Speaker 1: It's the big take from Bloomberg News and I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: I'm West Gusova today. How fentanyl caused the opioid crisis
Speaker 1: to come roaring back. Just before the COVID pandemic hit,
Speaker 1: there was some cautiously optimistic news about America's decades old
Speaker 1: opioid epidemic. After many years of rising deaths from overdoses,
Speaker 1: the numbers were starting to tick downward in some hard
Speaker 1: hit states, and it appeared like prevention and treatment methods
Speaker 1: were finally starting to work. But that all changed in
Speaker 1: when the powerful opioid fentanyl began flooding the streets right
Speaker 1: as the world shut down. Fentinyl overdoses are now a
Speaker 1: major health crisis in many places across the country, and
Speaker 1: public health officials are struggling to keep up well. If
Speaker 1: you look out the definition of an opoi, the first
Speaker 1: thing it says is that it creates a feeling of euphoria.
Speaker 1: After a while, there's no longer that sense of euphoria.
Speaker 1: It's really just I want to feel like I can
Speaker 1: function today. That's Helena Gerard. She's a health official in
Speaker 1: Volucia County, Florida, which is one of the places where
Speaker 1: fentyl overdoses are a terrible problem. We'll hear more from
Speaker 1: her in a bit, but first to explain what's happening
Speaker 1: and what's being done about it. I'm joined by Bloomberg
Speaker 1: reporters am A Court, Leonardo Nicoletti, and Linley Lynn, who
Speaker 1: have worked on a deeply reported story about the fentinyl crisis. Emma,
Speaker 1: Linley Leonardo, thanks so much for being here. Thank you
Speaker 1: glad to be here, Thanks for having us. Let me
Speaker 1: just start with the most basic question, what is fentanyl.
Speaker 1: Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, and that means it is
Speaker 1: made in a lab. It's not a natural opioid. And
Speaker 1: when we're talking about fentanyl in this context, we're really
Speaker 1: talking about the rise of illegal fentanyl. Largely that's what's
Speaker 1: killing people. But fentanyl was originally sort of developed as
Speaker 1: a medication to manage pain, and there is a prescription
Speaker 1: version as well, but in this context, again really talking
Speaker 1: more about the illegal drug market, so that originally this
Speaker 1: was a manufactured pharmaceutical, but then it became illicitly manufactured. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and lately especially it's really kind of um. The
Speaker 1: initial chemicals to make fentanyl are coming from China, they're
Speaker 1: going to Mexico and manufacturing fentanyl and it's getting smuggled
Speaker 1: in through the southern border. And you know, part of
Speaker 1: the reason fentanyl has really taken off is because fentanyl
Speaker 1: is extremely cheap to manufacture and it's extremely powerful, so
Speaker 1: it produces a high much more easily than with other
Speaker 1: kinds of drugs. So you've gathered in this story an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of data tracking the rise in the use
Speaker 1: of ventinyl and then along with it the explosive rise
Speaker 1: in tragic deaths. Could you give us a sense of
Speaker 1: just how large a problem this is nationwide in the US?
Speaker 1: Sure thing? Um I spent a lot of time analyzing
Speaker 1: um CDC data, that's the data from Centers for Disease
Speaker 1: Control and Prevention, and just to share one set of numbers,
Speaker 1: last year, over eighty thou Americans died from opioid overdose,
Speaker 1: and fentanel was founding octossities of at least seventy thousand
Speaker 1: of these deaths. So this include those people who knowingly
Speaker 1: or unknowingly took fentanyl, and sometimes there might be um
Speaker 1: drug cocktails that they just took they didn't know fentanel
Speaker 1: was part of it like cartail being they might have
Speaker 1: taken marijuanan and had ventanol in it or heroin another drug, exactly,
Speaker 1: multiple substances mixed up. And this year's provisional data so
Speaker 1: far show that almost a nine of Americans who have
Speaker 1: died of opio it overdose died of fentanyl. That's very
Speaker 1: gruesome numbers. And as we dove further into our reporting,
Speaker 1: I was talking to myself, I just think it is
Speaker 1: an opioid and this is part of the everlasting opiod crisis.
