The Girls-In-Tech Catalyst Conference brought women together to network and unite in a traditionally male-dominated field. Forty percent of mid-management-level women are dropping out of technology-related jobs, which may be due to the scarcity of other women in the workplace and the gender pay gap. Video by Mariah Ellis / Cronkite News
Arizona residents are spending more on health, but the state still ranked 49th in the country last year in cost. Chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes may be the cause of the increased spending. Video by Sierra Oshrin / Cronkite News
The Girls-In-Tech Catalyst Conference brought women together to network and unite in a traditionally male-dominated field. Forty percent of mid-management-level women are dropping out of technology-related jobs, which may be due to the scarcity of other women in the workplace and the gender pay gap. Video by Mariah Ellis / Cronkite News
Arizona residents are spending more on health, but the state still ranked 49th in the country last year in cost. Chronic diseases like obesity and diabetes may be the cause of the increased spending. Video by Sierra Oshrin / Cronkite News
One case has the high court considering whether states that don’t allow same-sex marriages must acknowledge those from states that do. The other focuses on whether a three-drug cocktail that’s led to botched executions in Arizona and Oklahoma constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Video by Andrew Romanov / Cronkite News
One case has the high court considering whether states that don’t allow same-sex marriages must acknowledge those from states that do. The other focuses on whether a three-drug cocktail that’s led to botched executions in Arizona and Oklahoma constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Video by Andrew Romanov / Cronkite News
SCOTTSDALE – An April 6 Cronkite News story erroneously reported that a pending state law that will allow individuals to request medical laboratory tests without a doctor’s order applies to cholesterol and blood-glucose tests. Arizona requires no doctor’s order for those tests and others on the Direct Access Test List maintained by the Arizona Department of Health Services. The pending law expands that universe to all lab tests.
SCOTTSDALE – An April 6 Cronkite News story erroneously reported that a pending state law that will allow individuals to request medical laboratory tests without a doctor’s order applies to cholesterol and blood-glucose tests. Arizona requires no doctor’s order for those tests and others on the Direct Access Test List maintained by the Arizona Department of Health Services. The pending law expands that universe to all lab tests.
President Obama released a five-year-long plan to combat antibiotic resistant bacteria today. Advocates say it’s the step in the right direction.
Some criticize using reusable, washable bags because they’re a breeding ground for bacteria. An expert’s study says only 3 percent of people using the bags actually wash them.
Some attorneys and police have criticized the DUI flier, saying it’s not effective when stopped for a violation.
NOGALES, Ariz. – The floor, the ceiling, the speakers, the seats. Even the gas tank.
As port director for the Customs and Border Protection port here, Guadalupe Ramirez has seen heroin smuggled into the United States in almost every place imaginable on a vehicle, not to mention the human body.
“I would challenge you to think of any place in a vehicle that you think we have not found narcotics, and I pretty much guarantee you we have found it,” he said.
Ramirez points to some colorful hilltop houses on the other side of the border fence, less than a mile away. Drug traffickers recruit people in those homes to act as spies, reporting whether a canine unit is working, if imaging equipment is on and how each officer works, he said.
This is the constantly changing nature of the drug trade. Traffickers will use any means to smuggle heroin and other drugs into the United States. Their routes and techniques are constantly adapting, and law enforcement agencies are forced to adapt as well.
Nogales is just one stop along a path of influence and ingenuity through which drug smugglers channel heroin from the coastal mountains of Sinaloa, Mexico, into Arizona and eventually to the rest of the United States.
The route often passes through Tucson, where heroin overdoses have surged since 2009. And through Pinal County, where deputies receive reports of fake emergencies trying to divert them from route used by smugglers.
It reaches Phoenix, where the FBI runs wiretaps to catch and dismantle drug trafficking organizations, and onto Interstate 10, where it is trafficked to communities throughout the United States.
At the end of this path is demand, particularly among teens and young adults who no longer view heroin as a street drug but as an alternative to costly prescription pills. In turn, Arizona has seen a dramatic increase in overdose deaths.
“The consumers in the United States have a hunger for that kind of narcotic,” Ramirez said. “It’s a shame because it’s such a devastating narcotic. It’s something that will ruin a young person’s life and devastate families.”
Across the border
In the late 1990s while living in Texas, Ramirez heard about a rash of deaths among young people, most of them high school students, who had overdosed on unusually potent heroin in the Dallas suburb of Plano. When Ramirez thinks about it today, he still can’t comprehend why they did it.
