Concord
“I wouldn’t give one more weight than the others. They’re (all) major corridors that are supplying the state,” said New Hampshire State Police Sgt. Mark Hall, who is part of the state’s drug interdiction unit.
Every day, quantities of drugs both large and small are transported into New Hampshire from other states in the Northeast, including Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York.
But the path for the flow of deadly heroin and fentanyl starts thousands of miles away, in Chinese warehouses and in poppy fields and clandestine labs run by Mexican cartels.
As New Hampshire continues to suffer from the opioid epidemic, authorities are seeing more fentanyl coming into the state.
The drugs moving into New Hampshire from eastern Massachusetts cities like Lawrence and Haverhill are now almost all lethal strains that include fentanyl, according to police.
That synthetic drug, now blamed for two-thirds of the 478 fatal drug deaths in New Hampshire last year, is about 50 times more potent than heroin and more than 100 times more potent then morphine.
Just touching or inhaling two milligrams of fentanyl (for scale, that’s the size of two grains of salt) potentially is enough to kill a person.
Most of the fentanyl in the United States comes from China, according to a recent report from the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Though the Chinese government is starting to crack down on thousands of chemical and pharmaceutical facilities that manufacture synthetic opioids, drug makers in Mexico, Canada and the United States can simply order the drug online and receive shipments through the U.S. Postal Service.
“It’s almost like the Wild West. You can pretty much get what you order,” said Tom Ridge, former Director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “It’s a global marketplace, it’s a global drug trade.”
New bipartisan legislation in the U.S. Senate aims to halt that.
Democratic New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan is one of STOP Act’s co-sponsors. She said that while private postal companies like UPS and FedEx are required to provide package tracking information, the United States Postal Service isn’t required to.
That’s what the STOP Act is trying to change, and Hassan said she’s hopeful it will give law enforcement more information to help combat the supply of illicit drugs.
“It’s really important that we’re working to combat and beat this epidemic on all fronts,” she said.
In a grid-locked Senate, Hassan said, she’s hopeful that addiction is one of the things that Republicans and Democrats can agree on.
Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire are wholesale fentanyl seizure hotspots, according to a nationwide map of Drug Enforcement Administration seizures recorded from 2013 to 2015.
Highways are the major drug corridors in New England, according to state police and federal drug enforcement agents.
However, the area of the state you live in determines where drugs come from, according to law enforcement.
The western side of the state bordering Vermont gets most of its heroin supply from New York City and Hartford, Conn., according to authorities. The drugs flow up through the Massachusetts cities of Springfield and Holyoke and into Vermont and small New Hampshire cities such as Lebanon and Keene.
Southeastern New Hampshire, including Manchester, the Seacoast and northern cities, like Concord, see a flow of drugs that come up from eastern Massachusetts cities.
“New Hampshire being as small as it is, you wouldn’t think there would be different trends in different areas, but that is the case,” Sgt. Mark Hall said.
It’s an example of the drug territories held by different gangs in the Northeast.
Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel has a significant hold on the New England heroin market, with the Juarez cartel maintaining a Connecticut stronghold, the report shows.