Law enforcement officials from four agencies gathered in Graham this week to announce a breakthrough in a collaborative effort to shut down the pipeline that has funneled narcotics into area schools.
In a joint news conference on Wednesday, Alamance County’s sheriff Terry Johnson recalled that his own agency began to pursue the people supplying these drugs after an area high school student suffered a near fatal overdose in 2024. Along the way, Johnson said that his deputies traced the flow of narcotics back to a criminal street gang dubbed “70 East,” whose tentacles had also extended into Orange and Caswell counties.
Johnson added that his own office has teamed up with its counterparts in these two other counties to pursue this gang to its various haunts. He added that their mutual labors have led to the searches of four dwellings in three different counties and the arrests of six individuals for the sale and possession of drugs ranging from psylocibin to pot. Court records indicate that all six of these suspects were taken into custody on January 12.
“The criminals don’t give a flip about county lines. We’re catching a lot of stuff coming into Alamance County that normally, possibly, wouldn’t be here, and it’s because of working together that this was uncovered.”…