“These were young people,” he said. “When you look at Plano, Texas, it was a very affluent community. This is not like someone in the inner city (that) had challenges. These were children that had their whole lives in front of them.”
Now, as the man in charge of stopping the smuggling of drugs through the Nogales port and as a father himself, Ramirez said the effort to stop heroin trafficking through here is about doing what’s best for this country’s children.
“I can only imagine what a family would go through when they lose a child of any age, even someone in their 20s that has their whole lives ahead of them, because of these drugs that come into our country,” he said.
Ramirez has seen heroin seizures at the Nogales port of entry double from 125 kilograms in fiscal 2013 to 250 kilograms in fiscal 2014.
Those drugs likely came from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, which is known for its production of narcotics, and brought to Arizona by the Sinaloa cartel, Ramirez said.
Douglas Coleman, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug and Enforcement Administration’s Phoenix Division, said the Sinaloa cartel is a multibillion-dollar enterprise that is extremely powerful.
“It’s probably the most powerful and ruthless criminal group in the world,” he said. “Their power is extensive, and their ability to move these products into the United States is vast.”
Thomas Pietschmann, a researcher for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said marijuana producers in Mexico have moved away from cannabis in recent years because of the legalization and regulation of marijuana in many U.S. states. They replaced marijuana fields with poppies, which are used to produce heroin and other opioids.
“The market prices have gone down, and so it’s less attractive for the Mexican cannabis producers and traffickers to produce the cannabis in the United States,” Pietschmann said.
Smugglers employ a variety of techniques to get heroin and other drugs into the United States. Ramirez said that most common is smuggling them in vehicles. He’s seen narcotics packed in a hollowed-out seat, in the gas tank, in the air conditioning vents among in the car speakers.
“Literally anywhere you can imagine,” he said, “they have found a way to modify it and put the narcotics in there.”
Officers at the Nogales port use K-9 units, X-ray machines and other state-of-the-art equipment to detect narcotic shipments. But Ramirez said their first line of defense is an officer’s intuition – that gut feeling.
Many of the individuals caught smuggling drugs aren’t hardened criminals but cash-strapped individuals recruited by the cartels.
Jeremy Slack, a researcher studying the U.S.-Mexico border for the Social Science Research Council, said people in Sonora make between $6 and $8 a day, and the appeal of $1,500 for a week’s work is attractive.
And many don’t have a choice, Slack said. It’s common for a drug trafficker to show up at individuals’ houses and order them to drive a car loaded with drugs across the border. If they refuse, the smugglers threaten to kill them.
“I’ve heard it’s pretty common for people to come to your house and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to modify your car and you’re going to do this for us. You can take our money or we can kill you,’” he said.
Ramirez said officers once caught a 94-year-old woman with narcotics strapped to her body. Her son had persuaded her to smuggle the drugs, he said.
“That sticks in my mind because I can’t imagine anyone using their 94-year-old mom to try to smuggle narcotics into the United States,” Ramirez said. “It goes to show you that there’s no limit as to what they’ll do to bring the narcotics in.”
The waypoint
Chris Platt, a detective with the Anti-Smuggling Unit in the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, parks his marked SUV next to an on-ramp and facing Interstate 8 just west of Casa Grande. He lowers his window and waves traffic around him as he spends several minutes watching intently for anything suspicious on the highway.
The drugs that make their way through the Nogales port often end up here or nearby on Interstate 10 on their way elsewhere. It’s the job of Platt and his colleagues to stop them.
“Once it gets to Phoenix, that’s kind of the apex where it’s going to be distributed from,” Platt said.
He spends a lot of his time stopping traffic and trying to stop drug or human smuggling in other ways. He knows what areas are primarily used by drug traffickers to transport or transfer drugs, as well as places where people carrying drugs on foot will take breaks.
Researchers and law enforcement officials say that a majority of the drugs that enter the U.S. from Mexico are smuggled by vehicle. But these days informants are telling Platt and other sheriff’s detectives that cartels have started concealing small packages of heroin within larger bundles of marijuana that are backpacked from the border. It’s another example of the constantly changing nature of the drug trade.
“We know they’re going to make changes,” Platt said. “Especially the more we get or the more our counterparts get, they’re going to change it up. We know that’s going to happen. All we can do is just try to get the intel we can on what they’re doing and try to adapt to it.”
