Editor’s note: This is the second installment in the Stowe Reporter’s series about opiate abuse in Lamoille County and its social impacts. It was written by Tommy Gardner and first published in the Reporter on Feb. 13, 2014. (The first story can be found here.)
Last month, Eric Breyette celebrated one year of sobriety. The next day, he went to jail.
This isn’t Breyette’s first time in lockup, but the 60-day sentence is his longest stint, the result of violating an abuse prevention order against his ex-fiancée, the mother of his child he hasn’t seen in over a year. Sobriety and a yearning for his son have him convinced this will be his last time in jail.
“I miss my son with all my heart,” Breyette said in an interview in late January, just a few days before he began his term. “That’s my drive to stay sober. That’s my drive for everything I’m going through now.”
Breyette is not alone in his desire to stay clean. Opiate addiction, and the related crimes it drives, has clogged Vermont’s courts and jails. State officials are launching new initiatives aimed at keeping addicts out of jail and giving them the treatment they need.
Breyette started smoking marijuana when he was 9 years old, and the list of drugs he has smoked, popped, snorted and shot up is a lengthy one. The 27-year-old Johnson man said he would chew up handfuls of Percocets and Vicodin, and could blow through $5,000 worth of crack cocaine in a week. He’d routinely drink a case of beer in a night, chased with rum.
When he started his love affair with the needle, he’d fill it with whatever he could, shooting all manner of painkillers, heroin and drugs meant to get people off heroin, like Suboxone and methadone.
Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Breyette has extreme shakes. During the interview, he held out his arm and it flapped up and down like he was trying to fan a flame. He had a friend do the needlework for him, and he took to heroin with gusto.
“It all came to a head for me really fast,” he said. “I never slowly used. When I started, people were shooting me up, and we’d be sitting in a circle, and I’d be, you know, falling on the ground because I couldn’t stand up because I’d shot so much up.”
Abuse such a variety of drugs long enough, and there’s a good chance you’ll end up on the wrong side of the law, and Breyette’s rap sheet finally caught up with him. Some of the incidents are detailed in affidavits from different Lamoille County-area police departments.
In 2007, he took an ex-girlfriend’s car and brushed up against her with it. In 2008, he broke into a Johnson trailer and stole a TV and DVD player in order to sell them for drug money. Later that year, he violated a restraining order, barely after the ink was dry on the order. He was slapped with another violation of abuse order on Halloween in 2012.
The turning point for Breyette came in December 2012, the last time he used the needle. Ironically, it wasn’t hard drugs he used, because he was all out. But he did have a bottle of his favorite beverage, 100-proof Captain Morgan rum, and he mainlined the liquor, shaky hands and all.
“The way I shake, and trying to do it myself, I had like 15 holes in my arm trying to find a vein,” he said.
Lamoille drug scene
Breyette said heroin and opiates are as easy to find in Lamoille County as marijuana.
“I’ve been out of the game for over a year now, and if I wanted to go out and buy some pills or buy some heroin, I’d probably have it within three hours,” he said.
Lamoille County Sheriff Roger Marcoux said there are certainly drugs out there, judging by recent busts. A bag, or a typical dose of heroin, is about 25-40 milligrams of the drug. And dealers are getting busted with thousands of bags at a time in Vermont.
The problem, Marcoux said, is that while a bust may get one drug dealer off the streets for a while, there are others to fill the void. And remember, he said, that bust was just one delivery. Many dealers make regular trips up interstates 89 and 91.
Marcoux said law enforcement needs to be more proactive about ferreting out drugs coming into Vermont from other states.
“There is a massive, massive amount of heroin coming in from the cities, and we have to stop that coming in,” he said.
There are copious prescription drugs out there, too. Marcoux said the most recent statewide drug take-back day netted over 3,000 pounds of pills.
“That gives you an idea” of how much drugs are out there, he said. “And those are the people who are actually turning the drugs in.”
Paul Duquette, a former Newport police chief and original member of the Vermont Drug Task Force, said a troubling trend is a kind of “super heroin,” which dealers or chemists are cutting with fentanyl, a powerful painkiller. Heroin dealers often cut their products with anything from aspirin to lactose powder to maximize profits and dilute the purity of the drug. But fentanyl instead boosts the effect. He said there were three recent overdoses from fentanyl-laced heroin in Addison County, but it has not made its way into Lamoille County.
It begs the question, Duquette says: “Is that someone trying to make a super heroin, or some vigilante trying to get rid of junkies?”
Marcoux and Duquette said cities like Burlington and Rutland, St. Albans and St. Johnsbury are rife with opiates and heroin, and it’s a seller’s market for dealers moving product up from cities like Lowell and Lawrence, New York and Boston. Down there, dealers get five bucks a bag, but they can sell bags for as much as $30 each up here.
Breyette said the rural nature of Lamoille County makes the illicit drug trade arguably more dangerous, because dealers have learned to be patient, cautious and better organized. He said he’s been in a few hairy situations, too.
“This may be backwoods Vermont … but a Glock looks like a Glock, and ‘click click’ is still the scariest sound in the world,” he said. “Anybody who tells you they weren’t afraid at that point and time is either in the Army and been to war, or lying.”
Rapid intervention
Breyette is an example of opiate users who inevitably “put in a lot of miles in the criminal justice system,” according to Marcoux.
But there are statewide and county-wide efforts to steer low-level offenders out of the courts’ revolving doors and toward more social services. In Lamoille County, there is the recently-announced “Rapid Intervention for Community Change,” or RICC program.
According to Lamoille County State’s Attorney Joel Page, RICC focuses on using public health strategies, providing rapid access to treatment and using more science-based risk assessments, while making sure perpetrators repair the harm they caused victims. He said it also saves taxpayers money. It is designed for repeat offenders who commit non-violent misdemeanor offenses.
In announcing the RICC program Jan. 31, Page said he believes “a quick response will be more successful than a delayed response, that we should ‘strike while the iron is hot.’”
Upward of 33 percent of people entering the Lamoille County Court Diversion are addicted to opiates, according to program director Rebecca Penberthy. The organization spends at least an hour with every new referral, and Penberthy said during the course of their talks, the referrals open up about their drug use. She believes that over the past decade the pendulum has shifted from alcohol abuse to opiate abuse, with more prescription drugs than heroin being used.
Penberthy said court diversion workers are often the first people to whom offenders admit having a drug problem, before their friends or families. And, sometimes, young people come in charged with something that would not typically be linked to drug abuse.
“Sometimes you’re just waiting for someone to ask you,” Penberthy said. “They’ve never had people ask these questions before.”