Speaker 1: But this exact chapter we're at right now is a
Speaker 1: real fentanyl crisis. To give you some size and scope.
Speaker 1: Um since March, the beginning of the pandemic, more than
Speaker 1: one d and sixty five thousand Americans have died from
Speaker 1: opioid overdoses. What was it about the pandemic that made
Speaker 1: people suddenly turned back to opioids and in particular fentanyl.
Speaker 1: That's a great question, and it's something we really wanted
Speaker 1: to explore in this story. In particular, I think when
Speaker 1: you think of the opioid crisis, people often think of
Speaker 1: prescription drugs, right, they think of produced pharma. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a long history the opid crisis has gone on
Speaker 1: since the you know, the mid to late nineties and
Speaker 1: the United States, but in this case, fentanyl was already
Speaker 1: sort of starting to take off in the US prior
Speaker 1: to COVID. But what we really saw it was in
Speaker 1: the last three years the deaths from fentanyl just kind
Speaker 1: of exploded, and we saw like enormous fatalities from fentanyl.
Speaker 1: And when we tried to sort of explain why that was,
Speaker 1: the answer we kept kind of coming back to was
Speaker 1: sort of mostly the ubiquity of fentanyl was a big,
Speaker 1: big factor. So it's not that people were necessarily seeking
Speaker 1: it out. It was permeating other illegal drug supplies. So
Speaker 1: people who were you know, using drugs like heroin, for instance,
Speaker 1: or meth or even something like cocaine or marijuana, which
Speaker 1: people don't typically think of as these really you know,
Speaker 1: some of these drugs don't sound like marijuana particularly dangerous,
Speaker 1: but they were getting sort of adulterated with fentanyl. Fentinel
Speaker 1: was getting kind of mixed into that drug supply. And
Speaker 1: when were they mixing fentinel into those other drugs. It's
Speaker 1: a little hard to say, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: big explanations is that fentanyl is um so cheap and
Speaker 1: so you equitous that it was a way of sort
Speaker 1: of spreading out drug supply. In some cases it might
Speaker 1: have also been you know, an accident. All the stuff
Speaker 1: being made in the same kind of space. Ventanyl so
Speaker 1: poisonous that small mistakes could really be quite devastating. But
Speaker 1: in addition to sort of the illegal drug supply getting
Speaker 1: sort of contaminated with fentanyl, another part of that story
Speaker 1: that's really important is counterfeit pills. So people buying black
Speaker 1: market out of all or xanax or other kinds of drugs,
Speaker 1: and those drugs might not actually be out of all
Speaker 1: or xanax, they might be pills with fentanyl inside. Then
Speaker 1: those might also be causing deadly overdoses. And this seems
Speaker 1: to be a pretty big trend. Now, these these two
Speaker 1: sort of factors in the sort of rise of fentanyl. Yeah,
Speaker 1: to add on that, a lot of the deaths they
Speaker 1: are actually due to accidental overdose when it comes to ventanyl.
