Former addict tells his story on ‘The Heroin Road’
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Among the many comments Times Staff Writer Sam Quinones received about ‘The Heroin Road,’ the series detailing the effects of the supply chain of black tar heroin from Xalisco, Mexico, to small-town America, was the account of a former heroin addict. The former addict, who asked for anonymity, said he was arrested in a DEA sweep and forced to plead guilty to drug trafficking charges though he was only a small-time daily user of the drug. Here’s his story:
I recently was forwarded a copy of your article regarding the new rising black tar heroin epidemic and its corresponding business model. I was one of more than a hundred people indicted as part of the DEA’s Operation Black Gold Rush (targeting Xalisco dealers) in 2006 in federal court and sent to federal prison.
What I want to draw your attention to, however, as a bastion of an institution once known as the watchdog of the government (free press), is that I am not Mexican nor was I a heroin dealer. I was a white, middle class part-time college student who became a heroin addict. My habit consisted of $50 a day, and at no point did I engage in any sales. I was one of the ‘customers’ only. However, when a lot of money is spent on an investigation, and it turns out to not be connected to some super-massive and nefarious cartel, someone must answer, and there must be bodies to parade in front of the public. I was a heroin addict. Yet because of the way federal ‘conspiracy’ law is written, you are guilty of any crimes committed by those you associated with. This is clearly not the wording the law uses, but it is the jist. I believe they use the term ‘reasonable foreseeable knowledge’. In other words, I was incarcerated and labeled with a drug trafficking charge for being a small-time daily user, with no interest in selling the drug.
You are forced to plead guilty to a crime you did not commit. I fully acknowledge that I broke the law and deserved punishment. I bought and used heroin every single day. But I did not commit the crime I pled guilty to. I pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute 100 grams of heroin. The federal government conceded that I have never in my life seen a quantity of heroin even approaching 100 grams, much less sold it. This was irrelevant by the letter of their law. My choices? Plead guilty to a crime that I did not commit and receive 15 months in prison, or go to trial facing 10 years to life if I lost. What would you do? Clearly I took the 15 months.
This is a very important social justice deficiency that resulted from massive investigations (funded by taxpayer dollars) that yielded only a few farm boys from Mexico, and not cartel deep channels like they had hoped.
As to the day to day of the operations (at least from a customer’s perspective) your account was very accurate, so your research must have been thorough. You mentioned free heroin for bringing in new customers, which I was never specifically aware of. But one interesting point is that if you had no money for that day, they would give you your drugs free for that day, knowing you would come back tomorrow. They just couldn’t take the chance that you would enter rehab or go ahead and kick the habit, and they were smart enough to have their eye on future sales, so they would give you enough of the drug to stave off dope sickness to allow you to continue being a valued customer.
On a personal level, I feel it’s interesting to note that these guys did not feel like drug dealers. One I dealt with often spoke of his daughters, another time a driver helped me to jump start my car. These were simply men doing whatever they could to support families back in Mexico. They were not rich nor were they violent. In jail, I spent many hours playing cards with another guy and realized that he was but a confused young man seeking to make a way for himself in the world. Not a maniacal, hand-wringing drug dealer bent on the destruction of society. He was the driver who jump started my car, and in jail I shared my ramen noodles and phone cards with him. Just two men trying to get by.
Today I am clean of heroin. I am entering my senior year in my coursework toward a bachelor’s degree in Social Work, which I hope to use to help others lost, marginalized and disenfranchised as I was. But as a proponent of social justice, I have dedicated myself to raising awareness that people are incarcerated by the federal government everyday for simply being drug users. It is a numbers/money/political game, and too many individuals receive prison time instead of the treatment and services that they actually need to rehabilitate and return productively to society.
Thank you for the well written and well researched article.