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Addicts' parents pass along suspected dealers' numbers

Joye Brown

July 17, 2008

Here are some dealers' numbers," an e-mail from one parent read.

"Pass them on & I'll keep sending them as long as I find them," she wrote. " ... Maybe if more people sent in phone numbers, we could save our children."

The woman, whose son is on heroin - and who reached out to Newsday after reading a column on the heroin-related death of Natalie Ciappa - sent me the telephone numbers after she and her husband tried to give them to police.

I suggested they try again. But by then, other parents, some of them anonymously, began sending me numbers they'd copied from bills, or from their children's cell phones, too.

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Stop.

Please.

The numbers shouldn't come to me. There's not much I can do with them.

Instead, they should go to Nassau and Suffolk county police, who told me they'd be glad to get them.

But be warned: Police also said they need more than telephone numbers. They need enough information to fuel a drug-related investigation, too.

"We will be glad to take whatever parents want to give us," said Det. Lt. Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Nassau's department. "But we need more than numbers to come up with probable cause."

The response was similar in Suffolk, where Lt. Robert Donohue, commander of the police department's community outreach unit, said, "The more information we have, the better."

It could be that parents find a pattern to the calls. Or that they have a name. Or that they say their child made a call, left the house, and came back later, high.

Both departments stressed that they don't want - and are in no way asking - parents to do police work.

But a number of parents, desperate to save their children from drugs, are investigating on their own.

They're searching cell phones, going through purses. They're using cell phone numbers to confront children with their suspicions.

One father told me he's spent more than one afternoon in a park, where he suspects his daughter buys drugs.

He never saw her, but says he saw drug dealing that he reported to police.

I went back to the couple who had e-mailed the first set of telephone numbers and asked them why they believed the numbers belonged to people selling drugs to their son.

"Everybody has a cell phone these days," the mother said. "And those bills can tell you everything you want to know."

She said that she and her husband, while examining the family's telephone bills, noticed that their son would call one number several times in a row.