Speaker 1: And from the CDC data, we actually saw like a
Speaker 1: growing number of deaths um when officials were doing autopsies
Speaker 1: that were ultiple narcotics were found in the same body,
Speaker 1: so many died without knowing from what substance they died
Speaker 1: from even and so this cocktail effect has definitely been
Speaker 1: a new trend that we are observing. Leonardo Linley just
Speaker 1: mentioned the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
Speaker 1: You're we're heavily involved in gathering and then analyzing the
Speaker 1: data that you used to track the rise of fentanyl
Speaker 1: in this story. What did you find in that data.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you know, we found in
Speaker 1: the data, and that we think we showed really clearly
Speaker 1: in one of the graphics is that a lot of
Speaker 1: things have been changing in the past few years. And
Speaker 1: one of the things that has been changing is that
Speaker 1: who fentanel has been killing has changed a lot. And
Speaker 1: you know, you can see that while the opioid death
Speaker 1: rate was highest for white Americans for more than fifteen years,
Speaker 1: so until six white Americans were dying at the highest
Speaker 1: death rate, but now it is highest among Americans. Um,
Speaker 1: you can see that, you know, the opiod death rate
Speaker 1: for Black Americans has more than doubled since and most
Speaker 1: of this increase has happened during the pandemic. Um Obviously,
Speaker 1: fentanyl has had a really big role in this increase,
Speaker 1: and do we know from the data why there was
Speaker 1: that switch from more white people dying from overdoses to
Speaker 1: more black people dying. The CDC has actually really tried
Speaker 1: to highlight this trend over the pandemic, and one of
Speaker 1: the potential explanations they've given is that access to medical
Speaker 1: care for opioid use disorder, which is the disease of
Speaker 1: opioid addiction, may be sort of quite unequal, and so
Speaker 1: people of color, including Black Americans also there's been a
Speaker 1: big increase in the death rate among Native Americans in
Speaker 1: the US, may not have the same kind of access
Speaker 1: to treatment um as white Americans. One of the things
Speaker 1: that really struck me in the story, uh, and you
Speaker 1: alluded to this before, is just how deadly fentyl is
Speaker 1: and the way you described it was just a few
Speaker 1: grains of salt worth is enough to overdose, and that
Speaker 1: so many of the doses of drugs that people buy
Speaker 1: in the street contained way more than that. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: this is something that really struck us as well when
Speaker 1: we were reporting this story, is that just two milligrams
Speaker 1: of fentanyl equal to a few grains of salt is
Speaker 1: enough to potentially cause a deadly overdose. UM. And you
Speaker 1: can envision a few grains of salt. That is a
Speaker 1: very small amount um And part of the reason for
Speaker 1: that is that fentanyl is up to a hundred times
Speaker 1: more powerful than morphine, you know, a prescription opioid, and
Speaker 1: fifty times more powerful than heroin. And so what we
Speaker 1: actually heard out of the county that we focused on
Speaker 1: in the story, which is Lucia County. It's in Florida,
Speaker 1: is that some people were overdosing and they had so
Speaker 1: much fentinel in their bodies that it was enough to
Speaker 1: kill thirty or four the people. That's what the Medical
Speaker 1: Examiner's office told the county council. My conversation with Emma
Speaker 1: Leo and Linley continues after the break. So, now that
Speaker 1: we have a pretty good idea of just how powerful
Speaker 1: and deadly fentanyl is, I want to talk about the
Speaker 1: focus of your story, which is in Valusia County, Florida,
Speaker 1: which has seen a huge increase in fentanyl deaths, and
Speaker 1: what's happening there and what they're trying to do about that. Linley,
Speaker 1: can you describe what's happened in Valusia County. So, when
Speaker 1: we were using a database from the CDC that tracks
Speaker 1: death causes in the US. We screened opiate death data
Speaker 1: of every single county in America and try to see
Speaker 1: which ones fitting to this exact pattern. And there were
Speaker 1: scores of counties all of the US that have gone
Speaker 1: through similar tragedies, and we looked into fifty counties and
Speaker 1: called fifteen of them. After all that work, we picked
Speaker 1: Volucia in Florida. Then we looked at Vlucia Stata more closely,
Speaker 1: and we saw fentanel induced overdose deaths tripled in from
Speaker 1: the year before. So it was very shocking to us.
