editorial comment Indeed, the question has to be asked....

Tim Trevier is a big man with 15 titanium earrings, a diamond nose ring, a leather do-rag and a modified fu manchu. If you saw him on the street, you'd look twice, but it would never cross your mind that he is cop.



At 42, he has been a police officer 19 years. A lieutenant in the Bureau County Police Department, he is currently detailed to the Illinois State Police drug task force headquartered in La Salle.

Trevier's work takes him into the rural communities of La Salle, Spring Valley, Ottawa, Utica and Peru. Compared with the urban landscape of Chicago, this is another world. It is small town America with main streets and a mix of mostly modest homes and farmland.

Just as Tim Trevier doesn't look like a cop, this bucolic setting doesn't look like the site of a heroin epidemic, but it is. For the last three years, more and more high school students and young adults have been jumping into their cars and driving 90 miles to Chicago's West Side to score dope.

Heroin today is purer, cheaper and more addictive than it has ever been. Just 10 bucks for a "blow." User-friendly, you can snort rather than shoot it. But in no time, you'll be using a needle. And needing to buy multiple "blows."

And though purity is one of heroin's big selling points, purity kills.

"I talked to a nurse at Illinois Valley Community Hospital in Peru," said Trevier, "and she said at one point they were averaging four and five overdoses a week. Our young people are dying from this drug, bottom line. And if they are not dying, they are either incarcerated or going to be incarcerated."

Sgt. Dorothy Knudson agrees. At 41 she runs one of the Narcotics and Gang Investigation teams for the Organized Crime Division of the Chicago Police Department.

When you ask her about her work, she tells you bluntly, "I love it sometimes, other times it rips me apart."

What Knudson can't tolerate, she says, are the stereotypes about heroin, the notion that it's restricted to poor, black inner-city neighborhoods and not white, wealthy suburbs or middle-class rural communities. She's seen people from Tinley Park to Wilmette show up on the West Side to buy heroin.

Four months ago Trevier, Knudson and their respective colleagues began a joint operation to put one small dent in this utterly daunting problem. Their target was Daniel Funches, whose street name was "Tony."

"Tony," an Unknown Vice Lord, is considered by police to be the go-to guy for La Salle and Bureau counties, allegedly supplying an estimated 90 percent of the heroin that is making its way into those rural communities.

At dawn on Tuesday, Trevier and his team joined Knudson and 60 Chicago officers. Armed with sledge hammers, battering rams and bullet proof vests, they descended on the West Side. "Tony" was one of 12 targets. Ten carloads of cops surrounded his graystone apartment building at 15th and Kedzie.

By 7:45 a.m. "Tony" and most of the other targets were in custody.

In so many ways, Tuesday's bust was a model operation. Standing out there on the street, it was hard not to be impressed with the efficiency and professionalism of the officers involved. But at the end of the day we all have to ask ourselves what exactly is being accomplished in the war on drugs?

Right this minute some poor farmer in Afghanistan under the leadership of U.S.-supported warlords is growing a field full of poppies in order to feed his family. Afghanistan is functionally a narco-state, now producing 87 percent of the world's opium, more than it did under the Taliban. And though the Defense Department is now trying to be more aggressive in attacking this problem, it's too little way too late.

Here at home, heroin is seeping into all of our communities whether we want to admit it or not. Down in Bureau County, state Rep. Frank Mautino (D-Spring Valley) has proposed new, tougher legislation based on the number of "blows" or doses of heroin, in a person's possession. He's doing his best to scare straight the users and dealers in his own community. I don't blame him for trying, but it's like sticking a finger in a crumbling dike.

Until we address the contradictions between our foreign and domestic policy when it comes to drugs, we will lose this war. Until we deal with addiction as forcefully as we do incarceration in this country, we will keep losing this war. And even the most dedicated and talented members of law enforcement like Tim Trevier and Dorothy Knudson are doomed to fail.

back | to top | full article >>