Forgive our impatience, Xavier Becerra. With all respect to your busy Washington schedule as the nation’s health and human services secretary, our city needs to hear from you ASAP.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson posed a question to you Friday and your answer will clear the way for a new tool to save lives being lost to fentanyl, the number one cause of drug deaths in the U.S.
Judging by the number of personal stories readers sent me after my column on 23-year-old Martin Heitzman’s fentanyl poisoning, lots of folks will be interested in Becerra’s response.
Each sorrowful anecdote amplified why Dallas needs common-sense law enforcement tools like overdose mapping — especially because Texas may never embrace harm-reduction measures to keep potential fentanyl victims safe
Johnson’s letter to Becerra asks for assurances that the Dallas Fire-Rescue Department can provide overdose information for this public safety effort without violating HIPAA privacy rules.
This seems like an easy “yes” given that the mapping tool is a federal DEA effort and the local High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area group has repeatedly urged Dallas to join the other North Texas cities already participating.
The no-cost initiative collects and maps the location and date of each overdose and stipulates what drugs were involved in order for public health and law enforcement agencies to spot trends and know where to deploy resources.
Among the local cities or police departments already signed up are Plano, Richardson, Irving, Grand Prairie, Coppell and Carrollton.
Johnson wrote that Dallas, like other cities nationwide, is on the front line against drugs that “have cut short far too many lives, leaving behind shattered families and incomprehensible destruction to our society.”
The mayor sent his letter — saying “we can’t manage what we can’t measure” — the same week that Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot and Lance Sumpter, director of the Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area group, briefed the City Council’s Public Safety Committee on OD mapping.
Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid manufactured overseas and primarily being smuggled from Mexico into the U.S., is more than 100 times as potent as morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Two milligrams, and sometimes less, is deadly.
It’s increasingly showing up in North Texas because it’s a cheap filler in the production of counterfeit prescription pills. Sometimes a tiny deadly dose is in the fake “study drug” Adderall, an anxiety-reducing “Xanax” or an oxycodone dose taken for pain-killing or euphoric effects.
“Entities overseas are creating these pills that resemble Adderall or hydrocodone to intentionally kill Americans,” Creuzot said in our recent interview.
A few of the readers who contacted me after my last fentanyl piece were most interested in why I wasn’t blaming President Joe Biden’s border policy for the deaths. Actually, seizures of fentanyl at the southern border have increased steadily since 2016, long before he became president.
What’s new is that deaths associated with fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills have increased dramatically in North Texas in the last few years. Yet Dallas has been slow to react to this “one pill kills” epidemic.
That’s why Creuzot and Johnson are eager to get OD mapping launched.
The message Creuzot wants everyone to hear: “You may be purchasing something that is going to kill you as opposed to getting you high.”
Creuzot learned of the OD mapping tool from then-U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox and Sumpter. Efforts to sign Dallas up repeatedly ran into City Attorney Chris Caso’s concerns about HIPAA, so Creuzot finally went to the mayor.
He and Johnson believe the effort will give agencies the ability to coordinate more strategically on planning, rehabilitation and enforcement. “As it stands today, we are in the dark on these issues,” Creuzot said.
So far this year, the DA’s office has reviewed 86 cases in which fentanyl was involved. Creuzot and his staff know that number, like much of the data around fentanyl use, is probably much higher.
“Getting OD mapping in place will help with putting more numbers to the problem because unfortunately without it, that data isn’t being captured,” he said.
As a former U.S. attorney who cares passionately about the fentanyl issue, Nealy Cox worries that we haven’t done enough to warn people about the “one pill can kill” drug.
“Hardly anyone doesn’t know someone who hasn’t been affected by this — someone who has a loved one who has either overdosed or died from an overdose,” she told me.
What makes fentanyl so dangerous in nonmedical use is its potency. “When the overseas manufacturers don’t get the formula right, bad things happen. And they don’t get the formula right a lot,” Nealy Cox said. “There’s no FDA controlling that.”
While the DEA is confiscating bag after bag of fentanyl-laced pills in North Texas, Dallas police officers also are seeing more of these drug cases.
“We are trying to wrap our arms around an issue that has unfortunately arrived here after mostly being elsewhere in the U.S.,” police chief Eddie Garcia told me.
If data on all overdoses could be gathered and shared as details of each case emerged, he said, it could serve as a road map for his detectives’ investigations.
He also is talking to his counterparts in East Coast cities hard hit by fentanyl to see what additional lessons can be learned.
“Trying to track down the supply and break that chain is incredibly important to us,” said Garcia, who has two detectives assigned to follow up on overdose cases.
Outside of law enforcement, City Council member Paula Blackmon has led the way on bringing more public awareness to the dangers of the fentanyl-laced pills.
Most recently, she committed some of her District 9 Covid-related funds toward an anti-fentanyl information campaign that the Quality of Life, Arts and Culture Committee previewed last month.
“Fentanyl is hitting every zip code in the city and it’s hitting every one hard,” she said. “A bad decision should not be fatal.”
Teen overdose deaths in the United States more than doubled from 2010 to 2021, jumping from 518 to 1,146 deaths annually, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In 2021, fentanyl was involved in more than 77% of those deaths.
It’s imperative that schools and families focus young people on facts — not “scare tactic” myths — regarding what an overdose looks like, how to access naloxone, which is used to treat overdoses, and even how to test drugs for the presence of fentanyl.
Naloxone, often known by the brand name Narcan, is an easy-to-use medication that is legal in every state including Texas and capable of reversing the effects of an opioid overdose.
Another harm-reduction tool is the much more controversial fentanyl testing, which checks illegal drugs for the presence of the often-deadly synthetic opioid. While these strips are allowed in many states, they are classified as illegal drug paraphernalia in Texas.
Several cities in states that prohibit test strips have banned local prosecution of people who possess the item. But no one I spoke with expects that idea to get traction in North Texas.
For now, local leaders are united in the need to get overdose mapping up and running.
Are you still with me, Mr. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary? All we are waiting on in Dallas’ attempt to save lives is you.
Jago Times "English Edition" Best Online Newspaper
