Ron Lafferty, director of the Barren River Drug Task Force, speaks to members of Cave City’s city council on Monday, May 10, 2021. Lafferty updated the Glasgow City Council on his agency’s recent drug arrests and seizures.
(BRENNAN CRAIN/WCLU NEWS)
By Angela Briggs, special to WCLU News.
GLASGOW, Ky. — The Glasgow City Council received a report from the Barren River Drug Task Force at its Monday meeting.
Ron Lafferty, director of the Barren River Drug Task Force, said the drug task force aims to take traffickers off the area streets. Lafferty has been with the BRDTF since 2004 and its director since 2014.
“The mission of the task force is to investigate and prosecute mid to upper-level drug trafficking,” Lafferty said. “That is our primary goal.”
The task force works with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Federal Bureaus of Investigation, and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The groups work alongside one another to clear dangerous drugs from the community’s streets.
Networking among agencies is a strategic way to identify drug flow into the community, Rafferty said. An officer in Tennessee recently left a significant tip on a law enforcement platform online.
“They stopped the vehicle and made a huge seizure,” Rafferty said. “Thanks to the DTF the bad guys were caught, and a large amount of fentanyl was taken off the roadway.”
A kilogram of cocaine and 10,000 fentanyl pills were recovered. The majority of the drugs were already in the area, and agents stopped further diffusion.
Lafferty said most drugs enter the area from Louisville.
Methamphetamine has made a resurgence in recent years. Overdose deaths from the synthetic drug are on the rise.
The BRDTF has opened 168 drug related cases, which is fewer cases than usual. The seizure rate of drugs is elevated though.
Prescription pill abuse has declined, but it’s being replaced with drugs like heroin and fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic opioid similar to morphine. It’s 50 to 100 times more toxic, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It accounted for 59% of opioid related overdoses in 2017.
Lafferty said 48% of marijuana, 55% of methamphetamine and 66% of prescription pills cases were in Glasgow. Lafferty said 15% of the BRDTF’s heroin seizures were completed in Glasgow.