Coleman, the DEA special agent, said agents have to change their methods regularly to keep up with the cartels.
“Law enforcement never stops any crime,” he said. “Our job is to investigate, arrest, prosecute and bring to justice those that violate the law.”
In Pinal County, drug traffickers sometimes will call 911 to report a fake emergency to divert law enforcement agencies from a route where they intend to smuggle drugs. But Platt knows what to look for: Is the caller making sense? Providing his or her name? Able to provide details about the incident?
If the caller doesn’t offer those details, Platt goes on high alert. While other deputies respond to the report, he may stick back and look for any suspicious behavior.
It’s situations like these that require Platt and other detectives on the Anti-Smuggling Unit to think on their feet and continually evolve.
Platt said there will never be a way to end heroin trafficking. But he said harsher punishments for users and traffickers could cut it down.
“As long as there’s a demand, it’s not going to stop,” he said. “The only thing we can do is try our best and try to keep the numbers down. That’s it.”
A little ways northwest of Interstate 8, Platt, carrying a rifle, climbed over a barbed-wire fence, clambered up a dirt hill and went into a wash.
Walking through this same area eight months ago, leftovers from smugglers were everywhere. Gallon-size water bottles, carpet shoes designed to conceal shoe prints and leftover burlap used to wrap narcotics littered the curving wash for about a quarter of a mile.
Some scraps remained, but it was mostly cleaned out.
“They’ve changed it up,” he said. “They’re using somewhere else.”
A national plague
Just up the road from Pinal County, in a secluded building in north Phoenix, yet another law enforcement agency works to stop the trafficking of heroin into Arizona and onto the rest of of the United States.
While most other law enforcement agencies are responsible for intercepting drugs traveling through Arizona, the FBI’s Phoenix Bureau is responsible for dismantling the cartels.
“We don’t focus on the drug itself,” said Ronald Baker, a supervisory special agent at the FBI. “We know the issues behind it. Our focus is on these transnational criminal organizations that manufacture, distribute and sell these kind of drugs.”
Baker supervises the FBI squad tasked with investigating criminal groups, conducting joint operations with other agencies and ultimately dismantling cartels. With FBI Director James Comey describing heroin as a plague in the U.S., stopping criminal organizations responsible for moving it through Arizona is a priority.
But FBI agents run into the same problem as Ramirez and Platt: Because the drug trade is so lucrative, cartels are constantly changing tactics, and it’s hard to keep up.
“If there’s been success by a particular law enforcement organization that stops maybe how things have been brought in through a certain area or port, then those criminal organizations are going to find another way around,” Baker said.
The FBI uses a variety of techniques to track and break up drug trafficking organizations. Agents will conduct wiretaps, work on interagency investigations and focus on dismantling smaller satellite groups.
“That affects the bigger group, the transnational organized crime group organization out of Mexico and other parts of the world,” Baker said.
Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who has written about drug trafficking trends extensively, said law enforcement agencies will use every trick in the book to dismantle an organization. That includes squeezing informants, conducting electronic interdiction, wiretapping phones, following cellphones, patrolling airspace and tracking Internet use.
Because of drug trafficking organizations’ willingness to do absolutely anything to get narcotics into the United States, Bagley estimates that law enforcement agencies only stop 15 percent of the drugs brought into the U.S.
“The illicit profits are so high that they drive innovation, whereas the rewards that are received by law enforcement remain constant whether they increase or decrease their annual count or seizure numbers,” he said. “They’re simply not compensated in the same way. They work 9 to 5 or 8 to 5. The traffickers work 24 hours a day.”
Bagley said it’s important to focus on law enforcement and halting the flow of heroin but contends that resources would be better used to curb demand and for treatment and rehabilitation. He said the government should focus on vocational training, education, getting people to finish their high school degrees and ending jail time for nonviolent drug-related crimes.
“I have argued for a long time that much of this money is basically wasted,” Bagley said.
But Pietshcmann, with the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said law enforcement can be effective. He pointed to Australia’s effort to dismantle heroin rings in 2001.
“Heroin consumption declined by about 80 percent in Australia. And the people dying by opioids in Australia has declined by 60 percent. And this has not changed since,” he said. “Thirteen years, and the heroin market has not recovered in Australia.”
The FBI’s Baker said it’s tough to determine the best way to combat the drug trade, describing it as a business model that’s going to evolve with supply and demand.
