MSP detective retiring from career fighting drug trafficking
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GAYLORD — Ken Mills has spent over 35 years in law enforcement, including the last 20 with the Straits Area Narcotics Enforcement (SANE) drug task force.
Mills said there are two components of drug abuse that have made it historically a difficult problem to deal with — the addictive nature of the substances and the profit motive that comes from selling drugs.
“It’s a tough combination to beat,” he said.
Mills, a detective lieutenant with the task force, will retire from the field at the end of the month. SANE serves the counties of Cheboygan, Emmet and Otsego in Northern Michigan. Law enforcement departments in those counties assign officers to SANE and pay their salary. Grant funding covers the other expenses.
“Nobody wants to become an addict and many of them start out by saying, ‘I can control this,'” Mills said. “Of course almost all of them fail at that.”
The narcotics trade has evolved over the years in the region, said Mills. In the late 1990s the abuse of prescription drugs, especially Oxycodone or OxyContin, a medication used to help relieve severe ongoing pain such as the pain that comes from cancer, was most prevalent.
“Once we started seeing OxyContin and how addictive it was, we knew it was going to be a big problem,” Mills said. “When I was assigned to SANE in 2002 we worked with the medical field and treatment providers to come up with a plan to address that.”
More:Gaylord residents face drug charges following arrest by SANE
More:Meth addiction is rising in northern Michigan communities. Here’s why.
The profit motive lured many into selling part of their prescriptions, especially in a rural area like Northern Michigan, noted Mills.
“The people up here who had the prescriptions knew they could make money by selling it on the street,” he said.
Eventually heroin became more popular because it was cheaper, Mills said. Heroin evolved into being laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50-100 times stronger than morphine. Fentanyl is added to heroin to increase its potency, or be disguised as highly potent heroin.
“You hear a lot about overdose deaths and a lot of times it is related to fentanyl,” said Mills.
“In the mid 2000s we had a lot of cocaine. We were buying crack cocaine and powder cocaine. A lot of our investigations were going out of state or in urban areas because that is where it came from. We have a three-year period where we had almost 100 arrest counts for the distribution of cocaine and we still see it today,” Mills said.
Mills said SANE started seeing crystal meth, the common name for crystal methamphetamine, a strong and highly addictive drug that affects the central nervous system, a couple of years ago.
“It’s cheap and the price hasn’t changed that much,” he said. “People go downstate and get it fairly cheap and then come up here and sell it.”
Gaylord Police Chief Frank Claeys, who worked with Mills on cases and now is the chairman of the SANE board, called him “the backbone of narcotics law enforcement in Northern Michigan. For 20 years he has mentored countless officers and a lot of them have gone on to prominent positions in their departments once they return from the assignment,” he said.
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Detective First Lieutenant Kip Belcher of the Michigan State Police (MSP) said Mills’ retirement marks the end of a storied 35-year career with the state police, the last 20 of which he spent as SANE’s team commander, working with area sheriffs, police chiefs, and prosecutors.
“Ken’s passion for working on drug investigations has been boundless: he and his detectives arrested hundreds of persons responsible for selling heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine in the area, removing large volumes of these drugs from our neighborhoods,” said Belcher. “He has also been an active supporter of the drug treatment, prevention, and mental health organizations in Gaylord and nearby areas. His departure from SANE leaves a tremendous void in the district’s MSP leadership, but I and others are pleased to see him successfully concluding his law enforcement career, and turning the page into well-deserved retirement.”
Mills is a 1981 graduate of Rudyard High School. He attended Northern Michigan University and graduated in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. He worked for the Michigan Department of Corrections in Marquette from 1986 until 1987, when he joined the state police.
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