A new drug task force working in the North Georgia area since January 1 is making an impact on drug traffic, according to the commander of the agency.
The John's Creek-Alpharetta-Forsyth County Drug Task Force, called JCAF, has just wrapped up its first quarter on the streets of the three communities.
"All the agencies were aware that the drug traffickers...were bouncing over the jurisdictional lines," said Capt. W.C. Barrett of the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office, the first JCAF commander. "If you jump across jurisdictional lines when you distribute narcotics, you know the agencies are held by those boundaries, so they can't bounce back and forth with you."
Armed with that knowledge, Forsyth County Sheriff Ron Freeman began conversations with Johns Creek Police Chief Ed Densmore and Alpharetta Department of Public Safety Chief John Robison to form a multi-jurisdictional drug task force.
Barrett said since the first of the year, JCAF officers have made almost 75 arrests.
"We have arrested between 70 and 74 drug dealers," Barrett said. "We try not to arrest the users. We try to use the users for intel, get them help, get them into programs like drug courts and see if we can get them off the drugs. The ones that make money off of somebody else's misery are the ones that we want to put in jail."
Barrett said among those arrests are three dealers who admitted they had been targeting high school students as customers.
"They admitted they were selling to Lambert High School, South Forsyth High School and West Forsyth High School," Barrett said. "They were dealing anything from pills to cocaine to the THC oils and edibles."
Barrett said as a father the so-called edibles are troubling to him, since those drugs are designed to entice children.
"Some of the edibles surprise me," he said. "They have gummy bears that look like a regular gummy bear, but they're filled with THC to ecstasy. They have what looks like little bags of candy that you would buy at CVS or Walgreen's...just all kinds of stuff."
Barrett said despite the tricks dealers are using to get illegal drugs into the communities served by JCAF, his agents are doing a great job fighting the battle.
"Like I said, because of their efforts, they've arrested in three months 74 drug dealers. You average that out by how many work days we have in three months, that's almost one to two drug dealers a day," Barrett said. "I would bet that we're the highest-yielding drug task force in the state, if not the nation, right now."
Barrett also pointed out that the work of a drug agent is nothing glamorous.
"They don't wear a uniform - they dress like a thug, sometimes they have to act like a thug to be with the thugs - but they are honorable men who sacrifice," Barrett said. "They work long hours...but they don't get the normal thank you's that an officer in uniform gets."
Currently, there are 18 members of the JCAF Drug Task Force.