Speaker 1: And it just had a lot to do with the
Speaker 1: COVID pandemic and add isolations and everything. And so in Lucia,
Speaker 1: two hundred and seventy two lives were lost that year
Speaker 1: due to fentanel and more surprisingly, that's over nine of
Speaker 1: all of the total opiate overdose deaths in that county
Speaker 1: that year. What was it about COVID in particular that
Speaker 1: would make people turn to drugs? I mean, boredom, I suppose,
Speaker 1: but that's a pretty extreme solution to boredom. The way
Speaker 1: that we have been thinking about and learning about this
Speaker 1: is really through the lens of losing support and routine
Speaker 1: and kind of structure of life, right, so all of
Speaker 1: a sudden everything has completely changed. And there's also I
Speaker 1: mean it's hard to remember now with so many COVID
Speaker 1: protocols kind of out the window, but there was a
Speaker 1: time people were extremely scared of this new virus. And
Speaker 1: so you put all that together, the fear, the boredom,
Speaker 1: the loss of support, social isolation, social distancing was one
Speaker 1: of the big tactics we used initially to keep this
Speaker 1: virus at bay. And you have kind of a recipe
Speaker 1: for people using substances, um. And there was actually back
Speaker 1: at that point in time, there was some thought, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, all this disruption will extend the drug trade too,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't seem to have happened. In fact, we've
Speaker 1: seen as a result of a lot of these disruptions,
Speaker 1: we've seen people getting cut off from many vital sources
Speaker 1: of support for addiction. For instance, in Vlusia County, we
Speaker 1: know some local support groups and like narcotics anonymous style
Speaker 1: groups actually stopped meeting for a period of time. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, even when they began meeting again, they might
Speaker 1: have only done so virtually, which you know, I think
Speaker 1: we can all recognize that there is a place for
Speaker 1: zoom meetings in life, but we were also all getting
Speaker 1: very tired of zoom meetings. And then in person treatment
Speaker 1: changed a lot to the clinic that we talked about
Speaker 1: a lot in this story, um sm A healthcare and
Speaker 1: Volucia County was meeting with patients virtually, and one of
Speaker 1: the providers said to me, you know, virtually, you don't
Speaker 1: really read people as well. We don't have them in
Speaker 1: we can't test their urine for drugs, so we don't
Speaker 1: really know if they're using drugs again, and we can
Speaker 1: ask them questions, but we don't totally know, you know,
Speaker 1: we can't read them, you know, are they telling us
Speaker 1: the truth or not? So it did really change the
Speaker 1: dynamic um And even now with things sort of resuming,
Speaker 1: it's been difficult, I think, to get some of those
Speaker 1: rhythms back. Leonard, When you were looking at all this
Speaker 1: data and trying to figure out a way to visualize it,
Speaker 1: what leaped out at you the most from these floor
Speaker 1: the numbers. For me, what leaped out the most was
Speaker 1: really the spike that you see during the pandemic, and
Speaker 1: it's it's just so clear. You can look at the
Speaker 1: graphic and you see that if you just put a
Speaker 1: ruler on, that's exactly when the spike started. Like it's
Speaker 1: almost vertical that line. It's really crazy to look at
Speaker 1: exactly like M said, it follows the vertical line all
Speaker 1: the way up to you know, the highest point of
Speaker 1: the chart. But I think what really struck me when
Speaker 1: I was looking at the numbers was just on the
Speaker 1: national data the chart was actually too tall to fit
Speaker 1: in this on the screen. So there isn't actually a
Speaker 1: mobile device or a computer that you can use to
Speaker 1: actually see the entire chart at once. You have to
Speaker 1: scroll basically through, and as you scroll you see that
Speaker 1: like you still haven't reached the peak of deaths in M.
Speaker 1: So we've outlined this enormous problem, how intractable it is.
Speaker 1: What works? What do we know actually works to bring
Speaker 1: down addiction rates and overdoses. Yeah, so we basically know
Speaker 1: that one of the most important things you can do
Speaker 1: when someone has what's known as opioid use disorder, it's
Speaker 1: you know, most people call opiate addiction, is to open
Speaker 1: up access to medication assisted treatment. That basically means treating
Speaker 1: folks with essentially opioids that have been specifically approved by
Speaker 1: the US Food and Drug Administration the FDA to treat,
Speaker 1: you know, opioid use disorder, and so it's been very
Speaker 1: well established this is the gold standard of treating opioid addiction.