“The transnational organized criminal groups look at ways to evolve, to change with what we’re doing to stop them,” he said. “There is a constant evolution in combating the drug problem.”
Logan Spude lay on the floor covered with a sheet, his body still warm, even as paramedics declared him dead at 4:33 a.m. His pockets held a wallet and a can of Grizzly Long cut tobacco. His black sneakers rested where he left them, right by the front door.
Just hours after leaving the Verde Valley Guidance Clinic the afternoon before, Spude relapsed by shooting up heroin in the parking lot of a local Clarkdale Wal-Mart, where he and an acquaintance had just purchased a 10-pack of syringes, some spoons and water.
Early the next morning, too high to get back to his sober living home, he fell asleep on his friend’s floor and never woke.
Spude had tried to stop his addiction multiple times. He was 26.
“Drugs have never been discussed in this town. Ever. Ever. It’s pretty much a ‘no see, no talk,’” his mother Barbara Spude said. “Only when Logan died did I have nine moms, because I was counting them … nine moms come to me and tell me that their children were addicted to heroin and they didn’t know what they were going to do.”
At its worst, the life of a heroin addict is deadly and unforgiving. From 2010 to 2013, drug deaths topped even the number of motor vehicle deaths in Arizona with 1,106 drug deaths compared to 711 motor vehicle deaths in 2010 and 1,200 to 770 in 2013, according to yearly reports from the Arizona Department of Health Services.
Although these numbers represent all drug deaths and not just those that are heroin-related, a report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) shows people aged 12 to 49 who had used prescription pain relievers non-medically were 19 times more likely to have initiated heroin use recently than others in that age group.
“We have seen an increase (in heroin deaths) and that’s really why we addressed it in our prescription drug initiative, because prescription drugs are obviously tied to heroin rates and consequences,” said Kelly Charbonneau, the substance abuse grant coordinator for the Arizona Department of Health Services.
Doug Coleman, Special Agent in Charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration Phoenix Division, also attributes much of the heroin problem to the abuse of prescription pain medications.
“The main reason for that is the prescription drugs that are abused the most are the opiate based prescription drugs; the oxycontins, the oxycodones, the hydrocodones,” Coleman said. “We’re seeing a switch over to the heroin because … getting the pills has become not cost effective and the flooding of the market with the heroin is leading to decreased prices of heroin because there’s more of that commodity on the market.”
Logan Spude first began abusing alcohol as a teenager, his mother said, after his brother Ryan died in a car accident. He began smoking marijuana at 16, abusing prescription drugs at 17 and then eventually heroin at 21.
“He was 14 (years old) and that was devastating,” Barbara Spude said. “That was his (Logan’s) older brother.
“That really, really affected him and maybe that had something to do with a lot of the young adults that do get into heroin, and maybe there’s some deep down issues in families and maybe we need to be looking at that instead of just focusing on the heroin,” Barbara Spude later added.
Logan had been clean for four months, his mother said. Court documents corroborate Logan’s struggle, as he went in and out of relapse at least twice in 2012 and 2013. She said he had started using his connections to help other addicts.
“He was starting to mentor other heroin users,” his mother Barbara Spude said. “He had a young girl named Brittany Lynn. He was starting to mentor her about heroin and get her off. They were working on it together.”
She also died only a few months after Logan Spude from what the Yavapai Medical Examiner’s Office says was a methamphetamine overdose.
“They were becoming buddies and she looked up to him because he was older; she was 21,” Barbara Spude said. “She and Logan were really, really close and it [Logan’s death] was a little more than she could handle.”
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health places the average age of the typical heroin user in the range of 18 to 25.
“It’s alarming for me to watch this happen because I know what addiction does and I know that adults aren’t capable of handling addiction,” Coleman said. “Seventeen, 18, 19-year-old kids certainly have no chance of handling addiction if they go down that path.”
Logan was in drug court the day he died for a previous charge of possession of drug paraphernalia.
“What I have seen in just the two years since I have been here is quite a rise in the amount of heroin that is being used in this community,” said Clarkdale Police Chief Randy Taylor, who responded to the 911 call the night Logan died.
“I don’t remember it wasn’t even on the radar when I got here, we didn’t even talk about heroin. We knew that heroin in the area was there but we never anticipated it being at the epidemic level that it is at now,” he said.
