NUKOLII — While crystal methamphetamine, or “ice,” has gotten much of the attention because of acts of violence committed by those high on the drug, experts say the Hawaii and Kauai war on drugs must attack all types of drugs
NUKOLII — While crystal methamphetamine, or “ice,” has gotten much of the attention because of acts of violence committed by those high on the drug, experts say the Hawaii and Kauai war on drugs must attack all types of drugs and users.
“We need to target all the drugs,” said Gary Shimabukuro, whose company, Laulima Hawaii, teaches drug awareness courses in Hawaii and around the world.
“If we’re going to attack the drugs, we have to talk about all of them,” he said before the annual meeting of the Hawaii State Association of Counties at the Radisson Kauai Beach Resort here yesterday.
“Almost all of them (ice users) have begun with marijuana,” said Christopher G. Tolley, demand reduction coordinator and public information officer for the U.S. Department of Justice Drug Enforcement Administration’s Honolulu office.
“There is no such thing as recreational use, or casual use,” said Tolley. Most addicts are “poly-users,” or use many drugs including ice, marijuana, heroin and cocaine, he added.
“If we didn’t have as many marijuana users, we wouldn’t have as much ice users,” said Shimabukuro.
Fighting the problem of drugs in Hawaii, and on Kauai, takes an involved community, an educated community, and battles on the enforcement, eradication, education, rehabilitation, and other fronts, Tolley said.
“The entire community must work together,” said Tolley. The community must decide it wants drugs out, and children and adults both need to be educated, he added.
Since he first encountered smokable ice at chicken fights on Oahu 21 years ago, Shimabukuro said “it’s about time” that government and community leaders finally have decided that drugs are the number-one problem in the islands.
“We’re way overdue. It’s a global problem, and it’s escalating,” said Shimabukuro.
With close to 100 laboratories for “cooking” ice discovered in the islands over the years, some 80 percent of all physical abuse found to be related to drugs, most of those incarcerated either on drug-related charges or for stealing to support drug habits, and parents leaving young children to attend to even younger children while the adults go on multiple-day drug binges, “that’s an epidemic,” he said.
Oahu leads the nation in number of per-capita thefts, and around 700 cars a month are stolen on that island, Shimabukuro said.
A piece of ice the size of a grain of rice is all it takes for some users to get high, and the high can last from four to 16 hours. But at $250 to $350 for a gram of ice on the street, many users find themselves resorting to property crimes to support their habits, Shimabukuro said.
Tolley estimates that 90 percent of all property crime in Hawaii is perpetrated to support drug habits, and called ice addiction “the most significant problem in Hawaii.”
There are an estimated 30,000 daily users, whose habits generate $5.1 million a day in untaxed, undetected dealer revenue. That’s a $1.8 billion annual industry, Tolley said. “These are very conservative estimates.”
“Ice has been devastating” in terms of death tolls attributed to its use, said Tolley. And those numbers will “only escalate.”
Where most of the ice in the islands used to come from Korea, now California is the leading supplier, he continued. Local dealers find cheap Mainland sources of the drug, so don’t often resort to making their own, Tolley said.
“We’re not known as a lab state,” so residents and authorities haven’t been exposed to environmental problems associated with improper dumping and disposal of the hazardous materials used to make ice, Tolley added.
DEA officials prefer to refer to the so-called “club drugs” as “predator drugs,” as they are used to manipulate people. Drugs including “roofies,” also called “date-rape drugs,” are hard for law-enforcement officials to detect, because they look just like other types of medicinal drugs, in pill form, Tolley said.
Ecstasy is another predator drug that can cause permanent damage to the brain and body with just one use, yet in 2000 some 8 percent of all high school seniors in Hawaii admitted in surveys to using ecstasy.
That’s the equivalent of 48 people out of the normal-sized graduating class of 600 seniors at the island’s three public high schools combined.
Most of the state’s ecstasy comes from the Netherlands, and the sheer volume of packages and privacy protections prevent DEA agents and other officials from catching more than a small percentage of the estimated total number of drug packages sent to the state, he said.
So, the DEA targets suspicious individuals, packages and businesses, uses drug-sniffing dogs, and other means to slow the flow of illegal drugs, he noted.
“This is about more than keeping people from smoking. It’s about society,” and how one user impacts many, many other people, he said.
“We can make a difference in this problem,” said County Councilmember Jimmy Tokioka. “It is a big, big problem on this island.”
Business Editor Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
