Law Enforcement Racks Up Some Wins as Community Continues to Embrace Drugs

By Kenneth C. Rossignol
ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN — For the past twenty years this newspaper has chronicled the activities of both local drug dealers and law enforcement efforts throughout Southern Maryland.
The advent of crack cocaine, a cheap by-product of powered cocaine, produced a fresh enslavement of large numbers of the black population during the 1980’s and by the end of that decade, a significant number of white residents joined in on the thrill seeking which came from smoking the drug in pipes, often fashioned from soft drink or beer cans.
As the druggies of Southern Maryland grew or bought pot, often laced with PCP, drug dealers brought cocaine to the area from points south, via air, land and sea.
But most often, the point of entry was by way of the highways from the DC and Baltimore areas.
Some of the drug dealer gangs brought drugs up from the Southern states in a variety of ways, from hidden in the tailgates of pickup trucks, concealed in tractor-trailers or simply mixed in with gear inside of motorcycle trailers.
Most of the arrests, until the past three years, have been of small time street dealers.
In the last few years, more efforts have been made in St. Mary’s than at any time in the past.
The cooperation between the Maryland State Police and the St. Mary’s Sheriff’s Department has been essential to turning the tide in favor of the law and against the drug dealers. These two agencies in turn have linked with federal agencies and other Maryland counties to form task forces which have been able to become even more sophisticated than the dealers.
While the law enforcement agencies have been gearing up to target dealers of heroin, cocaine and marijuana as well as meth, a huge new challenge in the form of prescription drugs, pain killers and anti-depressants, have been marketed straight from drugstores and medicine cabinets with individual pills selling for as much as $100 each depending on the type.
Brazen robberies of pharmacies have taken place in Lusby, Waldorf and Hollywood as robbers have hit hard to gain drugs.
The lax security of such stores has offered little in the way of digital camera technology, which is relatively inexpensive, to safeguard the huge dollar value of drugs kept in a typical pharmacy. Perhaps no one has written a prescription to the pharmacy owners in the form of a legal requirement for basic security in order to sell drugs.
Efforts of the sheriffs of Calvert, Charles and St. Mary’s have varied along with the personalities of those who have held the elected law enforcement positions over the past twenty years.
In Calvert, the focus of law enforcement on combating drug dealing has been fairly consistent through the terms of Sheriff’s L. C. “Bootsie” Stinnett, Vonzell Ward, Rodney Bartlett and current Sheriff Mike Evans.
In Charles, both Sheriff Jim Gartland and Sheriff Freddie Davis, who took office in 1994, put a high priority on locking up drug dealers. Sheriff Rex Coffey spent a significant part of his career as a narcotics officer and still has the orientation of that experience. Davis had retired from a career with the Maryland State Police before being elected to three terms as Charles Sheriff and like Coffey, was an experienced narcotics commander.
With Rt. 301 weaving through Charles County, that agency has had the opportunity to nail large quantities in a single stop such as the $41 million in cocaine carried in the sleeper compartment of a truck traveling without a trailer who ran a red light in Waldorf in the wee hours of a winter morning.
When the Charles County patrol officer who stopped the truck to issue a citation for running the red light checked on the status of the truck driver, he found that the man’s license was suspended triggering both his arrest and a search of the truck which revealed the huge stash of cocaine.
St. Mary’s Sheriff Tim Cameron came to lead the department without any significant experience in narcotics but unlike his three predecessors, has put forth the most effort and reaped the most results in narcotics enforcement in the past 30 years.
Sheriff Wayne Pettit assigned few resources to narcotics with the lone exception of bringing in a new undercover officer who racked up the most arrests in an operation which set the high water mark for 20 years for the most convictions as a result of one operation.
Sheriff’s Richard Voorhaar and David Zylak were lackluster performers in narcotics interdiction, leaving a large group of drug dealers in business for much of the past 20 years. But Cameron assigned an aggressive narcotics commander to lead the joint task force with the Maryland State Police and the number of arrests of serious drug dealers has begun to approach historic proportions.
Yet another long term drug dealer in St. Mary’s, Buck Shade, was sentenced on Thursday to 13 years in federal prison.
Much of the credit for the extra resources being thrown at the drug dealers comes from an unlikely source: the combination of the Clinton Administration’s Cops Program and the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas legislation which created police task forces in the nation’s metropolitan areas. In this region, Congressman Steny Hoyer had the DC HIDTA expanded to include Southern Maryland.
Federal prosecutors also came in to play, willing to apply federal statutes to drug dealers who had been operating all through the region, often across state lines.
The result in St. Mary’s County has been impressive as the lead-in time for investigations over the past three years has resulted in dozens of arrests and now meaningful convictions for long time drug dealers.
When Richard Fritz, then a former prosecutor, ran against St. Mary’s States Attorney Walter B. Dorsey in the 1994 Democratic Primary, and lost, he ran on a platform of taking drug dealers off the street.
Fritz won the post in 1998 and has continued to run on a platform of taking drug dealers off the street, but now the same drug dealers who were in business when Fritz was a prosecutor and then hired him as a lawyer when he was in private practice, were still flourishing while Fritz was in the top job as States Attorney.
Police officials say that Fritz was not intentionally bypassed by police but that he told them to go ahead with federal prosecution due to the tougher sentencing and non-parole standards versus the liberal treatment in Maryland courts where typically a judge will reconsider a sentence within a month or two of sending a drug dealer to prison.
