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The arrest of 14 men tied to off-campus fraternity houses at Pennsylvania State University, announced last month by Pennsylvania's Attorney General, has surfaced a pattern that Centre County Drug and Alcohol Administrator Catherine Arbogast tracks as a migration in substance use across rural Pennsylvania.
Her office is recording a shift away from opiates and opiate derivatives toward a stimulant market that now includes cocaine, methamphetamines, prescription medications, and synthetics manufactured in illicit laboratories.
The mechanism that makes any of it dangerous, Arbogast says, is drug cutting: street buyers have no way to identify what has been mixed into a product before sale.
The charges and the alleged ringleader Court documents name Agostino Abbatiello, 24, as the alleged organizer. He was initially denied bail after missing his arraignment and then turning himself in.
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