When Detective Captain Joe Ross stepped into the interim Ironton Police chief job in February, he had several things he wanted to see done, including dealing with cars blocking sidewalks, campers parked on the streets and to deal with the city’s drug problem.

“Since I took over as the acting chief, we have stepped up our enforcement on drugs,” he said. “We’ve been working with the Lawrence County Drug Task Force. And we’ve made several busts with our K-9 unit, Sgt. Brian Pauley and Goose.”

Ross said Pauley made several traffic stops with Goose that resulted in arrests.

“We have nine or ten people we have arrested in the last month for heroin,” Ross said.

Ross said the department stepped up drug arrests, for one thing, because Goose is now available to work.

“We got him last year but it takes awhile to get certification and get him going,” he said. “It’s a big plus if you stop a car. If you ask to search the car and they say “no,” you don’t have any recourse but to let them go. With a drug dog, you can run him around the car and if he “hits” on the car, we have probable cause to search the car. So that’s where a lot of these busts are coming from.”

“We’ve confiscated probably close to $7,000 in cash, which the majority of that has been turned back over to us by Prosecutor Brigham Anderson.”

The money is going to doing more controlled narcotic buys. Under state law, the money can be used for things like drug buys, equipment, paying informants, but not things like salaries.

“I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far,” Ross said. “One in particular, we had complaints about a gentleman selling dope at the playground up on Ashtabula Street so we made three controlled buys from Thomas Jenkins. We made an arrest and he was charged with three fourth-degree felonies.”

He said they are working on more drug arrests with more indictments forthcoming.

Ross said that the two most popular street drugs they are seeing right now are opiates.

“We are seeing heroin coming in from Huntington and also an influx of Oxycontin pills coming this way, we think, from Detroit,” Ross said. “Right now the most dangerous ones are heroin and crystal meth, that is what everyone is overdosing on. We are trying to stop that, put a dent in it. The heroin that is coming in is almost straight fentanyl, it’s killing people.”

Ross said that since the state closed down the pill mills, the people who were addicted to Oxycodone pills get their opiate fix with heroin.

“That’s why we have the big influx of heroin, it’s cheaper, it’s easier to get,” he said. “Instead of paying $40 for a 30-mg Oxycontin pill, they’re paying $25 for a 1/10 of a gram of heroin.”

Ross said that by making drug arrests, they hope to put a dent in other crimes.

“If we can deter some of these drug problems, then thefts go down because they aren’t stealing to buy drugs,” he said. “And the community has been a good asset in this fight, with people calling and leaving tips on our drug hotline.”

Another thing the department is dealing with is getting people who have been given Narcan to prevent an opiate overdose to get into a treatment program within 30 days.

“We hooked up with the prosecutor’s office and he made the decision that if they aren’t in a treatment program in those 30 days, we are charging people who have had numerous overdoses with inducing a panic,” Ross said, adding the charge is a felony and that one person has already been arrested for that.

“We are just trying to improve the safety for the citizens of Ironton,” Ross said. “We are making advancements in that.”

The Ironton Police Department drug hotline is 740-237-6101.