Though it looks like one community from the street, there are two Fargo-Moorheads.

One is the peaceful, prosperous community that the vast majority know so well – safe, stable, successful.

But then, there is the other one, the sprawling, tangled city that Moorhead Detective Jeff Larson and his colleagues know too well. That Fargo-Moorhead area is growing, too – perhaps even faster than the sunny side. That’s where the drug trade flourishes.

High prices, easy lines of supply and a growing population have brought about a boom in narcotic sales, Jeff says. It casts its web far beyond the drugs themselves, he adds. “A large percentage of the general crimes we investigate are drug-related, too – robberies, thefts, vehicle break-ins, home invasions,” he says. “Virtually every case of human trafficking goes hand in hand with narcotics.”

He and Commander Brad Penas, who heads the MPD’s investigative division, say the size of the drug underworld has mushroomed for several reasons, including the availability of top-quality methamphetamines and opioids from the West Coast, China and Mexico, and the extreme profitability of the local market. “Prices are just out of control here,” Jeff notes. “Dealers can double their money by selling here over what they’d make in Chicago or Minneapolis. The profits are huge.”

The local drug scene has changed dramatically since Jeff moved up from the patrol division to narcotics investigations in 2005. A grant had enabled the department to grow its drug investigation staff – to two. A year later, Clay County District Court added another prosecutor to handle the growing volume of drug crimes.

The biggest challenge in enforcement then, Jeff says, was home-cooked methamphetamine, formulated in small amateur labs from easily available components. “When the states starting limiting sales of Sudafed and similar products, that pretty much shut the locals down,” he says. But it didn’t solve the meth problem; if anything, it made it worse. Superlabs in Mexico quickly took up the slack, using efficient mass production methods to create “ice” of far greater potency and purity than the homemade product could ever achieve. “The local meth was maybe 40 percent pure; the rest of it was poisons,” Jeff says. “Now, you couldn’t even sell that stuff anymore.”

Today, while the meth market makes up the largest share of investigators’ workloads, opioid drugs are perhaps the most serious challenge they face. “We may have ten times as much meth activity,” Brad notes. “There’s a much larger user base, but it’s rare to die of a meth overdose.

“Opioids kill people. That pushes them to the top of the list.”

Eleven users have died of opioid overdoses in the past three years, Brad says, in the city of Moorhead alone. Near-deaths? No numbers are available for close calls virtually resurrected by emergency medics with the antidote Narcan. Nor are totals readily available for the entire metro area. “We may not even be aware of some of them,” he adds.

The opioid epidemic presents a different kind of challenge. “You still do see some meth users with ‘the look’ – broken-out skin, bad teeth, the kind of thing we saw in the 1990s,” Jeff says, “although the higher-quality products have eliminated some of that. We see a lot of meth users who are weekend warriors. It’s their party drug of choice; they can straighten up for the rest of the week.”

But opioids – both heroin and its pharmaceutical counterparts like OxyContin and Percocet – are a different story. The need for them is constant: “If you’re not getting high, you’re working on getting your next high in any way you can.”

Heroin primarily comes in through the drug cartels, Brad says, but there are other routes for bringing opioids to market. One is prescription pharmaceuticals, filched from half-used bottles in home medicine cabinets and refilled by well-meaning physicians. They’re most highly prized on the street for their reliable dosage and quality. The health-care industry has taken steps to cut down on over-prescription of these drugs, the officers note, tightening their availability on the underground market … and boosting prices even higher.

The other drug highway is the Internet, where dealers turn to the so-called “dark net” to order designer drugs like fentanyl and carfentanyl at dirt-cheap prices. These highly potent opioids, manufactured in China, are often used to cut more expensive heroin to dramatically increase the dealer’s profit. That multiplies the danger to users, who might very well buy a far deadlier product than they’re expecting.

The towering challenge of combatting the dangerous, deadly are irresistibly lucrative illegal drug trade may seem overwhelming to most community members who hear about it. But there’s progress being made.

Much of it is due, Jeff says, to the metro police chiefs and the sheriffs of Cass and Clay counties, who are pooling personnel, equipment and budgets for maximum results. The regional DEA task force that Jeff serves on, along with a second that coordinates Clay and Wilkin agencies, have the most ambitious goal in mind – to not only take local drug dealers off our own streets, but trace the supply line back and ultimately shut down whole networks. That takes an overwhelming amount of painstaking investigation, collecting and corroborating information from confidential informants across all their jurisdictions. But it pays off, as recent headlines about high-profile arrests and federal trials amply demonstrate.

Too, the Moorhead investigators applaud the efforts of the community-wide Mayors’ Blue-Ribbon Task Force on Addiction. Announced in September, it’s bringing together people not only in enforcement but health-care professionals, mental health experts, educators and government leaders to seek solutions from every direction. Jeff is one of Moorhead’s representatives on the commission.

The size and scope of the area drug trade comes as a surprise, Jeff says, to most of the residents to whom he speaks at service clubs, educational events and business meetings. “Eighty percent of the people in Moorhead are amazed to hear about it,” he says. “To the other 20 percent, it’s business as usual. We see the same names come up over and over.

“It’s very obvious by now that we’re not going to be able to arrest our way out of this,” he emphasizes.

Brad agrees: “We’re going to need all the resources we’ve got and all of us working together to make a dent in this issue.”