Students from UNC Chapel Hill and Duke are among 21 people who have been arrested for allegedly running a massive drug ring which trafficked ‘thousands of pounds’ of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs with payments made via Venmo.
Prosecutors said the alleged drug dealing took place between 2017 and 2020 with more than $1.5million of product being shipped from California through USPS and then distributed in North Carolina, where Duke and UNC’s campuses are located about 10 miles apart.
The suspects range in age from 21 and 35. A full list of the fraternities allegedly involved have not yet been released but they include UNC chapters of Phi Gamma Delta, Kappa Sigma and Beta Theta Pi.
‘This is not a situation where you have single users, where you have a 19-year-old sipping a beer, where you have someone taking a puff of a joint on the back porch of a frat house,’ prosecutors said at a press conference Thursday.
‘These are hardened drug dealers.’
Orange County Sheriff Charles Blackwood, whose office worked with the DEA on the investigation, said it ‘unfolded unlike any other case I have seen’.
He said the suspects all had ‘brazen’ attitudes and that the use of drugs in some of the fraternities was ‘pervasive’.
The DEA probe was launched in 2018 after people in a different investigation informed the police about drug dealing at UNC, police said.
Some of the first arrests were made in July this year and authorities said they have been working since then to piece together the operation they called ‘astonishing’.
Authorities identified two UNC students, one Duke student and two Appalachian State students among the defendants, but declined to say exactly how many of those charged are currently or formerly enrolled at any of those three schools.