Others speculate that Fritz was kept out of the loop and point to his years of inaction at following through on campaign promises to crack down on drug dealers, with the long careers of Wendell Ford, Junior Maddox and dozens of others cited as examples.
Now federal prosecutors have been locking these career drug dealers up and throwing away the key.
The commitment of Sheriff Cameron to treat drug trafficking as the serious threat to the community that it truly is, has resulted in the druggie community becoming paranoid about who they are dealing with and affecting both the supply and prices of the illegal commodities.
The area is still infested with drugs which seem to be the proverbial ‘opiate of the masses’. How the economic Great Recession will affect the use and sale of illegal drugs in this area as well as the marketing of prescription drugs, remains to be seen.
Among those who favor welfare as a lifetime commitment to avoiding work, drugs play a large role in their lives.
Among the middle and upper middle class, drug use, especially prescription drugs and cocaine continue to have a strong attraction.
For children who are exposed to D.A.R.E. and other programs; if they work, good, but there are now thousands of graduates of the programs who have become drug users. Would more of them become druggies had these education programs not been available in schools? Perhaps.
The committed pot smokers continue to run political action groups pushing for the legalization of marijuana and some want the war on drugs abandoned and allow a free for all in the nation.
The evidence of what illegal drugs has done to society in general and St. Mary’s County in particular is staggering, that the use and sale of drugs have led to increased crime, especially burglaries and theft to pay for the drugs.
Suicides, murder, and a complete and total loss of vast numbers of the potential members of society contributing in their own unique way to the world have been the result of intense drug use.
Crack cocaine has been deadly as it is cheap and easy to use giving deadly high and is highly addictive, a perfect drug for those in the trade to use to enslave a generation.
The hard core white and black underworld have adopted crack as their drug of choice while so called recreational drug users of the middle class have gone after the various prescription drugs that they can simply steal out of the medicine cabinets of their families and friends or obtain multiple prescriptions with insurance paying the cost.
The wealthy live in their own world and obtaining drugs has never been difficult for them.
Treatment of drug users has been a hit and miss proposition with the unfortunate conclusion arrived at by many who have dealt with family members in rehab centers is that often, far too often, rehab does no good at all.
While local drug dealers have been targeted, the out of town drug dealer who rolls into the area in just a couple days from Texas, such as took place last year when one such dealer was nabbed with a large quantity of marijuana at the A & E Motel in Lexington Park, continue to freelance and set up shop.
The bottom line is that there is an insatiable appetite for drugs by large segments of the local population with poorly educated whites and blacks a virtual gold mine of opportunity for drug dealers.
Most of the source of funds for their drug buys comes from crime and the effort for police in dealing with drugs starts with dealing with thefts.
Brazen thieves such as one who rolled up to the John Deere dealer in Dameron recently and loaded up a brand new lawn tractor from the front display points out the need for police patrol units and more security for businesses.
Often crimes such as the theft of power tools from trucks or garages and sheds result in the stolen item being sold for enough to buy a twenty dollar rock of crack cocaine.
The Walden Drug Counseling Center is heavily funded by the citizens of St. Mary’s County and it has evolved from a counseling center into a program with many facets including residential treatment. Over the years it has brought in clients from out of the area but local citizens do not realize that they are footing the bill for people from other jurisdictions.
As with many organizations, Walden has on occasion strayed from its principles. Two years ago, Walden was accepting money from illegal slot machine operations and at the same time running gambling addiction programs.
The alternative to operating programs that are of little effect on the problems of substance abuse is of course to do nothing. It would definitely be cheaper. The appearance of large numbers of bums walking the streets in Lexington Park panhandling and sometimes robbing shoppers exiting stores comes in spite of a homeless shelter being built. The shelter has rules against the use of drugs and alcohol and the bums don’t like rules and set up hobo camps in the woods right in the middle of Lexington Park.
Since mental hospitals were emptied of patients by those concerned about their rights and after many occasions where state run mental facilities couldn’t manage to keep from abusing patients, these crazy folks join the bums in their camps, causing a further strain on ambulance calls and police services.
For now, a full court press by the Maryland State Police and St. Mary’s Sheriff Tim Cameron is on against the illegal drug trade but the population at large continues to desire drugs and a supply will always be created to quench that demand.
The complete and total acceptance of drug use has faded from the days that a booze and drug event spanned an entire weekend and local lawyers, police and prosecutors all showed up at the annual Bucksnorts campout and drugfest. The organization seems to have died out or perhaps its leaders have died of overdoses. But the acceptance in local society of such a cesspool of culture has waned from its heydays.
The role of druggies who work as helpers for tradesmen cannot be understated.
These druggies rip off unsuspecting home owners when they come to homes to provide assistance in installation of siding, plumbing, roofing or virtually any work contracted for homeowners.
Arriving smiling and happy in the day as they assist with painting and carpentry or installing swimming pools, they often return at night when no one is home to burglarize and steal.
The role that these druggies play in burglaries is incredible. With such tools as google or access to Maryland Judiciary case search, homeowners should ask their contractors for the complete name and date of birth of their helpers and run criminal background checks themselves prior to allowing a contractor to be in their homes.
Of course, a barking dog is the ultra enemy of miscreants and burglars.
Lighting up ones home, even with low energy bulbs, locking up vehicles and sheds and keeping a shotgun handy are the best deterrents to burglaries and assists in combating the drug scene.
The continuing diminishing of the work ethic in the nation, the advancing of the socialist welfare state and the success enjoyed by Democrats in keeping blacks as their voter servants will assure that drugs will be widely available.