — Otero, Bent and Prowers counties combined have about 36,000 residents — it can be hard to hide a drug dependence or ask for help.
“We don’t have the resources in our communities, because we’re not big communities, to weather that,” said Sheriff Zordel, whose department has just nine officers. “We don’t have a population of addiction counselors. We don’t have the mental health professionals to come out.”
Many first responders are seeing more heroin overdose calls and regularly carry the opiate antidote Narcan.
“Over the last four or five years, we’ve certainly seen periods we’ve used Narcan a great deal,” said John Spano, director of the Bent County Ambulance Service.
Chief Jeremy Burkhart, of the Lamar Fire Department, said heroin overdoses have accounted for about a third of all his agency’s overdose calls over the past four years. There were five heroin overdose calls in his town of about 7,500 between July 2015 and the end of last month, he said.
“We’ve had a couple of instances where we’ve issued Narcan and they’ve come out fighting because we robbed them of a $35 high,” Burkhart said.
A handful of heroin users have also overdosed more than once, he said.
More recently, the Rocky Ford Ambulance Service was called out on reports of a heroin overdose in May. First responders used Narcan to save a person’s life, said Ray Gonzales, chief of the town’s fire department.
“It appeared to be a gathering where everybody was getting together and injecting heroin,” Gonzales said.
In the town of Holly, which has a population of about 800 and sits roughly five miles from the Kansas border, the volunteer ambulance service took a call last spring and ended up finding their patient dead upon their arrival. Teri Hetrick, chief of Holly Volunteer Ambulance, said first responders didn’t immediately know what caused the death, but eventually learned it was heroin.
“It was (shocking),” Hetrick said. “It was a tough call.”
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Substance abuse counselors say they don’t have a nearby needle exchange or a clinic with drugs for heroin treatment at their disposal. The nearest access to those is in Pueblo, whose resources are already said to be stretched thin, or in western Kansas.
Roughly a year ago, a Suboxone — a narcotic pain reliever — program at High Plains Community Health Center had to be shut down because, in part, some patients were selling their medication on the street.
The Arkansas Valley Regional Medical Center says the increase in area heroin usage has led to a jump in emergency room visits.
“We are busier,” said Carrie Cutrell, the hospital’s chief nursing officer. Cutrell said her staff has seen everything from opioid-induced constipation to infections and abscesses at injection sites.
This spring, the Otero County Department of Human Services was called out three times in a week for three different babies who tested positive for drugs — a mixture of methamphetamine and opiates — and were born into different families.
Children showing signs of heroin or other opiate exposure, which officials say have been on the rise over the past few years, are taken from their parents. The uptick has created a strain on the small department’s workload.
Adding to the problem is that newborns with drug exposure have to be transferred to Denver or Colorado Springs with neonatal intensive care units. Their parents are often sent to treatment in those Front Range areas, which means staff must spend hours transporting clients.
“We only have eight caseworkers here,” said Cece Zavala, a caseworker. “If you have just one of two people running out of county doing visits with kids, that puts quite a burden on the workers that are left behind.”
She added: “I think we’re feeling quite the crunch.”
Amy Brewer, Otero County’s child welfare manager, said in one case, a child lost their mother to an overdose.
“For me, one of the hardest parts of the job is going to the hospital and seeing kids who are born with tremors,” Zavala said. “It’s just a really, really hard thing.”
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Heroin’s rise in small-town America is especially troubling because of how ingrained the drug can become in communities.
“In rural areas, the problem is especially severe because there is less access to addiction treatment,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a heroin expert based in New York City who is the director and co-founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. “If people with opioid addiction don’t get treatment, they will continue using opioids and heroin will keep flowing in.”
He says the nation is facing its worst drug epidemic in its history.
“We have to prevent new people from getting addicted,” Kolodny said. “That’s the way to stem the flow of heroin.”
Law enforcement staffers in the Lower Arkansas Valley say they’re working to collaborate with social service agencies, hospitals, probation departments and courts.
“We realize it’s not just a law enforcement problem,” Sheriff Mobley said in his La Junta office. “It’s a community problem.”
Officials realize, too, that they can’t halt heroin’s spread overnight. In Otero and Bent counties, prosecutors and law enforcement leaders are bolstering their 16th Judicial District Drug Task Force. A January operation by the group netted 16 arrests.
“Getting the resources to go out, it takes a long time,” said Bent County Sheriff Dave Encinas. “I don’t have anybody designated to work on the narcotics. I did send a deputy to some training, but he’s still new and getting involved in it. These things are tough.”
Encinas said his department’s low pay usually limits deputies to stay only about three years. He has taken efforts to retain his force, but the pull of larger departments with deeper pockets is tough to match.
“We’re trying to slow it down,” Encinas said of the drug trade. “We’re probably not going to ever stop it.”
Updated Nov. 14, 2016 at 10 a.m.: The following corrected information has been updated in this article: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a heroin expert based in New York City who is the director and co-founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. His name is Dr. Andrew Kolodny.
