HIGH TIDE OF HEROIN

Despite four fatal overdoses, Aransas Pass reluctant to admit shrimping,
drugs linked

By Thaddeus Herrick
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle

ARANSAS PASS Gail Wright was found dead in her room at the Travel Lodge
on Commercial Street after a boozy night of cinnamon schnaaps and Busch
beer at Judy's Silver Dollar Saloon.

David Dermott was dead on arrival at the Columbia North Bay Hospital, as
was Dennis Bowen, a stepfather of two whose face turned blue and body went
limp at his home in a neighborhood infested with mosquitoes and crime.

These deaths over the past three months have caused a stir in this coastal
town of 8,000 for two reasons: All died of heroin overdoses and all were
shrimpers.

Heroin claimed a fourth victim on Halloween, a crewman on a tugboat. The
drug also has been responsible for a half dozen nonfatal overdoses since
last summer, at least two involving shrimpers.

While authorities say the overdoses are a product of the shrimp season,
when Gulf shrimpers are paid hundreds of dollars in cash after weeks on the
water, Aransas Pass leaders are reluctant to even acknowledge a problem.

Still, few in this forlorn town just over the causeway from Corpus Christi
recall such an alarming number of overdoses, which police attribute to a
batch of unusually strong heroin.

"There's never been deaths like this before," said Angelia Scarbrough, a
former Aransas Pass shrimper and onetime heroin user herself. "It's gonna
keep happening 'til the stuff runs out."

In Wright's hotel room, along with $8 in cash, authorities found a syringe
and a oneshot supply of heroin that was 12 percent pure, compared with the
2 percent that's usually found on the streets.

The overdoses, of course, are another illustration of the nation's growing
preference for heroin. Drug experts say heroin has regained popularity with
all segments of the U.S. society, attracting 141,000 new users last year.

Many are upwardly mobile suburbanites. Yet in Aransas Pass, the upswing in
heroin abuse seems at least loosely tied to the economic despair that grips
this town's oncerobust shrimping industry.

"When you take a drug, it takes away some of the pain," said Anne Dunn,
executive director of the Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse Coastal
Bend. "And there is a lot of pain in communities like this pain of
poverty and hopelessness."

Aransas Pass has always been a salty dog kind of place, a town catering
less to the Port Aransasbound tourist than the fisherman who docks at Conn
Brown harbor after 20some days at sea.

But the town had an economic backbone in Gulf King Seafood Co., a local
outfit whose fleet of 75 boats helped make Aransas Pass the state's
secondmost productive shrimp port. With its processing plant, shipyard and
supply house, Gulf King all but owned the local harbor.

Not so anymore. The company sold the supply house and half its interest in
the shipyard, and the processing plant is for sale. Meanwhile, Gulf King
dispatched the bulk of its fleet to harvest shrimp off the coast of
Nicaragua, a move that has met with limited success.

Some say the company became overextended. Others blame the demise of the
town's largest employer on environmental regulations, such as the one that
calls for shrimpers to install devices in their nets to free sea turtles.

Still others cite the decreasing supply of shrimp in the Gulf, a problem
facing Texas shrimpers from Galveston to Brownsville.

For its part, Gulf King proclaims itself financially healthy. Nevertheless,
the company's downsizing almost singlehandedly dropped Aransas Pass from
second on the list of Texas shrimpproducing ports to fifth.

"Shrimping was 75 percent of the economy," said Wilma Anderson, director of
the Aransas Passbased Texas Shrimp Association. "Now it's about 25."

Local leaders insist that jobs are still plentiful, with several nearby
chemical plants and the naval base at Ingleside, one town away. Indeed, the
unemployment rate is only a couple of percentage points higher than the
state average and there is talk of a condominium boomlet.

Still, nearly two of three Aransas Pass schoolchildren receive a free or
reducedprice lunch, a sizable jump since the start of the decade. The
harbor is a marine ghost town. And along Commercial Street otherwise
known as the Texas Tropical Trail there is little more than tattoo
parlors and trailer courts, bars and budget motels.

"It's bad here," said Nina Kimbrell, a lifelong resident who runs the
Christian Service Center, which provides food for the poor. "Real bad."

Kimbrell often assists wouldbe shrimpers from the Gulf states who turn up
in Aransas Pass when Texas opens up its waters in midJuly. In fact, many
here blame the recent heroin scourge on such transients.

But the only outoftowner to die from drugs recently was Michael Stahl, a
Floridian who used cocaine. He was found on a bed in room No. 13 of the
Schooner Motel, where rent is $85 a week and the manager said, "Ain't
nobody in their right mind would want to stay here."

Overdose victim David Dermott, 49, was a local as was 41 yearold Gail
Wright, though she divided her time between Texas and Florida. The latest
heroin victim, 42yearold tugboat crewman Bradley Freeze, also was an
Aransas Pass resident.

Bowen, who was raised here, had just returned from 26 days in the Gulf as a
crew member on the 98foot Lori Dawn, a shrimp boat owned by Aransas Marine
Ways. At 41, he had dabbled in heroin in past years, friends say, but had
recently promised to quit.

"Dennis had cleaned up," said one friend. "He was going to turn his life
around."

For many here, that is no small task. Gulf shrimpers say the nature of
their work encourages binges. At sea for weeks at a time, working at night
and sleeping during the day, they come into port for several days to unload
their catch and get paid.

But while alcohol has always flowed freely at bars such as Judy's and the
Hilltop, a honkytonk with a jukebox that blares old Bob Seger songs and
overlooks the harbor, heroin has only emerged as the drug of choice in the
past several years.

"Shrimpers haven't changed much," said Mike Pashos, a longtime industry
executive in Brownsville. "What they party with has."

While the extent of heroin abuse in shrimping communities along the Texas
coast is unclear, few towns have seen such close parallels between the
industry and drugrelated deaths as Aransas Pass.

Still, local leaders are loathe to acknowledge a link between the two, even
after Dr. John Rutkowski, an emergencyroom physician at Columbia North Bay
Hospital who treated at least two of the heroin victims, made such a
connection in the Corpus Christi CallerTimes.

The hospital now dismissed Rutkowski's views as "his own." Rutkowski,
meanwhile, refused to discuss the matter any further.

Anderson of the Texas Shrimp Association said the Corpus Christi press, in
publishing the physician's comments, was making "a mountain out of a mole
hill." Rick Ewaniszyk, Aransas Pass city manager, agreed.

"Most shrimpers are hard workers," Ewaniszyk said. "The heroin is
restricted to a small minority."

But those who have worked in the industry say that's not the case. A former
crew member estimated that a quarter of Aransas Pass shrimpers use heroin,
though far fewer are believed to use it while working.

One local shrimper returned home recently with $1,500 after 14 days on the
Gulf, only to spend $300 on heroin during his first three days back. On the
fourth day home he overdosed, his face turning ashen as he stopped breathing.

His wife said she revived him by giving him an injection of saline
solution, applying an ice pack to his testicles and slapping him in the
face, a home remedy that medics view with skepticism. They use saline
solution to clear the veins before administering Narcan, a heroin antidote.

The woman claimed that she has used this method to revive her husband
repeatedly in past months. But she said she cannot endure his habit much
longer.

"I'm sick of it," she said. "I'm tired of it."