Heroin arrests rise across Nassau

With fewer than 50 people in attendance at a community forum at East Meadow High School last week, a Nassau County Police Department detective unveiled statistics showing that heroin use continues to rise.
   
As of April 7, there had been 176 heroin-related arrests in Nassau County this year. That is an increase of more than 40 percent over the same period in 2009, when 125 arrests were made. There were a total of 374 heroin-related arrests in the county in 2009.
   
Eight of this year’s arrests have been in East Meadow. Eight were recorded in Merrick, and five in Bellmore. More than half of the arrests so far this year have involved people in their late teens and 20s.
   
“We have made this our number one priority in the police department,” NCPDP Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey said. “It’s poisoning our kids. We have children just wasting their lives away because of the heroin situation.”
   
Mulvey spoke at an event called Too Good for Drugs, a touring police program hosted by Legislator Norma Gonsalves and Detectives Bill Flanagan and Gary Shapiro on April 7 in the EMHS auditorium. The commissioner said that last year’s heroin arrest total was a record for Nassau County. And based on the first four months of 2010, the county is on pace to beat that total.
   
Though law enforcement resources have been added to the fight against heroin, the epidemic has brought about an increase in other criminal acts such as residential burglaries, robberies and break-ins, the police explained.
   
“This problem is the biggest problem in Nassau County,” Mulvey said. “It’s driving crime.”
  
In the burglaries and robberies committed by drug addicts, police say, the targets are often prescription medications. Opiate-based painkillers like Vicodin and Oxycontin are popular. To limit the availability of those drugs, which are coveted by dealers and users alike, police began inviting people to anonymously drop off unneeded medications with no questions asked.