“They Want It, We Got It”

Alright, then.

Two days after I offered my two cents on some of the root causes of Trenton’s ghastly violent crime, and some possible solutions, I have to offer thanks to the State’s Commission on Investigation (SCI) as well as an unnamed “Trenton-area Bloods leader” for their timely validation of a number of points I made on Tuesday.

The SCI yesterday released a report titled, “Scenes From An Epidemic: A Report on the SCI’s Investigation of Prescription Pill and Heroin Abuse.” The full report can be found here. I haven’t read it yet, but will do so for any relevant nuggets. For now, I will rely on the reportage in today’s Trentonian by David Foster on the SCI’s report.

The SCI explores the recent rise – after a relative lull of a few decades – of heroin abuse in the state, suggesting that the rise in heroin traffic is directly related to a nationwide increase in prescription drug abuse, specifically painkillers. People are getting hooked on painkillers, which are expensive and hard to get (That is, unless you are an indicted co-conspirator of Trenton’s IO, or one of his friends; but that’s another story entirely!!).

Ironically, after over 40 years of the national War on Drugs, Heroin is cheaper and easier to acquire – at least on the streets of the City of Trenton – than Vicodin and Percoset. Go figure.

So there is a direct link, according to the SCI between prescription drug abuse and Trenton’s booming business in heroin. Mr. Foster quotes from the report, “‘During a three-week surveillance operation at several major intersections in downtown Trenton, commission investigators observed a bustling open-air drug market daily during morning rush hour within blocks of New Jersey’s Statehouse,’ according to the report.”

Although not part of the report, SCI Counsel Chadd W. Lackey responded to a reporter’s question as to how this trade specifically related to Trenton. His response: “If you have more people moving to prescription pills, and then subsequently moving to heroin, the heroin trade then in turn becomes very valuable. You may be seeing additional turf wars associated with that because of the growth and the amount of heroin that’s being distributed in the streets.”

“Additional turf wars.” That’s what we are seeing in Trenton, which lately has been almost indistinguishable from real wars, as in incidents such as the one captured on video and posted on the Trenton Times site on Monday. The incident, you may recall, in which bystander Nathaniel Matthews was deliberately targeted and shot in the back by an assaulting gunman.

These “turf wars” are boosting the violent crime rate in this town, and they are being fueled by the booming drugs business, as I argued on Tuesday, and which SCI confirmed yesterday.

The SCI report featured a quote by one of the drug insiders in this town, an unnamed leader of the Bloods gang, who added his confirmation not only of the scale of the drug industry in this town, but the origin of much of the demand for his product.

“He [ the gang leader]  told the Commission in sworn testimony that demand for heroin in outlying communities is such that some elements of the Bloods have set up processing and packaging outposts away from city streets where the raw material, arriving in compressed, rock hard, eggshaped chunks, is placed in the hands of a specialist known as a ‘whip-up man’ who breaks it down with high-speed commercial blenders and other tools.” [Emphasis mine – KM]

“Demand for heroin in outlying communities.” That means customers from towns such as Princeton, Hamilton, Hopewell and Bucks County, among others.

The same communities several of whose citizens are so fond of looking down and tsk-tsk’ing the city of Trenton for its out-of-control drug and crime problems, and who suggest leaving us to our own devices to clean up “our” drugs problem.

The same communities from whom comes the money that sustains Trenton’s drugs economy. The same communities whose money indirectly buys the bullets and weapons that Trenton’s gangs use to shoot each other as well as innocent Trenton citizens such as Mr. Matthews.

QED, thanks to the State Commission on Investigation and my man from the Bloods.

Trenton is the major regional magnet for this business for these suburban customers.  As the Bloods leader boasts, “They want it, we got it.”

I will ask one additional question, from the unstated context of the Trentonian article, as well as informed comments from people I heard from after my earlier piece. If there is, as the SCI report claims, ‘a bustling open-air drug market daily during morning rush hour within blocks of New Jersey’s Statehouse,’ who else from “outlying communities” populates that morning rush hour into downtown Trenton, other than State of New Jersey workers?

Can it possibly be that a leading source of demand for Trenton’s drugs might actually be State workers? That is one obvious implication from this morning’s Trentonian article. I will read the full report for further  information or speculation on this topic.

So, we now have official validation of the scale, and some of the root causes of the problem in Trenton. The drugs economy in Trenton is booming, along with the “turf wars” that are a feature of the (actual) cut-throat competition among rival gangs, because of a massive increase of demand from “outlying communities.” That demand clearly contributes to the massive criminal infrastructure that exists in Trenton, and the resulting plague of murders, shootings and terror that afflicts our town.

So, when will those in authority on the City, County, State AND Federal levels finally propose to fight crime in Trenton by attacking the Demand for Drugs, and the monied suburban customers who fuel all the heartbreak we are suffering?

WHEN??????????????????????