Heroin Highway: How North Jersey Became The Fatal Drug's Last Stop

They’re at a red light or waiting in line at a tollbooth. They just pulled up to the next gas station pump. They look like ordinary people driving ordinary vehicles.

But they’re not.

These people are transporting one of the most sought after commodities in North Jersey: heroin. The people driving these vehicles are bringing the drug to your neighborhood, maybe even your street.

It is no secret that the availability and use of heroin in North Jersey has skyrocketed in recent years. And the major roadways that millions of residents travel on every day are the last leg of the trip for the drugs whose journey started in Columbia and Mexico.

There are more than three dozen municipalities in Bergen County within 10 miles of the 4th Ward in Paterson, one of the most drug-infested areas in the United States. Two of them, Fair Lawn and Elmwood Park, border Paterson.

“It’s a huge challenge. We get a huge number of people driving through Fair Lawn to get to Paterson,” said Sgt. Brian Metzler. “The majority of people we get are from eastern Bergen County.”

The ”best, purest heroin in the country,” as one Wayne police officer put it, makes people come from all over the tri-state area to get it. Metzler said he remembers one particular incident when a man took a taxi from Brooklyn to buy heroin.

But how exactly do they get it and who brings it to them?

Drug cartels from Mexico and other foreign countries will use everything from tractor-trailers with false walls to people’s stomachs to transport their products across state lines, authorities explain.

Often a cartel will send more than one tractor-trailer across the United States-Mexican border and be happy if one of them makes it through border inspections, said Special Agent Timothy McMahon, public information officer with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration’s New Jersey Division.

Cartels often pay very low-income citizens to swallow some of the drugs that have been placed in surgical gloves and coated with cooking oil, authorities explain. When they’re in the United States, the drugs are expelled out of the body.

Once the drugs are safely brought into the United States, they are often stored at warehouses. The drugs are then given to distribution cells where they are packaged and given to “street-level” distributors who sell it to users.

It is those distributors and users whom police pull over and charge on the region’s major highways.

“These are people who have a habit and in order to support that habit, they distribute to all the urban centers,” said Paterson Police Director Jerry Speziale. “They’ll pick up 100 bags or they’ll collect money from the addicts.”

The distributors use Routes 23 and 80 to travel to Pennsylvania. Routes 17, 287, and 208 give people quick access to Bergen and Passaic Counties. The Palisades Interstate Parkway brings people to Rockland County in New York.

Route 20 also provides distributors with quick access to Bergen and Passaic counties. More people are going to the outskirts of Paterson and using the thoroughfare to bring drugs into Bergen County, Speziale said.

“You could be sitting next to someone at red light and have no idea they are a user. It’s a schoolteacher, it’s a college student. You could be driving down your local street and you look at someone driving and you have no idea that person has a habit,” said McMahon. “These people who are out there with these drugs, they’re everyday people. The way the highway system is set up makes it difficult to find them. You have to know the routes they are taking and even then, it doesn’t mean that we can start searching vehicles. We have to abide by the law and have probable cause.”

The changing face of the average heroin user in North Jersey is forcing authorities into playing catch up when it comes to the war on drugs. No longer is it the person strung out in the middle of the street with a needle in his or her arm.

“Drug dealers are delivering now. You can get drugs delivered to your house just like a pizza,” said Wyckoff Police Chief Benjamin Fox. “These dealers, they are doing everything they can to get their product into the hands of people who want it. The pull on this drug is so strong, they can’t stop it. It’s a problem of a magnitude I’ve never seen.”

Fair Lawn police have been combatting the problem with aggressive motor vehicle patrols on Fair Lawn Avenue, Maple Avenue, Lincoln Avenue, and Broadway.

Related: Heroin Deaths In New Jersey Double Since 2011

Forty-two people in Bergen County died from Heroin overdoses in 2014, an 81 percent increase from the 25 in 2011, statistics by the state Medical Examiner’s Office shows. There were 26 overdose deaths in Bergen in 2013.

Those numbers dwarf Passaic County’s, however. At 700 percent, that county had the highest percentage increase of heroin-overdose deaths since 2011.

Paterson had 835 reported cases of heroin abuse in 2014, second only to Newark. Those numbers come from the Division of Addiction Services in the New Jersey Department of Human Services, and are based on the number of people seeking treatment for heroin abuse.

The increased drug presence brings with it more crime, Metzler said, including more residential and commercial burglaries and robberies.

Related: 30 N.J. Towns With The Most Heroin Abuse

“These people, all they care about is getting their next high,” Metzler said. “They care about it more than anything else and they’ll do anything they can to get it.”