$750K Drug Bust For Meth And Heroin By IMPD
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department has been on a month-long investigation that finally resulted in the bust of a career this past Tuesday. Search warrants had been served in two separate locations. Lieutenant Scott Hessong of the Southwest District told USA Today reporters that officers within his district as well as the Southeastern District began the initial investigation around March. The search warrants, which had been issued in both districts, led officers to confiscating $44,000 in cash, eight guns, 45 pounds of suspected heroin, as well as crystal methamphetamine and black tar heroin with a street value of $750,000.
The four who were arrested are thought to have been involved with trafficking on the southwest and southeaster districts; the department has not released the identity of those in connection to the investigation. Deputy Chief Chad Knecht of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department spoke to journalists as to the scale and significance of this particular bust as he surveyed the table where officers were displaying 11 bags of suspected drugs, guns, and stacks of money. He credited the uniformed beat officers who used their extensive knowledge of the community to investigate the case and command such results.
“These are once in a career type cases…On that table, you see exactly what drives the crime. The profit from the money, the firearms to protect it and the drugs that are tearing our communities apart and causing addiction. That table exemplifies what’s going on in our society.”
A drug busting of this magnitude is rare at a district level, says Hessong. He hopes this work by Indianapolis police will potentially save lives with a reduction to the amount of overdoses in coming weeks.
“There’s absolutely no way to tell what we did to prevent drug overdoses. To give you an idea, each use of heroin is like a few grains of sand, and we have 45 pounds that’s packed solid. So, there’s no way to tell how many individual drug uses you have just with this product here.”
The hard, crystalline form of methamphetamine, known commonly as crystal meth, is a central nervous system stimulant which can be crushed, snorted, and dissolved for injection. Its most common use is to be heated and smoked. Abuse of this drug is reported to have remained steady since 2002, states Project Know. This means abuse rates for meth have not seemed to increase or decrease to a large degree. Yet nearly 600,000 people between the ages of 12 and older came forward claiming use of the drug in 2014. Heroin users are at an even more staggering and alarming amount. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIH), in America 948,000 people reported using heroin in 2016.
