It’s an addiction that doesn’t discriminate among race, age or socioeconomic level. It can spread its
fingers into a variety of crimes.
And like the rest of the United States, Wood County is not immune.
Nationwide, the country is seeing a resurgence in heroin, a drug that found an eager audience in the
1990s but had largely faded away in the years since.
Now, it’s back in a big way.
Across the country, heroin use has been climbing steadily since 2007 among persons 12 or older, according
to a government study.
The drug is processed from morphine, which itself comes from poppy plants. It can be snorted, smoked or
injected, depending on the kind of heroin and its relative purity.
Bowling Green police saw a dramatic spike in heroin issues last year.
While between 2010 and 2012 total numbers of arrests or overdoses related to the drug were fewer than 10
per year, in 2013 there were 12 arrests – with eight of those being for trafficking in the substance –
and eight overdoses. One overdose was fatal.
In Wood County overall, there were 54 drug overdoses between 2007 and 2012, the latest date for which
statistics were available, according to the Ohio Department of Health.
“We’re just part of a national trend,” said Maj. Tony Hetrick of the Bowling Green Police Division. “I
think it’s everywhere. It’s impacted communities across the nation.”
Law enforcement officials interviewed for this story uniformly pointed to two reasons for the explosion
in heroin use: it is inexpensive to buy, and its abuse commonly evolves from prescription drug
addiction.
“Heroin’s cheap, it’s easy to get,” said Hetrick. “It all started with (prescription drugs like)
Oxycontin, Oxycodone. When those became available people began abusing them. They’re very potent
narcotics.”
“Then,” he continued, “the state started taking steps to eliminate or reduce the abuse of those kind of
prescription painkillers.”
Among the efforts: some of the drugs were reformulated so that they couldn’t be abused the same way in
the past. For instance, the pills would become a gummy paste if crushed, making a user unable to snort
it.
“The prices of those things went way up, heroin began to fill the void, and that’s why we have what we
have now.”
“Heroin, being a narcotic itself, gave the same effects,” Hetrick continued. “It’s much more insidious
though – prescription painkiller abuse is bad enough. But heroin, when you come to the point you’re
injecting something you buy on the street, it just tells you the power of the addiction.”
Hetrick noted that crimes related to heroin use are a constant problem for officers.
“The big-box stores are getting hit probably the hardest,” including so-called “pushout” incidents where
thieves will steal carts full of merchandise or a single big item.
“Most of that’s drug-related incidents that are happening. When we’ve caught those people, they’re
trading it for drugs.”
“We do what we can with what we have,” Hetrick said. “Right now we have three investigators. The officers
are aware of it. We’re finding (it) at traffic stops and the like. We’re working the trafficking of it
through the investigators. But it’s not something we can solve alone. Much like marijuana, it’s
pervasive, it’s everywhere. We’re only scratching the surface.”
He said the drug largely comes into Wood County from the Toledo area and noted the drug cartels bringing
heroin into the country have “major logistical operations that are just as good or even better than
chain stores.”
“Just think how hard that is to get into the root of.”
Chief Dan Paez of the Perrysburg Police Division said that Perrysburg hasn’t seen a “huge” increase in
heroin issues recently – the last big surge was over a decade ago – but “in the last 12 months, we have
had three overdoses, which is a significant amount.” At least one overdose resulted in death, he said.
Four people were charged with heroin possession within the past year.
Jamie Webb of the Wood County Sheriff’s Office said rural areas aren’t spared: “From the smallest
villages to our largest areas, there are people who are addicted to heroin who are committing crimes to
satisfy their addiction.”
He said crimes in the county – burglaries, thefts and the like, similar to those seen in Bowling Green –
are used by the addicts, who will sell or trade the items they steal in order to get the drug.
“The types of crimes they’re committing, we’re seeing more.”
North Baltimore Police Chief Allan Baer said that some particularly troubled addicts will start stealing
from their family, then their friends, and then their neighbors – people they feel will be less likely
to turn them in to the authorities.
Other use even more desperate methods. Just this month, Rossford police arrested a Toledo woman after an
apparent overdose behind the wheel of her car at Crossroads Parkway. She had reportedly been panhandling
with a sign reading “Family in Need of Help,” but police say she was actually feeding her drug habit
with what she was given. More than $900, as well as drug abuse instruments, were found at the scene,
some of it hidden in a Bible.
Webb said that the addiction “crosses all lines. Age, race, doesn’t matter, their socioeconomic status.”

He took note of incidents in which “we’ve actually had several with the same people, where they overdose,
they’re revived by EMS and they” overdose again.
Webb recounted one situation where the heroin user was caught and held in jail for a month, and then had
a fatal overdose right after the user’s release.
“For our office, it’s our number-one priority, attempting to identify those who are using and trafficking
in heroin.”
The problems of heroin don’t only affect adults.
“Over the course of the last year, we have seen an increase in the number of juveniles charged with
possession or use of heroin,” said Wood County Juvenile Court Judge David Woessner. The court generally
deals with children between the ages of 13 and 17.
“Typically, by the time they have come into court and are charged … it’s not unusual to find some
fairly lengthy history or pattern of substance abuse leading up to it. It’s not unusual to see they’ve
experimented with other types of drugs before they moved up to heroin, so to speak.”
“So it’s out there,” Woessner said later. “And from what we hear, it’s accessible to those who want to
find it.”
There may be light at the end of the tunnel.
Baer, who said North Baltimore began to see an uptick in heroin-related incidents about five years ago,
is currently seeing a decline in such crimes.
“We saw it in North Baltimore prior to everybody else,” he said, later calling it “a blight that we dealt
with. Our big year was ‘08.”
He said he couldn’t pinpoint a reason for why it started so early in the village, “but it seems to be
better now. Everybody in the community says that. A lot of our former addicts are being successful in
life, or are in prison. But it seems like the pendulum is swinging and things are better.”
He credited the drop in heroin crimes to “just very proactive enforcement of it, mainly on the crimes
they were committing to support their habits.”
Also, he noted a strong social network in the community, and court policies that recognized heroin issues
and sent perpetrators to drug counseling and other efforts.
“They’d get out and if they’d hit their personal rock bottom, they’d get out and try to change their
lives.”