A quick stop at a Royal Farms store just off Route 40 in Elkton proved to be costly for 39-year-old James Adkins when he drove out of the convenience store's parking lot and allegedly failed to stop prompting the police to pull him over.
"During the course of the traffic stop, officers discovered paraphernalia, 19 baggies of heroin and over $200 in U.S. currency,” said Capt. Joseph Zurolo of the Elkton Police Department, “They also gleaned information that Mr. Adkins was also involved in illegal drug distribution trade."
What might appear to be a minor bust became something much bigger when police obtained a search and seizure warrant and raided Adkins' house on Buttonwoods Road.
"They served such warrant locating over 40 grams of marijuana, over a thousand baggies of heroin, over $5,000 in U.S. currency, a 38-caliber revolver and multiple items of drug paraphernalia," said Zurolo.
That's potentially a thousand baggies of death since the heroin was mixed with Fentanyl.
In a town of just 16,000 people, the opioid crisis has produced an average of about an overdose per day in Elkton, and its location along Interstate 95 squarely between two major drug markets in Baltimore and Philadelphia makes it doubtful the problem will go away anytime soon.
But with the help of the town's street crime unit, busts like this one are a step in the right direction.
"It's a pretty substantial street arrest for us, but it is really just a drop in the bucket in the macro scale of the drug epidemic that not only this community that is seeing, but that we're seeing across this country,” said Zurolo, “but we're just continuing to charge ahead and making the arrests and doing what the police can do to rectify the problem."
