Steve Janoski

Staff Writer, @SteveJanoski

It’s Friday morning, and Gurbir S. Grewal, the Bergen County prosecutor, is about to address the several dozen police officers involved in Operation Helping Hand, a weeklong initiative spearheaded by his office that sought to not only arrest heroin users, but persuade them to enter a five-day detox at Bergen Regional Medical Center in Paramus.

Last year, Grewal tells them, Bergen County didn’t go a day without a heroin arrest, an overdose, or what authorities call a Narcan save — and police weren’t putting a dent in the problem by locking people up. Engaging with addicts to secure the treatment they need, he says, is the only way to shatter their turbulent cycle of abuse, overdose and arrest.

“If we can get one person into treatment … maybe they get into long-term care and get out of this rut,” Grewal says.

At a midday news conference today, Grewal will announce another facet of his multipronged offensive against opioids: the heroin addiction recovery program, which will open walk-in hours at the Paramus, Lyndhurst, and Mahwah police departments, where addicts can clear warrants, turn in drug paraphernalia, and seek entry into detox with the assistance of drug counselors.

“That’s the future,” Grewal said. “That’s the model that’s really going to attack this problem.”

Grewal will also announce the results of Helping Hand, which ran April 3-7 and relied on officers from the Prosecutor’s Office, the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office and 16 municipal police departments to arrest heroin users who bought in open-air drug markets in Paterson, Newark and Passaic and crossed back into Bergen County.

The Prosecutor’s Office offered to embed a Record reporter and photographer with police throughout Helping Hand, under the condition that the names and faces of those arrested would not be published.

In all, officers arrested 43 people, 15 of whom decided to enter the Bergen Regional detox.

Authorities describe the increasing number of people addicted to opiods as epidemic, but it's worse than that — it’s a pestilence, one that has savaged families and left mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives and husbands weeping over graves that never should have been dug.

And traditional policing has failed to stanch the bleeding. Police say no amount of threatened jail time can keep addicts from racing back to their dealers when withdrawal sickness strikes.

“It’s a fight, man," said Lt. Hector Carter, a swaggering Ivy Leaguer with Trinidadian roots who is one of Grewal's field marshals for the operation. "When that stuff calls, [addicts] are like: ‘I gotta leave here. I gotta go.' "

From 2013 to 2015, The Record and NorthJersey.com documented the drug trade, centered in Paterson, in reports that detailed how the Silk City drug markets were feeding the addictions of those living in more affluent Bergen and Passaic county suburbs.

In 2014, about 50 people from Bergen County died from drug overdoses, which was double the prior year. In 2016, the number of deaths from overdoses reached 87, of which 70 deaths were heroin- or opioid-related. This year, there have already been 77 reported heroin- or opioid-related overdoses, and nine deaths.

Those numbers would be far higher without naloxone, commonly referred to by its brand name, Narcan. The medicinal nasal spray that reverses the effects of an overdose, Narcan has already saved 57 lives in Bergen County this year, compared with 180 in 2016.

Grewal is under no illusions about the operation’s overall impact — it’s not going to stop overdoses in Bergen County, he said flatly. But he focuses on individual successes, and believes if the initiative helps even one person crawl from beneath the leaden burden of addiction, it will be worth it, he said.

Capt. David Borzotta hosts an officers’ briefing the Wednesday before the operation kicks off, and he lays out the basics. Undercover officers in plain clothes and in unmarked cars will swarm open-air drug markets in the three cities, looking for hand-to-hand buys. They’ll run plates, identify Bergen residents, and pull them over when they cross back into the county. Then police will search the cars and make the arrests.

After processing, authorities will usher in recovery specialists and clinicians, who will offer addicts the chance to take one of the six detox beds Bergen Regional put aside daily for the initiative.

“We can’t make it any simpler: You have the recovery coaches and a bed waiting for you,” Borzotta said. “A lot of these are good kids who just got caught in the net. But if they don’t want it, we can’t force it. Here’s your court date, have a nice day.”

Throughout the week, investigators look for heroin, which is sold in bags, bundles, or bricks. Bags cost around $3 each. Bundles, which are 10 bags, cost about $30. Five bundles makes a brick, which runs about $150.

