Saturday morning my partner and I walked down to the pavilion by the pond in Pope Park to check out the heroin (fentanyl) bags that are easily found in the grass and on the pavilion floor, along with discarded syringes and other paraphrenelia.
At least once a month I like to go down there to see what the current brands are. In just a few minutes I found 10 different brands, eight of them I hadn’t seen before. Dealers often switch their bags out both to keep their marketing fresh and to make it harder for the police to link a particular bag back to them.
Over the years the bags have gotten much more colorful and are now mostly preprints (as opposed to rubber stamped designs or words). I’ve heard the dealers buy the preprints at a local tattoo studio. I’ve even seen them advertised in the past on Amazon, but when I looked today I couldn’t find them anymore. I was able to find them on a Chinese Alibaba web site. I’ve seen many of these bags on the streets of Hartford.
I have no objection to dealers using names like Tombstone, Pray for Death or Scorpion on their bags. I get pissed off when I find bags with Kermit the Frog on them, Hello Kitty or Casper the Friendly Ghosts.
Three of the bags were for the adult cartoon characters, Mort and Arty. One was Luigi from Donkey Kong, but it was a scary Luigi with blood stained hands. The one that ticked me off was Clifford the Red Dog. A happy smiling Clifford, the friendly red dog. All these bags were in a public park not far from a play area with swings and jungle gym and a see-saw. A couple years ago in a park in a neighboring town, a young child overdosed after finding a wax bag and putting it into his mouth. He had to be resuscitated with naloxone. I don’t know what brand the bag was, but if a kid wanders away from his parents and finds a bag with a friendly cartoon character on it, they might think it is candy. Now admittedly most of these bags are empty, but some bags still have small grains of powder left in them. A kid puts their fingers in the bags and then later the finger goes in the nose and it could be a problem.
A number of years ago I asked a friend of mine who used drugs daily to discuss this matter with her Park Street drug dealer and to tell him the tall paramedic who walks the park wants him to stop putting kid designs on his heroin bags. She was all fired up to do it. When I asked her about it later, she had forgotten our conversation. I don’t know if she ever mentioned it to him — she was not the type to be shy, but I did notice then that the bags started to have more skeletons on them. Whether or not that had anything to do with my suggestion, I don’t know. I’ll take credit for it though.
In general I am opposed to too harsh sentences for low level drug dealers because I feel our prisons are already too filled with small fry and not enough with the true criminals, rich Pharma executives who profited by lying about opioids and who started this whole epidemic, not to mention cartel bosses. But I would support tough penalties for any dealer, big or small, caught selling bags with cartoon characters on them. Whoever is behind the Clifford the Red Dog bags should be locked up.
Here’s an old post I wrote on this same topic back in 2017.