In October, the Centers for Disease Control reported that heroin overdose deaths across the country have increased from 2010 to 2012, specifically from 2,679 in 2011 to 3,635 in 2012. Arizona was one of the 28 states cited in the report for an increase in heroin deaths..
Natasha Gates, a 28-year-old mother, was among them. She died of a heroin overdose in a cold-water bath in October 2012.
Her mother Colette Williams said her daughter was a very talented person, as evidenced by her good grades and talent with the alto saxophone. She was overall a “pretty bubbly” person.
But she was having a hard time juggling her job and the responsibilities of raising her 5-year-old at the time, Blake.
“We knew that, yes it was a tough time,” Williams said. “I mean, she was hating work at the moment she, as I said, you know the whole family ideal just kind of got shut down and yes she was in pain and all of us repeatedly asked her please tell us what’s going on.”
According to Maricopa County court documents, Gates brought heroin to the house of one of her friends’ roommates to “get high. ” After smoking some, she asked him to inject her with more.
Passed out from the heroin, her friend and his roommate partially undressed her and put her in a bathtub filled with cold water to help suppress Natasha’s overdose symptoms. Both fell asleep and when they woke, she was dead, according to the records..
“Anguish, immediate anguish,” Williams said on how she felt when she found out about her daughter. “You know, I had the feeling that something bad was going to happen and I just never thought it would be Natasha that I’d be worrying about. She had been so great at raising her son, getting through work and finally living on her own and taking care of herself. Never thought this would happen to her.”
The state of Arizona is attempting to curb the increased heroin death rates at the source, according to Charbonneau of the state health department.
Charbonneau is helping coordinate better substance abuse policies designed to educate first responders, state-run clinics, etc. with the right know how to help treat opioid abusers like heroin.
“I think it was just so shocking for all of us in the manner that she had died and how it would’ve been so easy to save her life and I think it took all of us a long time to accept that fact; we were very angry as well as just broken-hearted,” said Williams.
Beyond the small collection of angels and wind chimes hanging from the porch of a modest Chandler home, 59-year-old Grace Valencia had stashed 31 pounds of black tar heroin, a supply destined for distribution in correctional facilities and East Valley neighborhoods.
By the time she was arrested and charged with nine federal offenses, Grace Valencia and over 40 others were identified by police as members of the Lara-Valencia Syndicate. Five of them were her own sons.
Members of the syndicate included street and prison gang members responsible for distributing illegal drugs – heroin among them – to prison and East Valley communities, according to court documents. In addition to the 31.6 pounds of heroin found in Grace Valencia’s home, investigators also discovered 5.4 pounds of cocaine, a total haul worth about $1.7 million, according to law enforcement.
“I would say in the last couple years it’s (heroin) made a huge rise, especially here in Chandler for the people that aren’t really aware of the drug culture, how it works,” said a Chandler undercover narcotics officer who asked not the be identified. “Especially an area like Chandler, they’re going to be distributed to certain houses we call stash houses and a lot of them are around this area.”
Many Mexican drug trafficking organizations employ relatives and friends, according to a market analysis reports by the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. Keeping the organization family-based makes it more difficult for law enforcement to penetrate the organization.
Top law enforcement officials say the Sinaloa Cartel is considered the most powerful Mexican cartel in operation today.
Mexican cartels are “criminal entrepreneurs,” stated Elizabeth Kempshall, executive director of the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area and a veteran of the Drug Enforcement Agency for nearly 30 years. Kempshall has studied the habits of drug trafficking organizations and watched as Mexican drug traffickers began leveraging America’s prescription drug abuse into a burgeoning heroin market.
“(Cartels) watch trends,” Kempshall explained.
With so much money on the line, traffickers have developed a variety of tricks for ferrying illegal drugs across the border. Non-factory trap doors in vehicles are fairly common.
The use of ultralight aircraft has also increased. Between 2009 and 2010, the number of ultralight aircraft detections by the Customs and Border Protection Air and Marine Operations Center increased over 240 percent in Arizona. That is four times the amount of detected crossings over the Mexico-El Paso border, according to a 2011 report by HIDTA in Arizona.
“About 2007, in Arizona, is when I first started noticing the heroin being seized in our state,” remembered Kempshall. Since the, she said, law enforcement efforts to investigate heroin trafficking operations have increased. There has been a 25 percent increase in investigations between 2012 and 2013 alone, and the first six months of 2014 are on pace to exceed those numbers.
