It’s a Dope Game

May 12, 2023 Rob Taylor

It’s a Dope Game

By: Captain Sean Sanborn

Drugs in our community are a problem, not a small problem, but a big problem. There is so much frustration in our community surrounding the drug crisis. And it is a crisis; people in our community are dying from drug overdoses at an alarming rate. Where once we dealt primarily with methamphetamines, fentanyl is prevalent in almost every drug investigation we partake in today. We often get asked at the Coos County Sheriff’s Office: What are you doing about it?

The Coos County Sheriff’s Office is the parent agency of the South Coast Interagency Narcotics Team (SCINT). The team is directed by a Detective Sergeant from the Sheriff’s Office, and other agencies participate in specified operations in their communities. Our Detective Sergeant works tirelessly to look for the drug dealers in the community and build cases against them. However, as time passes, case law or legislation removes more of our tools. Measure 110 limits our ability to investigate these types of crimes. Measure 110 decriminalized possession of controlled substances. Small amounts of drugs such as cocaine and heroin, which equate to several drug doses, are considered a “user” amount. Many would correctly point out that Measure 110 focuses on the users, not the dealers. What those people lack an understanding of is how a drug case used to be typically built. Measure 110 decriminalized drugs to a class E violation, a $99 fine. To put this into perspective, if a person is driving 70 miles per hour in a 55-mile-per-hour zone, the fine is $165.00 should that person be cited.

Any investigation is built from the floor up. It is rare to find the suspect before one knows that a crime has occurred. When one looks at a drug investigation, the initial crime, in the traditional sense, was the user. A suspect was found to be in possession of a controlled substance. Logically, we knew the drugs had to come from somewhere, so we would use various prosecutorial and investigative tools to obtain that information from the user. Often people are signed up as confidential informants or CI’s. These individuals provide law enforcement with information or conduct controlled buys from people suspected of dealing drugs. In this manner, law enforcement would attempt to track the drugs to their source and stop it there. Often, this is done with the assistance of federal partners such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Since the passage of Measure 110, that traditional model is gone. Indeed, we still use CI’s; however, the pool of people who can be utilized in that capacity has significantly diminished. As a result, the difficulty in building these cases has increased dramatically. Many folks may say that it is easy because it is everywhere. Those folks are right, it is everywhere, but we can only request a search warrant when we have probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed. This does not apply to violations. We must articulate that the individual in question does not only have a user amount of an illicit substance but a criminal quantity.

Yet another difficulty is funding these operations. They are often lengthy, and the investigator must work when these crimes occur, which means long and diverse hours. SCINT is not funded out of the general fund, other than personnel costs associated with the Detective

Sergeant and overtime for the other Deputies we pull in to assist with the investigations. The investigations are funded solely out of seizures and grants which support the investigations and operations of that organization. There is federal funding such as the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) Program which funnels federal dollars through local teams for training and other purposes. However, HIDTA is limited to certain areas in Oregon, primarily the I5 corridor and some areas along the Idaho border. While we are working to show that the Highway 101 corridor should also be a HIDTA area as it runs between Oregon, Washington, and California, we have been met with roadblocks at nearly every step.

SCINT is effectively working on a shoestring budget. The Coos County Sheriff’s Office is the sole provider of monetary resources for the program outside of grants and seizures. Of note, the Coquille Community Tribal Fund recently provided a very generous grant to SCINT. But meanwhile, the crisis grows. Since May of 2022, eight people have died in our community of a suspected or verified overdose. Of those eight, six were given multiple doses of Naloxone, also called Narcan. There have been 44 people suspected of overdose who survived without Narcan, 21 who survived with a single dose of Narcan, 61 who survived with multiple doses of Narcan, and four we just aren’t sure about. That is 136 people who stood at death’s door, either fell over the precipice or lived. These are just the cases we know about. Many overdose cases go unreported due to the wide availability of Narcan to the public. One day, three people died in a single day due to a drug overdose.

The drug problem is prevalent in our community, it is here, and it is not a joke. These drugs are becoming available to our children and killing our family and friends. I assure you that we are doing everything that we can. However, our resources are limited, and we are making way too little stretch way too far. Therefore, I share this information to educate and relay facts to share understanding. While it is a dope game, it is not a game at all.