Here’s how you die: Sitting on a couch and leaning over a coffee table in your living room, you barely have time to sit up straight after inhaling lines of cocaine laid out on a mirror, coke that you weren’t aware was laced with fentanyl. Before your friend can reach for a cell phone to call 911, your blood pressure plummets and your breathing slows. You don’t realize it, but fluid is filling your lungs. Lacking oxygen, your fingertips and lips are turning blue, and your brain is beginning to malfunction. As your heart rate drops, blood seeps from your nose and mouth, along with a white foam. You stop breathing and slip into cardiac arrest.
You have become not only an immeasurable tragedy for family and friends, but also a cold statistic. In 2021, drug overdoses in the United States surpassed 107,000, the highest ever. Two-thirds of the deaths involved synthetic opioid-related drug overdose. An intensively addictive opioid 50 times stronger than heroin, fentanyl claims more American lives each year than car crashes, gun violence or suicides. It’s now the leading cause of death for people ages 18 to 49, according to a Washington Post analysis.
It’s not only recreational drug users or hardcore addicts who are dying from fentanyl overdoses. Fentanyl can be pressed into oxycodone tablets, Valium or other legal drugs. As the Drug Enforcement Administration has warned, those who overdose may have assumed they were taking counterfeit prescription pills that are “easily accessible and often sold on social media and e-commerce platforms.” They had no idea that when they tossed down a fentanyl-laced tablet, they were ingesting a substance that would kill them with the speed of cyanide.
As the Chronicle has reported, Texas is now one of eight states that experienced more overdoses during the first half of 2021 than in either six-month period in 2020. The latest public data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that reported overdose deaths in Texas involving fentanyl increased 399% in the last two fiscal years. That’s 333 Texans in 2019, compared to 1,662 in fiscal year 2021. The Chronicle also noted that the Texas numbers are likely to be higher, since data from smaller counties can be unreliable.
In Harris County, where fatal drug overdoses increased 52% from 2019 to 2021, fentanyl kills more than one person every day, according to data compiled by the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences. Deaths involving fentanyl increased by 341% in the same period, from 104 to 459.
So, what do we do about a nationwide crisis, one that seeps into our own neighborhoods? How do we respond to the most serious drug crisis in U.S. history?
From a Washington perspective, it’s necessary to acknowledge and correct past mistakes. The Obama administration dismantled crucial programs to monitor drug use, just as fentanyl began flooding the market. Things got worse under his successor.
President Donald Trump was obsessed with a border wall, an $11 billion boondoggle that would have done little if anything to stop the flood of fentanyl coming into the country at legal border crossings. As the Washington Post reported recently, a 2017 document produced by the Drug Enforcement Administration devoted four pages to synthetic opioids but ignored the fact that Mexican cartels, not China as Trump insisted, had begun to manufacture fentanyl and traffic it into the United States. For the cartels, primarily the Sinaloa and Jalisco organizations, fentanyl has become a cheap and easy billion-dollar business.
Trump tried to eliminate the drug czar’s office entirely and then appointed a 23-year-old campaign worker as deputy chief of staff – to nobody. Last year, former New Jersey attorney general Anne Milgram became the first Senate-confirmed DEA administrator since 2015. That’s not a record that reflects a government addressing a serious social crisis.
Congress has a job to do. Instead of obsessing about Hunter Biden or the January 6 congressional committee, lawmakers need to fund new detection technology that, if deployed, could help thwart fentanyl smuggling in trucks and vehicles at border crossings. They need to make sure, as well, that drug-enforcement agencies are fully staffed.
Also on the supply side, the Biden administration must work to enlist Mexico’s assistance. Since taking office in 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has backed away – foolishly, we believe – from cooperative efforts. He also has basically ignored systemic problems with his nation’s weak judicial system, a boon to the fentanyl-rich cartels.
On the demand side, Congress and the White House need to make sure that those Americans abusing opioids, whether in cities or small towns, have access to treatment. The Department of Health and Human Services should accelerate efforts to make treatment with methadone more accessible.
With the Texas Legislature descending on Austin, we could hope that lawmakers would persuade Gov. Greg Abbott to halt his own border boondoggle, the billion-dollar-plus Operation Lone Star that does little to thwart undocumented immigration and even less to stem the flow of dangerous drugs. We would like to think they could persuade him to stop spending our money on busing desperate migrants to so-called “sanctuary cities.”
Of course, neither of those outcomes is going to happen, although we were pleased to see that Abbott now says he supports decriminalizing testing strips that would help users determine whether fentanyl is in the drugs they buy. As we wrote recently, harm-reduction advocates say the testing strips, cheap and easy to use, could make an immediate difference on the streets.
“I was not in favor of it last session,” Abbott acknowledged. Arguing in the past that the testing strips encouraged drug use, he changed his mind, the Texas Tribune reported, after visiting University of Houston researchers who have developed a vaccine that could potentially inoculate people against the effects of synthetic opioids.
“There’s going to be a movement across the state to make sure we do everything that we can to protect people from dying from fentanyl, and I think test strips will be one of those ways,” the governor said.
Before that can happen, though, lawmakers need to clarify state law, since the strips are currently considered drug paraphernalia, along with pipes and used needles.
Abbott also said he wanted to make Narcan, a drug used to reverse opioid overdoses, more readily available across the state. For now, it’s too expensive for cities and counties to use it.
Locally, education is key – in schools, among youth groups, around the dinner table at home. Young people from middle school upward need to be aware of the fentanyl risk.
“I really think moving forward, it’s important to both educate individuals about those risks and also provide resources for people. so they can figure out what they’re taking,” said Katharine Neill Harris, a drug policy fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute. “It’s kind of a harm reduction approach,” she told Yahoo Finance, “but I think that’s something we really, really need to do if we’re going to address the immediate threat of continued overdoses.”
We are, indeed, facing an “immediate threat.” It’s a crisis demanding our response. It is, indeed, a matter of life and death.
Houston Chronicle
