Welcome to the Midwest, where the opioid epidemic affects nearly everyone — and a some are taking to the internet to expose heroin dealers. But are their vigilante tactics helping curb the epidemic — or hurting the people they're trying to save?
In 2015, Scaletta got married and moved to South Carolina, and Megan and Briscar fell deeper into addiction. Friends had warned Scaletta for years that Briscar was an alleged drug dealer. It wasn’t long before the duo were identified by a locally famous Facebook page and online vigilante group called Portage County Heroin Dealers Exposed, or PCHDE.
By that point, Megan had admitted to her sister that she was addicted to heroin. “She just kept sobbing to me over the phone, ‘I really need help,’” Scaletta remembers. She contacted PCHDE on Facebook on behalf of her sister. The group was sympathetic and gave her phone numbers for treatment centers that Megan could enter. They took down the original post but continued posting memes accusing Briscar, himself addicted to heroin, of dealing drugs.
Scaletta called and texted Megan to no avail. She stopped around midnight, resolving to find her the next day. At 6:02 a.m., police arrived and found Megan without a pulse. At 6:25 a.m., her phone would flicker with Shannon’s final text: “Last night was the first night in 6 months I didn’t sleep. I don’t know what is going on, but I refuse to let you backwards.”
But PCHDE’s main weapon was its Facebook page. As it gained likes — as of this writing, it has over 13,000 — PCHDE shifted its operations entirely to Facebook. On any day, the group might share the identity of an alleged trafficker, the location of a rumored dope house, or an incendiary article about the light sentencing of a dealer.
When asked if he knows about Portage County Heroin Dealers Exposed, Powers nods. Of course he knows about it. Everyone in the county does. “There’s good and bad with something like that from a law-enforcement perspective,” he says. “I know their intentions are great, but when you see dealers exposed on social media before we’re able to arrest them, they may jeopardize an investigation — the dealers might change tactics or go underground.
On June 26th, 2017, PCHDE posted an announcement: “Breaking News: Dylan Briscar has been arrested!” A few days later, thewould report that he had been charged with tampering with evidence, a third-degree felony, for removing drugs from the motel room where Megan died. In 2016, PCHDE asked Pearce to protest at houses rumored to be selling drugs. “I said, ‘Hell yeah, let’s go,’” he says with relish. “It was me and a bunch of grandmas. I got 12 old ladies with me in the middle of fucking winter. We put masks on and stood outside of a red apartment building that had a bunch of dealers.
In late 2015, in Louisville, Kentucky, a Facebook page called Heroin Dealers Exposed emerged. It began naming people who had allegedly sold drugs, many of whom had never been formally convicted. Louisville’scovered the story. Around a year later, the woman behind it went public. Her name was JoAnn Miller.
The Facebook pages culminated in Portage County Heroin Dealers Exposed, which originally worked with the Meth & Heroin Dealers Exposed — the two groups served as administrators and backups for each other. “They are,” Miller says about PCHDE. “I exposed maybe a hundred dealers. They’ve exposed, I don’t know, a thousand.”
It would take Walmsley two more years to “divorce heroin,” as she calls it, but in March 2013, after “2,566 days shooting dope, 496 days incarcerated, and getting arrested 18 times,” she got sober and set upon a remarkable path helping others to get sober too. In 2015, she implemented the Police Assisted Addiction Recovery Initiative, or PAARI, in Ohio, which allows people who use drugs to walk into police stations to be treated without fear of incarceration.
Walmsley, in fact, helps temper the group. She says she speaks to both law enforcement and PCHDE on a regular basis, and says that “there have been several times where the Task Force reached out to me and asked me to contact the page and ask them to take down something … because it could hurt the chance of the dealer being arrested.”
“One problem with the [Portage County Heroin Dealers Exposed] page is that it doesn’t really have an accurate perception of the complexity of what’s going on,” Cauchon says. “It’s like there are good people and bad people. But there’s a myth of who the drug dealer is. In fact, most users deal and most dealers use. I would never tell someone how to grieve, but when you get [these pages] going on in your community, it changes how people talk to each other.
Many of the comments in PCHDE’s Facebook page share their vitriol for heroin dealers. But the group also receives criticism from those accusing it of ruining the names of people with drug addictions who are dealing to support a habit, or of misidentifying people. PCHDE is unapologetic. “To my knowledge I haven’t posted anyone that wasn’t a dealer,” the group leader says. “If they can convince me that they are in recovery even for a short time, I will delete the post.
In late May, PCHDE stopped posting on Facebook, seemingly due to an internecine conflict between its administrators. Shortly after, the Portage County Drug Task Force distanced itself via its Facebook page, claiming not to have received any official tips from the page. Geauga County Heroin Dealers Exposed remains and still posts regularly.
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