BALTIMORE _ Every mile brought Lt. Dan Gosnell closer to relief. His body ached for the little white pills, though his mind shouted to turn back.
"What the hell are you doing?" the young police commander asked himself out loud.
His pickup cruised east through Harford County. The Aberdeen police station was 20 miles ahead. Inside of him, a fever burned. Days had passed since he swallowed the last of his pain pills.
The police station lab held a cache of unwanted prescription medicine dropped off by Harford County families. Only two officers had a key; Gosnell was one. The promising 36-year-old lieutenant had decided to betray his oath, badge and best friends.
In a twist of fate that would scar a proud department, the man in charge of the drug evidence had become an addict himself. He sometimes took 24 pills a day.
Over the next two years, he would raid the lab almost daily, then sneak in the evidence vault and swipe pills from criminal cases. When the pills ran out, he would snort heroin off his police desk beneath his officer-of-the-year plaque.
His startling downfall transformed the suburban Baltimore police station into a crime scene and rendered Gosnell one more cautionary tale, like the trooper in Iowa, the sergeant in Arkansas, the detective in Kentucky; like police chiefs in upstate New York and rural Ohio _ drug addicts, all of them.
As the opioid crisis deepens, police are falling prey.
The scourge has struck police departments across the country, and prosecutors have dropped criminal cases that hinged on drug evidence.
Officers become hooked on narcotic painkillers after illness or injury. Prescriptions run out, but stockpiles of substitutes _ heroin, cocaine, fentanyl _ wait one locked door away, and they have the keys.
"It's like you're putting them in the candy store," said Joseph Latta, who directs the International Association for Property & Evidence, a South Dakota nonprofit that teaches evidence handling.
In Billings, Mont., police fired one evidence room worker for stealing pills; about three years later, they fired another one. In Johnstown, Pa., an officer overdosed and passed out in the roll call room. Last August, a Hagerstown sergeant killed himself a week before he was to stand trial for allegedly stealing pills.
Their profession values a steely independence: Cops don't need help. Gosnell told no one about the fever.
That first day, he parked beside the Aberdeen police station. The other officers were out on patrol.
When he drove home later, the fever was gone. It was that easy.
