Officials Say County is "Too Good for Drugs"

Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano and Police Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey echoed each other Monday, saying the county can't arrest itself out of a heroin problem.

To that end, the public servants were joined by Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence (LICADD) Executive Director Jeffrey Reynolds at Massapequa Park's Nassau County Police Academy Monday to unveil the "Too Good for Drugs" initiative. The program, created by the Tampa, Fla.-based Mendez Foundation, has been utilized in different parts of the country since 1978.

More than 30 school administrators and community leaders were at the academy receiving the first of two days of training, aimed at schoolchildren in grades K-12. An investment of $180,000 has been made in the program, all of that coming from asset seizures of those nabbed for drug crimes.

"This is a wonderful way to take the profits away from the drug dealers...and we are channeling them directly back to drug prevention, enforcement, awareness and education," Mangano said.

Monday's conference enacted the third prong in the county's approach to combat heroin, following an announcement last month of Operation H.A.L.T. (Heroin Abuse Location Targeting), along with an Awareness ad campaign.

More detectives are now on the heroin beat, and Mulvey said the numbers are promising. There have already been 109 heroin-related arrests over the first two months of 2010, compared to around 400 for all of 2009.

"In addition to detectives, we've changed our tactics," Mulvey explained. "We're doing some interdictions of Nassau County users who go into Queens and Brooklyn and the Bronx and come back here with drugs. We've had some successful seizures already, dogs hitting on some of these people we've been doing surveillance on at the county line and recovering heroin."

Reynolds hopes to educate more kids before law enforcement has to step in. But he added that it's not uncommon for different drug awareness programs to receive pushback. He hopes the structure of Too Good for Drugs is one that can be sold to all the county school systems.

"One of the challenges with the schools is that many of them are real focused on academics. Nobody wants to be at the bottom of the list that's published [in the paper] on a regular basis," Reynolds said. "And so they've got to find a way to integrate these lessons into the existing curriculum. This matches up perfectly. You're not adding 10 sessions. You're restructuring the health curriculum to take a more comprehensive approach that's based on science."