The Drug Cases Won't Go Away

One man accused of drug dealing allegedly stored his goods in his partner's mouth, and when the undercover cop made the buy, the colored vials were spit out.

Another alleged dealer flagged an undercover cop and yelled, "I got Apache," the street code for heroin, authorities said.

And a third man charged with dealing was more methodical: more than 35 hits of cocaine, all packed in little green-tinted plastic envelopes and all confiscated by undercover cops, according to authorities.

The stories of the three men arrested in those cases - all by different officers at different times in different places - were not extraordinary. In this city, dealers and cops work every day.

But the commonwealth's cases against Eric Council, Jose Barreto and Rafael Vasquez - all heard yesterday before Common Pleas Judge G. Craig Lord - reflected a court system that is overwhelmed by drug cases.

By coincidence, and a combination of delays, failures to appear and missing witnesses, the fates of the three men came together in Lord's courtroom.

The cases against the three show what's lost in drug statistics. They are the faces behind the drug epidemic - the daily staple of nine Common Pleas waiver courts, where defendants who have waived their right to a jury trial are tried by a judge.

Their volume is staggering. Of 58,123 cases resolved in Common Pleas and Municipal courts last year, 13,862, or 24 percent, were drug-related. In 1984, the comparable figures were 3,911 drug cases out of a total of 46,797 - or only 8 percent.

That astonishing rise is the single largest contributor to the clogged courts, concluded the Philadelphia Criminal Justice Task Force, which examined the problem and issued a preliminary report in December.

Worse still, those numbers do not take into account other cases driven by drugs, an addict who robs to feed his habit, for example. When you compute that into the formula, drug cases directly or indirectly constitute about three-fourths of the court's entire docket.

About 70 percent of the defendants who appeared in waiver courts last year - 10,430 people - faced drug charges. Most of them were charged with dealing small amounts, then arraigned and released because the prison system is overcrowded.

In the three cases yesterday, Barreto was arrested Feb. 20, 1988; Council June 28, 1988; and Vasquez May 13, 1989. Under ideal circumstances - now abandoned by the city court system - each defendant would have been tried within 180 days of his arrest.