PANAMA CITY — The undercover federal agents were getting closer to “Duck Dynasty.”
By September, the agents had gradually upped their quantity requests to one of Bay County’s heroin point men to about 4½ ounces.
“How much per can of top-of-the-line dog food if I get 4.5 cans,” investigators intercepted from a text conversation between “Duck Dynasty” and his alleged source in Miami. “Is it still 29 a can or does it get cheaper?”
The text was one of the last before the October arrests of Jeremey Walker, aka “Duck Dynasty,” Kelvin Jackson, Lisa Kelly and Dawinna Linder. Bay County Sheriff’s Office deputies pulled the group over at about 9:40 a.m. near Youngstown in a mover’s truck. They reported finding 124 grams of heroin and 90 oxycodone pills during the search with the information provided by the DEA.
A few weeks later, BCSO would record its largest street seizure of heroin — about 56 grams, worth thousands of dollars — after the death of 28-year-old Justin Roberts, which investigators said was connected to heroin use. Narcotics officers netted three arrests in wake of Roberts’ death, but a family was still left without a son and brother.
The cases were some of the first signs “Mexican mud,” as heroin is called in some circles, had finally washed onto Bay County shores. And BCSO drug specialists do not see an ebbing of the tide in the near future.
“I think we’ve been successful at plugging some of the leaks in the past,” said Capt. Faith Bell with BCSO’s Special Investigations Division (SID). “If we keep it out this time, though, we’ll be lucky.”
Bell has seen the evolution of drug trends in Bay County since a time when options were much more black and white, predominantly marijuana and cocaine. Most of the developments have been caused by social policies while others have been caused by scientific developments. Now, a veritable rainbow smorgasbord of illegal pills, powders and plants have flooded the market.
But out of all of the illicit substances to afflict a community, a heroin epidemic is the lowest one can sink, according to Bell. Cities from across the country have felt the crippling effects on residents and surges in drug-related crimes, such as burglaries, that the highly addictive heroin brings about.
“The whole country is experiencing this,” Bell said. “Until recently we’ve just been somewhat immune.”
Meth: Before the options for one’s drug of choice in the Panhandle became so extensive, South American and Mexican cartels could make large sums of money solely from marijuana and cocaine. Those were the years before the passage of medicinal and recreational marijuana use laws in some parts of the country diminished their stranglehold on supply. During that time, heroin and methamphetamine emerged as products markedly cheaper to manufacture and highly more addictive.
In Bay County in 2002, authorities started seeing an increase in methamphetamine labs and people in possession of methamphetamine just before the area went “full-blown meth,” Bell said. Other than raiding methamphetamine labs when they’d spring up and pinching lower-rung users to gain access to career players, nothing seemed to stem the methamphetamine boom — until 2005.
That’s when Florida passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, limiting the amount of pseudoephedrine one can purchase in a time period before flags are raised in a state database. Pseudoephedrine is a chemical used in the production of methamphetamine, but it also is in common cold medicine that is readily available in most drug and grocery stores.
“Up until then, they were making ounces at a time,” Bell said. “After the Combat Meth Act, we started seeing much smaller quantities on the streets.”
But, with the action created by the Combat Meth Act, an equal and opposite reaction occurred in the drug world. “Shake ’n’ bake” kits literally exploded into Bay County. One month, fire crews responded to dozens of house fires caused by methamphetamine explosions.
“The big difference is the volatility of shake-’n’-bake kits,” Bell said. “They can only make enough for a personal supply, but they are placing themselves in a more dangerous situation.”
While methamphetamine has persisted as a problem in Bay County, authorities were able to tamp down the production size. But the form would soon evolve into an extremely cheap and high-powered product flooding in from Mexico known as “ICE.”
Pill mills: Many drugs started showing up with more prevalence in Bay County after the turn of the century, but the seeds of demand for heroin were sowed by the pill mills’ mass distribution of opioid byproducts at 2000’s end, according to BCSO officials.
A documentary called “The Oxycontin Express” from 2009 featured the travels of pill addicts down a bustling pill pipeline to south Florida, called the “Columbia of prescription drugs” in the movie. Patrons traveled by ground and air from all over the country to Florida to obtain exorbitant prescriptions from 93 of the top 100 oxycodone-dispensing doctors in the United States.
Bay County was not spared by the pill frenzy. Once deaths from overdoses started to pile up in the county, BCSO sent officers to investigate the practices in person.
“There were hundreds of cars outside these places with license plates from all over,” Bell said. “These people who claimed these serious injuries would be running from their cars in the rain to get their pills.”
At the time, BCSO just asked the local pharmacies not to fill suspicious prescriptions. Most complied. And in 2011 Gov. Rick Scott vowed to eliminate pill mills and signed legislation to regulate pill dispensing. But the taste for opioids, a derivative of opium, would linger on in Bay County.
“Any savvy drug dealer is going to fill that demand,” Bell said.
Heroin: BCSO recorded the largest street seizure of heroin on its books March 4 following the death of a local man from an overdose. BCSO made three arrests and seized about 56 grams of heroin followed the death of Roberts, and BCSO expects other arrests in connection with a heroin distribution ring within Bay County.
Few details have been released about Bay County’s heroin distribution ring because of the sensitive nature of the investigation. Officials have said the general route ICE and heroin travels originate in Mexico and South America.
Cartels in each country have specialized in the cheapest to manufacture and most addictive products to market to North America. At some point, the drugs find their way to Miami or Atlanta before traveling toward Bay County.
In 2011, ICE became the big thing in Bay County. But as 2014 came to a close and 2015 began, heroin has taken main stage as a creeping epidemic.
“We’ll be lucky if we can stop it with what all is going on in the country,” Bell said. “But I don’t see us being able to.”
Heroin deaths nationwide have nearly quadrupled since 2000, according to a National Centers for Health Statistics report released in early March. Bay County already has seen several in the past few months, though figures are unclear since many still are pending toxicology tests.
Many EMS crews across the country now carry Narcan pens in their ambulance to combat heroin deaths. An injunction of Narcan, an opioid agonist, immediately counteracts the effects of heroin overdose, snatching the user from death. But it isn’t always appreciated.
“They’ll sit up angry that you took away their high,” Bell said, “as if they weren’t heartbeats away from death.”
Narcan is a prescription drug, which creates difficulties with Bay County EMS being able to readily use the medication. Each year since the heydays of the pill mills, authorities have seen only a fraction of heroin-related deaths compared to deaths caused by prescription medication, but due to the unpredictable nature of a heroin injection and the increasing presence of the drug, officials are not optimistic the ratio will stick.
“This year I think that will turn on its head,” Bell said. “I’d be surprised if it didn’t.”
Authorities also have said they intend to heavily prosecute those arrested for bringing heroin into the county. In the case of “Duck Dynasty,” Walker pleaded to drug possession and trafficking charges and was handed down a five-year prison sentence. Jackson, the man who ran the drugs from Miami, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for trafficking.
The cases against Kelly and Linder are pending.