Eric Brady | The Roanoke Times

Tim Carden leads the Roanoke office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration.

The first guilty plea is set for today in a Roanoke-area heroin distribution case that is one of several raising alarms among law enforcement agencies, whose officers worry that use of the drug is spreading to younger people.

Court filings indicate that federal jury trials have been reset to guilty plea hearings for Safiyyah Amirah Omar today and for Eric Wayne Otey Jr. on Friday. Omar and Otey are among six defendants accused of dealing heroin in Roanoke and Southwest Roanoke County as part of an organization allegedly headed by Clifton Dwight "Lite" Lee.

Attorneys would not comment in detail on the case, but court documents allege that one of Lee's co-defendants, Michael John Duggins Jr., was supplying heroin to a juvenile who lived with him in Roanoke County, as well as to at least 26 other people.

Federal prosecutors said the case is just one that has raised flags in the past year about heroin use among people ranging in age from 17 to their mid-20s. It's a trend that may be too recent to be fully reflected in the figures kept by police, courts and hospitals, but law enforcement and treatment center workers said it's clear to them that in some parts of the region, something has changed.

"It's like this wave has washed over the Roanoke area. It's different than we've seen before," said Julia Dudley, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia.

Pockets of heroin use among teens and young adults show up regularly in national media accounts, often in the Northeast or in more populated areas such as with a case involving a string of overdoses last year in Northern Virginia's Fairfax County.

Don Wolthuis, an assistant U.S. attorney and veteran drug prosecutor, said recent developments have shown that Western Virginia faces similar problems. "Traditionally, there have been small pockets ... or minicommunities of people who use abuse heroin. This is different," he said.

Accounts of the extent of heroin problems vary among localities. Craig County and Roanoke report no significant jump. Authorities in Botetourt and Bedford counties said they have seen heroin creep back into their communities. Meanwhile, Roanoke County police reported a 400 percent leap from 2007 to 2008 in the number of heroin-related incidents that resulted in an arrest.

Law enforcement officials said the drug's use and sale here are not like in larger urban areas. The presence of heroin in Western Virginia tends to be covert, without the drug-fueled violence or open-air markets that historically marked other, larger surges in drug use.

Crack cocaine and methamphetamine continue to account for most of the region's drug arrests, police and federal investigators said.

But federal authorities said that what they're hearing from informants and seeing in cases has them worried that heroin is following fentanyl and OxyContin in popularity of illicit use, even among people with little prior experience with drug use.

"They're skipping over pot and going straight to heroin," Dudley said.

"That's out of the norm," agreed Tim Carden, who leads the Roanoke office of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and is coordinating a new regional effort targeting heroin distribution. "People who use heroin have usually gone through the marijuana, the cocaine, the dependency issues."

Since he took charge of the Roanoke DEA office a year ago, Carden has worked to make it the hub of regional efforts to curb heroin use. He praised the cooperation that led to the August arrest of Lee, who faces 28 federal charges linked to leading a heroin distribution operation.

But Carden and other officials said their worries extend beyond the Lee case.

"Clifton Lee is not the beginning or the end of anything," said Brian McGinn, spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office. "He's in the mix ... one piece of the puzzle."

Age a common factor

Authorities said the increased heroin use has been accompanied by overdoses, although they declined to give details of such cases.

Federal authorities said that in cases involving overdoses, they plan to charge heroin suppliers with contributing to death or injury, as well as the more standard distribution charges. The resulting death or injury charge carries a 20-year minimum sentence.

The only such case now in Western Virginia's federal courts, prosecutors said, is that of Cynthia Nichols, who faces two charges of contributing to a serious injury as well as distribution charges. Her trial is scheduled for March.

Dr. William Rea, section chief of adult inpatient psychiatry at Carilion Clinic's rehabilitation facility in Roanoke and an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, said that adult admissions for heroin detoxification have jumped 25 percent in the past 18 months, and that all the new patients were between the ages of 19 and 26.

Rea estimated that he had seen 15 overdose cases in the past year -- many of them people who mixed heroin and Xanax or Klonopin, a combination that can affect breathing. He was aware of only one fatal overdose during that time.

Gail Burruss, director of adult clinical services for Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare, said her agency also has seen a jump in the number of people seeking treatment for heroin addiction, but added that far more people still seek services linked to use of crack cocaine, alcohol and marijuana.

Apart from an apparent concentration among young people, the increase in heroin use does not seem limited to any particular group, Dudley and others said.

It "jumps all socioeconomic and racial boundaries," said Lt. Huck Ewers of the Roanoke County Police Department.

Ewers said he first noted an increase in heroin activity after reviewing offense reports in April 2008.

The offenders tended to be 17 to 23, "without a doubt the youngest group of individuals" using heroin that Ewers said he had encountered in almost a quarter-century of police work.

Other localities reported smaller changes.

"For us, it's the same crowd that's been around forever," said Lt. Danny Brabham, a longtime Roanoke vice officer. "Fortunately, we're not being overrun with it." Although the number of heroin-related incidents has risen in the city in recent years, Brabham said that likely reflected patterns of enforcement and other factors, rather than an increase in the number of users.

No pattern of entry

Investigators have found no central figures controlling the flow of heroin into the region. In area cases that federal authorities investigated, residents made trips to Philadelphia, Maryland or New Jersey to buy heroin, then returned to sell it at many times the price they paid for it.

Heroin typically is sold in 0.03-gram bags, often stamped with names such as "Green Frog" or "Funeral." Bags go for $20 to $30 apiece in the Roanoke area, officers said. Authorities have found users consuming anywhere from one to 30 bags per day, with typical use probably being five to eight bags per day, Carden said.

Lee's organization is accused of bringing at least 1,000 bags of heroin into the region two to three times per week, paying $5,000 for 20 50-bag "bricks" of heroin and selling it for $30,000 after breaking it down into bags.

Heroin usually is cut with something like talcum powder or baby formula powder, Carden said, so the user has little idea how powerful the drug may be.

Much of the heroin seized around Roanoke recently has had a purity of 20 percent to 30 percent, but some has been 90 percent, Carden said.

Rea, the Carilion psychiatrist, pointed to the increased purity as a factor leading more people to need treatment. "It's much, much easier to get addicted" with more concentrated drugs, he said.

The persistence of heroin addiction was on display last month in court hearings that were part of another recent federal heroin case. Investigators had targeted Alvin Macauley, who is accused of heading a Roanoke-based distribution ring. Former husband and wife Ralph H. Covington Jr. and Dorraine K. Covington, charged with selling heroin they obtained from Macauley, made controlled buys to help implicate the larger dealer, Wolthuis told U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Urbanski.

But after they'd gathered the evidence, the Covingtons couldn't resist going back to Macauley to buy more drugs, Wolthuis said. The Covingtons bought 30 bags of heroin and had used 17 of them in the day before investigators caught up with them.

Ralph Covington, 48, told Urbanski he first used heroin when he was 15 and had been a regular user of the drug for more than a decade.

"It hurts your family. It hurts the people around you. ... It's just something that's taken over my life a few times," Ralph Covington said.

Urbanski decided to keep both Covingtons jailed pending what is scheduled to be an April 1 trial.

"These are tragic, tragic, tragic cases," Urbanski said.

Staff researcher Belinda Harris contributed to this report.