How much an average user does depends on the individual, said one officer, whose name could not be used because he primarily works undercover.

“The heroin addict I’ve experienced will do as much as they can finance on a daily basis,” he said. “It’s what they can get their hands on and how long they can stretch it for.”

The officer said users actively sought out any heroin brand known for killing through overdoses. Why? Because that’s a “good dose” — the strongest product.

On Monday, police processed a 30-year-old white man from Upper Saddle River. Officers stopped him on the Garden State Parkway, right before the Saddle Brook tolls, he said.

He's a college graduate who studied psychology and has a passion for jazz; he is intensely articulate and looks more like a coffeehouse snob than drug offender. He started using at 25, he said, when he snorted a matchstick head’s worth of heroin from a friend’s stash.

“I remember looking at the powder and thinking, ‘No matter what this is, this amount of anything couldn’t hurt me.’ And I sniffed it, and I felt amazing," he said. "Then I felt terrible and threw up. Then, I felt even better than I did before."

Since then he’s been beaten, threatened, and robbed several times, sometimes by the same people. At his worst, he was doing a brick a day and a bundle in one shot.

He once worked in digital advertising, but that’s over, and his father no longer talks to him. He also has a daughter, born last July, whom he has yet to meet.

“This is not who I was supposed to be,” he said.

He accepted the detox offer. As of Friday, he was still at Bergen Regional and looking to go into further treatment, police said.

Grewal’s office ran a similar program late last August, with mixed results: 40 people were arrested, and about 12 agreed to enter detox. But only one moved on to further treatment.

There were lag times between arrest and treatment, and because there were no health professionals involved, officers were often the ones trying to persuade the addicts to enter detox.

This year, two organizations — the Paramus-based Children’s Aid and Family Services and the Bergen County Office of Addiction Services — have joined to smooth the transfer process and talk to addicts reluctant to enter treatment.

The paradigm shift Grewal is driving is huge, said Sue Marchese-Debiak, the county’s coordinator in the Office of Addiction Services.

“We’re removing the stigma that’s attached to addiction,” Marchese-Debiak said. “If you’ve been in this field, you know this is a disease. This is an illness.”

State-certified addiction specialists from the county office speak with addicts as soon they’re processed, assessing their medical history and gauging their interest in rehab. Recovery specialists try to develop a relationship with the more wary users and leverage it to persuade addicts to get help.

The specialists also keep in touch after detox, said Ellen Elias, a senior vice president with Children’s Aid, to make sure the users don’t get lost in the system — or bounce out entirely. And Bergen Regional works with Charity Care to ensure that no addicts who want treatment are turned away due to a lack of insurance.

Users who enter the detox program are still charged with possession and whatever other charges they incur. And because they enter voluntarily, they can sign themselves out whenever they please. But the Prosecutor’s Office will inform the judge presiding over the users’ case that they accepted help, Grewal said.

The arrests stack up quickly, and addicts who tell their stories reveal a bleak world of carnage filled with gut-wrenching tales of robbery, assault, rape and murder.

By Wednesday, 18 people had been arrested, and among them were two pregnant women, only one of whom entered detox. A 23-year-old woman from Nyack, N.Y., told a shocked processing officer she had started doing heroin at 12. She declined treatment.

Another man, a 31-year-old from Garfield who wore his black Kangol hat low over the tops of his ears, said he got hooked on opioids after years of doctor-prescribed Percocet meant to ease the pain of a severe electrical shock he endured at age 13.

He entered detox Monday, but signed himself out early Tuesday morning.

Ben Kimmel, a Children's Aid recovery specialist with sleeves of colorful tattoos and a thick New York accent, tried to persuade the Garfield man to reconsider.

“No one can do this alone," Kimmel said. "I couldn’t."

The Garfield man did not return to detox. But police said he wanted to come back this week. Whether he shows up is impossible to predict.

“I’m still working on it," Kimmel said. "I’m calling him, calling him. He doesn’t always get back, but … I’m gonna keep working on him. I won’t give up. Because at one point in my life, when I didn’t deserve it, someone followed through with me, wouldn’t give up on me. So I’m not giving up on them.”