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FORCED TO FIGHT Law enforcement grapples with opioids in Appalachia BY CORY VAILLANCOURT STAFF WRITER fter a routine surgery, Haywood County native Clayton Suggs ended up hooked on opioids until on the first day alone in his new apartment after a year of sobriety, his addiction eventually cost him his life. Addiction is a slippery slope easy to slide down, but difficult to surmount — especially in the face of the millions and millions of pills flooding nearly every county in the nation, according to a pill tracking database first published July 16 by The Washington Post. Suggs was forced to fight a battle he couldn’t win. Like Suggs, the nation’s law enforcement agencies are fighting that same battle from a different perspective, and fighting just about as hard as Suggs did. “You’ve got to have enforcement, because you’re going to save a few. You’ve got to have treatment, because you’re going to save a few. But we always ignore prevention,“ said retired DEA Agent and Waynesville native Joel Reece. “We’ve probably lost the better part of a generation. We can treat until the cows come home, but we’ve already lost the better part of a generation.”
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oel Reece has spent the better part of his life in law enforcement, specifically drug enforcement. He became a Waynesville police officer, like his father, in 1978. “It wasn’t too bad,” he said of local drug activity at the time. “It was normal traffic stuff, DUIs, burglaries. Drugs were starting, but it was mostly weed and a little coke then. It wasn’t nearly the things we’ve got today.” Reece said he had always wanted to work narcotics after seeing a few friends’ lives “ruined” by drugs, but while spending the next 12 years with the State Highway Patrol, he likewise didn’t come across major drug activity often. That all changed in 1990, when he joined the U.S Drug Enforcement Agency as a special agent in Texas. “We had heroin when I was in San Antonio. It was black tar. Ugly, stinky, nasty. I didn’t like working it,” he said. “They put it in balloons, carry it in their mouths or who knows where. It was an issue, but it was basically just confined to the real, real hard-core inner city, and you couldn’t work it. You’re not going to get an undercover in there.” It also had a very low social impact, so it wasn’t really a huge problem for most people. When Reece transferred to the DEA’s Nashville office in 1998, the illegal drug market was beginning to evolve. “When I got there, meth had just come east,” he said. “Nobody was prepared for that, because nobody was trained.” Right around that time, meth production, distribution and usage began to spike, especially in rural Appalachia. “Tennessee got hit very hard,” said Reece. 6
Smoky Mountain News
August 7-13, 2019
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“North Carolina, I suspect, got hit harder than they knew, but there just wasn’t anybody working it over here at that time, that early on.” Labs, he said, were popping up everywhere in Tennessee, especially in places like White County and Crossville, between Nashville and Knoxville. “One year, I think it would have been around 2000, we were in over 200 labs in a year,” Reece said. “For whatever reason, the mountains just attract meth people. We would leave in the lab truck literally to go hit one, and by the time we got in somebody was calling about another. You’d debrief some of the crooks, they tell you about another one. We’d get home a lot of times with the sun coming up. ‘Good times’ is probably a little odd to say, but, it was good times.” Cocaine was still an issue, but heroin and pills weren’t really on anybody in Tennessee’s radar — yet. At least, until Reece and his colleagues made what was at that time likely the largest undercover heroin purchase in Tennessee history. “Nobody had seen it there before,” he said. After four years in Nashville, Reece moved further east to Knoxville, in 2006, where he said heroin and opioid pill dealers were starting to become more and more common. “It had begun to raise its head a little,” he said, “but they were still small time. Coke was still king, and crack was still a huge problem. But it wasn’t really raising anybody’s antenna yet.” Although a small town, Knoxville’s proximity to one of the country’s major drug trafficking capitals made East Tennessee one of the most drug-addled regions in the country by 2006. “Atlanta, Georgia is as important as any city in the United States for the cartels,” he said. “Anywhere. If you don’t have the money to buy it, they will front it to you. Up to a kilo. We had 10 and 20-pound seizures, in Chattanooga, a lot of them headed this way. Nowadays, you don’t go out and get a case of beer and beat your chest after a 10-pound seizure.” In 2006, Reece was called to DEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he directed a section responsible for a $21 million global drug intercept program, and also engaged in some classified work. From there he was sent west, to the DEA’s New Orleans division, which encompasses parts of several nearby states. Based in Jackson, Mississippi, Reece directed all DEA operations in that state from 2008 through 2011. “While we were there, you kept seeing all the stuff about South Florida, the pill mills,” he said. “Pill mills” are pharmacies or physicians’ offices where addicts know they can score a
Number of pills distributed per person, per year Average yearly total, by county, 2006 through 2012 0
75
150+ pills
The Washington Post’s “opioid belt” doesn’t quite make it into Western North Carolina, but has ravaged East Tennessee. Washington Post map
Tennessee’s Cocke County – just across the Haywood County line – has about half as many people and twice as many pills per person as Haywood does. Washington Post graphic