Wire taps and confidential informants allowed law enforcement to build their investigation of Grace Valencia’s family.
Dubbed “Operation Family Tradition,” law enforcement first began their investigation into the Lara-Valencia Syndicate in February 2011. In the months that followed, one of Grace Valencia’s sons, Ricky Paul Valencia, sold heroin to a confidential informant on fifteen different occasions, according to court documents. Between wiretaps and physical evidence, the investigation documented an approximately 25 sales in the final two months before the arrests.
Wire taps also allowed investigators to listen in on a series of conversations between Ricky Paul Valencia; his brother, Vincent Lara; and their mother, Grace Valencia. Although incarcerated throughout the course of the investigation, Vincent Lara was able to direct members of the syndicate over the phone to smuggle heroin into Arizona Department of Corrections facilities.
Wire taps also proved helpful in the case of Victor Corral.
As the leader of a drug trafficking organization based in Tucson, Corral coordinated the transportation of $227,000 of drug money in three separate trips over the course of five days. Drug Enforcement Agency officers caught up with $200,000 of the drug money when a Mexican courier attempted to cross the border with the money,as well as with 500 rounds of 0.38 special ammunition.
DEA agents, along with HIDTA and Homeland Security Investigations Tucson, had opened an investigation into the Tucson heroin trafficking cell in January of 2014. Through the use of mobile surveillance and wiretaps, law enforcement officers had monitored Corral’s activities for several months. On June 13, 2014, agents executed a federal search warrant on the residence of another organization courier, Alejandro Lopez. They found 88.88 pounds of white heroin in Lopez’s bedroom closet.
The stash represents only a small portion of what law enforcement agents will collect this year, and the case just one among many heroin investigations in the state of Arizona.
According to the El Paso Intelligence Center’s National Seizure System, there was a 259 percent increase in the amount of heroin seized in Arizona between 2010 and 2013. This is an increase from 180 pounds of heroin in 2010 to a total of 647 pounds in 2013.
“Maricopa County is the distribution hub for the Sinaloa Cartel’s heroin market in the United States. We know this,” said Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery. “They have command and control elements that are operating in Maricopa County as we’re sitting here right now speaking. And that amount of heroin being present in the Phoenix area is consistent with what we know of their operations.”
Law enforcement officials caught up with the Lara-Valencia Syndicate when they intercepted Brenda Calderon delivering drugs to a correctional facility. During an interview following her arrest, Calderon confessed to investigators that she was transporting heroin to the Lewis Prison Complex Facility in Buckeye, Arizona for Vincent Lara and another incarcerated brother, Angel Lara.
Grace Valencia was charged with nine federal offenses ranging from narcotic drug violations to promoting prison contraband, and pled guilty to the transportation or sale of narcotic drugs in return for the dismissal of her eight other charges.
According to data collected for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Reports in 2012, a total of 992 people were arrested in Arizona for the sale or manufacture of opiates, cocaine or their derivatives, including heroin. A total of 2,378 were arrested for possession. People 21 years old or younger accounted for approximately 25 percent of arrests.
After pleading guilty to the transportation of narcotic drugs, Grace Valencia was sentenced with five years of probation and 200 hours of community service because of health issues and the fact that Operation Family Tradition was her first criminal conviction.
The Obama Administration currently advocates a “smart on crime” response to drug-related offenses, rather than a “tough on crime” policy. This means that the goal of drug courts is no longer to lock away drug users, but rather to prevent criminal activity by helping participants recover from substance abuse problems.
“Many people charged with drug-related crimes are low-level, nonviolent offenders afflicted with an underlying substance use disorder who would be better served by treatment than jail time,” explained Sam Schumach, press secretary at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. “Drug courts are an acknowledgement that we cannot incarcerate our way out of our nation’s drug problem.”
Grace Valencia is currently serving her second year of probation. She is responsible for paying fines and fees associated with her case in sum of $1,530, in addition to a monthly payment to the Adult Probation Department for the duration of her sentence. Neither she nor her attorney could be reached for comment.
Her son Ricky Paul Valencia, credited with being the leader of the syndicate, was charged with a total of 12 years of incarceration and fines of over $6,000. Her other two sons associated with the syndicate, Vincent Lara and Daniel Lara, were each sentenced with an additional 11 and 10 years of incarceration, respectively, and fined over $3,000 each.
