CJ professors tackle issues surrounding heroin epidemic
Western Pennsylvania’s heroin problem goes beyond just dealers and users, according to Waynesburg University’s criminal justice professors.
Adam Jack, chairperson for the Criminal Justice and Social Sciences Department said drug abuse and distribution has always plagued America, but it is heroin’s widespread distribution that makes it so much more threatening.
“I want to make it very clear,” said Jack. “This isn’t always the person living on the street under the bridge. This is the person that has the $100,000 a year job, the steady work, or even the family at home. This affects everybody.”
It starts with the youth, and the lack of adequate education, said Jack-the slashing of popular school programs that used to lay out the costs at an early age.
Michael Cipoletti, assistant professor of forensic science, agrees; it’s what happens when kids don’t have the opportunity to learn.
“I’m worried about it on a personal level because of my kids’ age,” said Cipoletti, who has children in their early teens. “And I don’t necessarily worry about my own kids, because I communicate with them a lot about this kind of stuff. But I think a lot of parents don’t. And I think I’ve seen a lot of when you look at statistics, the vast majority of parents talk to their kids about alcohol and marijuana…but did they talk to you about cocaine and heroin, specifically?”
The heroin epidemic has become prominent in the area for the past couple of years, but Cipoletti said this is not an emerging issue.
“This ‘heroin epidemic’ thing, this ‘heroin thing’ is nothing new,” he said. “The circumstances allowing it to become an epidemic: that’s what’s new.”
According to Cipoletti, who began his career as a Crime Lab Drug Analyst, opioid addiction stretches back to before the American Civil War with morphine, and has expanded to modern day pharmaceuticals like Vicodin, Percocet, and OxyContin.
“The question becomes – why is this a problem now?” he said.
Cipoletti said that as companies marketed prescription pain medications to a larger portion of the population, abuse of all opioids rose significantly; and drug cartels distributing street drugs like heroin did the same. As a result, today, heroin is not just a lower-class problem. It touches everyone.
Now, criminal justice professionals face a greater challenge focusing on drug education, which they must balance with enforcing the law and helping those already addicted.
Heroin was originally a substance marketed only to “junkies,” said Cipoletti-poor, lower-class kids with nothing to lose-never the high-functioning addicts that still had a life to maintain. But both professors have noticed a significant shift over the years.
“We think of drug addiction, from a socioeconomic sense, as kind of a lower class issue, but it is absolutely not,” said Jack. “This opioid epidemic is affecting all classes of society, from rich to poor, from impoverished areas to affluent areas. We’re finding that it’s all over the place. And I really believe that it’s in part from the prescribed pills that then become abused and people can very very quickly become addicted.”
A possible cause of the change, Jack said, is the downturn in drug education and community-oriented policing-those programs like ‘Drug Abuse Resistance Education’ that help kids learn the consequences of narcotics from an early age.
“Drug prevention-wise, what ended up happening was about a decade ago, when we were in an economic decline, many departments did away with their D.A.R.E. programs because they didn’t have funding anymore,” said Jack.
As a result, a lot of people don’t have the necessary information to know the risks, said Cipoletti.
“I don’t think every person is educated enough in this area to ask those questions or to have that oversight,” said Cipoletti. “And that could be the difference between somebody getting addicted or not.”
Because of his own research of opium and other narcotics in a lab setting, Cipoletti feels responsible for sharing this information with the community-speaking at town halls, providing expert testimony and teaching in the classroom.
Jack also draws from his knowledge in the classroom, preparing criminal justice students for the nuances of dealing with substance abusers. Once someone has a drug issue, he said, it touches all aspects of their lives. As a result, he sees it in all sorts of crimes-bank robberies, burglaries, insurance fraud-committed out of desperation, to pay for their next high.
“I try and teach my students that not all drug addicts are bad people, and a lot of them are great people that have made some bad decisions that it’s very hard to go the other way from,” he said. “It’s a stigma to someone who is a drug addict, but a drug addict is your next door neighbor, is your brother, is your cousin, is your friend from high school. And the face that’s on them now is not the face that you knew at that time.”
Teaching this level of compassion is something that Jack stresses, and it is something he said is important in the law enforcement field.
“I always try and put in perspective for the student that the person that is addicted to drugs is still somebody’s daughter or son. It is still somebody’s brother or sister,” he said.
When it comes to eradicating the drug-solving the problem once and for all-Jack and Cipoletti are unsure of a particular strategy to take. It has to be a combination of approaches, they said, and it all goes back to giving the proper care and education.
“You can’t legislate a solution to this,” said Cipoletti. “So you can’t just up the law enforcement. You can’t just arrest more people, put more people in jail.”
That idea is reinforced in the approach professors take with Waynesburg students.
Cipoletti said, “Now when we teach this stuff, we have to emphasize the human side of these things, and it’s not always simple like that. We have to support them. We have to have programs for them. And it’s not just for them-it’s to have teachable moments for younger people.”
Breaking those barriers is the only way to truly address the problem effectively, said Jack.
“We need to work on treating these people less as the stereotypical drug addict, and more as the person that they were before-and the person that they can be again, if we can get them help. Part of [law] enforcement is having compassion-having the understanding that people make mistakes and they can come back from them.”