Meth ‘storming back’ in county, region
WEST CHESTER >> Methamphetamine trafficking and use is making a return of sorts across the country, and law enforcement sources at a press conference held Wednesday by District Attorney Tom Hogan say the situation in Chester County area is no different.
“Crystal meth is coming storming back in the region,” Hogan told reporters, noting its “potent and pure” quality and cheap cost for dealers as it makes its way from the southern border to the Northeast U.S. “Crystal has flooded southeaster Pennsylvania. The market is being flooded by the Mexican cartels with this product.”
“We are sounding he alarm bells now,” the DA said, flanked by two southern Chester County police chiefs and a representative of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), as well as the head of the District Attorney’s Drug Unit. “We need the public to get ready for it.”
Hogan said his drug investigators had begun to notice an uptick in the trafficking of methamphetamine for the past year or so, but also that they had noticed that the quality and potency of the drug was high and the price relatively low. He said cartels across the southern border were able to produce a strain of the drug that is purer that te “biker meth” of the past, and that those organizations were pushing its sale in the United States as a counter to heroin and opioids, the use of which have been flat-lining recently.
“They are pushing it at a very, very low price,” hoping to create a market by creating addicts among drug users, Hogan told reporters at the conference. “it’s like Big Pharma.” Where in the early 2000s a kilogram of the drug would cost between $46,000 and
$48,000, today it can be purchased in pure form for
$10,000, he said. Hogan’s comments, echoed by Laura Hendrick of the DEA, mirror what was discussed at a recent hearing in Harrisburg about the rise in methamphetamine trafficking across the state.
Jennifer Smith, secretary for the state Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs, told a state Senate committee in March that the state is seeing “quite an uptick” in both cocaine and methamphetamine use in three early warning areas — the Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Johnstown areas.
“We kind of knew it was coming, we just didn’t know how quickly that trend was going to start shifting across the state,” Smith said in an interview with the Associated Press.
Law enforcement seizures, police tracking of sales and reports from people needing medical treatment also point to growing use of cocaine and meth in Pennsylvania, Smith said. In October, the U.S. attorney’s office in Pittsburgh reported the largest seizure of methamphetamine in the history of western Pennsylvania.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency reported in October a concern that methamphetamine and cocaine use are being seen at much higher levels in areas that haven’t historically been hotspots for those drugs.
“Cocaine and methamphetamine are definitely on the rise,” U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency spokesman Rusty Payne told the AP.
Hogan, at the press conference held in the Chester County Justice Center, referenced what he called a “medium sized case” that pointed to the burgeoning presence of methamphetamine in the county.
In February and March, a confidential informant working with the Chester County Drug Strike Force made purchases of both cocaine and, in increasing amounts, methamphetamine from a Reading man, identified as Ruben Vargas Santilla.
Hogan said Santilla, a Mexican national in the country without documentation, would travel from his home in Reading to southern Chester County to make the drug transactions. The four buys all took place in New Garden.
On March 25, Vargas Santillia was stopped by police, including Chester County detective Oscar Rosado while driving his car. Inside, police found 11 bags of methamphetamine, each weighing an ounce. When authorities searched his home in Reading, they found a variety ofdrug paraphernalia, as well as 7 ounces of meth, 8 pounds of marijuana, and some cocaine.