The most prevalent drugs in Northern Kentucky right now are fentanyl and methamphetamine, according to Drug Strike Force Director Scott Hardcorn.
Hardcorn reported to the Kenton County Fiscal Court Tuesday trends the team is seeing, which includes counterfeit pills.
“And that’s not just a Northern Kentucky problem — that’s nationwide,” Hardcorn said. “And those are fentanyl and methamphetamine pills that are counterfeit; they can be Xanax or Percocet.”
The Northern Kentucky Drug Strike Force serves the Northern Kentucky communities within Campbell, Kenton, and Boone Counties.
People seeking prescription drugs off the street are now often getting pills laced with fentanyl, he said. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times stronger. When prescribed by a doctor, fentanyl can be given as a shot, a patch on someone’s skin, or lozenges.
Synthetic fentanyl is formed in labs and then illegally sold as a powder to put in eye drops or made into pills that look like other opioids, according to the institute.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration held National Prescription Drug Take Back Day on April 30 to encourage the public to remove unneeded medications from their homes to prevent opioid addiction from ever starting. During the Take Back event in Northern Kentucky, Hardcorn said the Drug Strike Force team took in 523 pounds of unused prescription medication. They received 803 pounds in total over the month of April.
“I hate the term ‘war on drugs’ because wars by definition are winnable,” Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Sanders said at the court meeting. “And when you talk about the war on drugs, it makes it sound like one day we should be able to get there, we’ll be finished, we’ll be over the line. Drugs won’t be a problem anymore. That’s just not the case.”
The federal Drug Enforcement Agency also started the One Pill Can Kill campaign last year to publicize the counterfeit pill trend. The DEA’s website says four out of every 10 pills with fentanyl contain a potentially lethal dose.
“So far this year, the Strike Force has taken in 5,525 counterfeit pills out of Northern Kentucky,” Hardcorn said.
Hardcorn appeared on the second episode of The Kentucky Side podcast with LINK nky’s Michael Monks, where he said that one of the pills they see a lot in our area is counterfeit oxycodone.
“It’s a little blue M30 pill,” he said on the podcast. “We’ve been getting a lot of them here in our area. Just in the last couple of months, three particular cases come to mind. From these three cases, our unit took in over 6,200 counterfeit fentanyl pills. We were talking about what we experienced in the past, and those counterfeit pills weren’t around back then.”
Kenton County First Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Casey Burns said the Strike Force is constantly adapting, just like current prosecutions change daily regarding drug cases. Burns works along with Sanders in partnership with the Drug Strike Force team.
“We’re seeing a lot less text messaging and a lot more transactions via the apps over signal and Snapchat and things like that,” Burns said. “It’s got to the point where Scott’s agents are now making deals themselves on Snapchat. Meeting up with people on bond and setting up deals where they just go to the deal and arrest of the guy. They don’t even have to use an informant because, on Snapchat, nobody knows who anybody is anyway.”
During the meeting, Kenton County Commissioner Jon Draud asked Hardcorn if he had seen any significant improvement in the drug situation both in our region and nationally. He noted that for about the past 10 years, the county has put a lot of effort and spent a lot of money on the drug situation, and he said it appeared it wasn’t getting much better.
Hardcorn said it all goes back to the drug traffickers evolving. Using methamphetamine as an example, back in the 80s, the primary precursor used was a chemical called p2p (Phenylacetone.) After the government illegalized p2p, traffickers evolved to, at the time, over-the-counter cold medications like Ephedrine and Sudafed. Again, once the government noted that problem, you had to start buying those medications from the pharmacy. Hardcorn said they are now seeing a cycle back to p2p because of that.
“That’s (p2p) a precursor in all the meth that we’re seeing now, but it’s being shipped in high quantities from China to Mexico. The cartels are turning it into methamphetamine and shipping it across the border,” Hardcorn said. “That’s not Scott Hardcorn and the Drug Strike Force saying that. That is from Homeland Security and the DEA.”
Sanders said where you really see the difference in the work that the Drug Strike Force team does is in the homicide rates.
“That’s where these agents are making a difference,” Sanders said. “We don’t see the violence, and when I say ‘we,’ I mean all of us in law enforcement, the criminal justice system, are taking out major players before they really establish themselves well enough that they can start shooting up the town, doing drive-by killings, executing other drug dealers, things like that. That’s part of the reason why the quality of life in Kenton County is as good as it is.”