Speaker 1: And these medications essentially help people sort of reduce some
Speaker 1: of the euphoria highs associated with use of these drugs,
Speaker 1: but they also help reduce the risk of relapsing. And
Speaker 1: that's kind of key. It's a controlled environment. These folks
Speaker 1: are being kind of adminis, you know, admit stared and
Speaker 1: looked after biomedical professionals, and this is supposed to help
Speaker 1: prevent them from using exactly the kinds of street drugs
Speaker 1: we're talking about and dying of an overdose. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of other things though, that can also be
Speaker 1: done to address this crisis and are being done, including
Speaker 1: making the lock zone, which is the opioid overdose reversal
Speaker 1: medication UM, much more widely available. And that's Narcan. Is
Speaker 1: that what we're talking about. Yeah, the brand name is
Speaker 1: is Narcan. The Lockson is the generic name, and there's
Speaker 1: been a big push to get this stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: available over the counter, for instance, so you don't need
Speaker 1: a prescription anymore. To get it UM, get in the
Speaker 1: pockets of people, get out into places like nightclubs where
Speaker 1: people might be, you know, using drugs and be at
Speaker 1: risk of overdosing. And the idea is that is that
Speaker 1: the person who's overdosing does it, but somebody who sees
Speaker 1: someone is overdosing, they have this on them and they
Speaker 1: can help that person so the person doesn't die right.
Speaker 1: And actually, one of the most powerful things I heard
Speaker 1: while reporting this story was COVID was a disease where isolation.
Speaker 1: Social isolation was the way you prevented it from spreading.
Speaker 1: And you're using drugs alone, there's nobody there to revive
Speaker 1: you with the loxon with nark, can you know. And
Speaker 1: I thought that was really I mean, that kind of
Speaker 1: hit me with a punch in the gut. So one
Speaker 1: thing that a place like Florida is actually starting to
Speaker 1: do as of this year is they're trying to do
Speaker 1: a better job connecting people who are at risk of
Speaker 1: overdose or who are you know, have overdosed UM with
Speaker 1: this medication assisted treatment. But in Florida and other places
Speaker 1: around the country, you know, many conservative states are not
Speaker 1: fully embracing all of the tools of what we call
Speaker 1: harm reduction, and harm reduction is basically acknowledging that you
Speaker 1: can't prevent people from using drugs and all instances, but
Speaker 1: when they do use drugs, you can try to mitigate
Speaker 1: the harm and make it, you know, safer to use drugs. Literley,
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the interview, you gave us some
Speaker 1: pretty jaunting numbers for a number of people who have
Speaker 1: died from hope we had used and in partain killer
Speaker 1: fentanel overdoses. Where are we in the numbers now when
Speaker 1: it comes to trends on the national skill, we are
Speaker 1: actually seeing, um from the total number accounts, we are
Speaker 1: seeing fewer over those deaths so far this year. But
Speaker 1: um caveat that is we are all just having provisional
Speaker 1: data for now. They are going to be updated as
Speaker 1: time goes by. We are gradually walking out of that pandemic,
Speaker 1: and I'm hopeful that without that essay major contributing factor,
Speaker 1: we should be able to see fewer drug overdose deaths.
Speaker 1: And also there is a growing awareness of what kind
Speaker 1: of role fentonel is playing in this overall opioid crisis nowadays,
Speaker 1: so I'm hoping for the best. I would also say
Speaker 1: you know, in this day and age, with fentanel creeping
Speaker 1: into so many other illegal drugs, drugs that people don't
Speaker 1: think of as sort of dangerous. Know, these are drugs
Speaker 1: that are now becoming extremely dangerous and using them can
Speaker 1: kill you. It's a very real danger now, it's not
Speaker 1: a hypothetical situation. Emma Linley Leo, thanks so much for
Speaker 1: joining me today. Thank you, Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: having us, Thanks for having us West. When we come
Speaker 1: back a close up view of the fentinyl crisis in
Speaker 1: Florida for a closer look at fentinyl's toll on people
Speaker 1: and communities, I'm joined by Helena Girard, who you heard
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the episode. She's the overdose Prevention
Speaker 1: coordinator for the Florida Department of Health Involutiona County. Helena,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for coming on the show. Thanks so
Speaker 1: much for having me. Can you first just describe what
Speaker 1: does the overdose Prevention program coordinator for Valuja County do?
Speaker 1: What is your job? So I get to work with
Speaker 1: community partners, so this would include hospital systems, um the
Speaker 1: sheriff office, the medical examiner. Most importantly, I get to
Speaker 1: work with people who have been directly impacted by substance use,
Speaker 1: whether it's themselves personally, or a family member or a friend,
Speaker 1: and we all work together. We look at the data
Speaker 1: that's provided by some of those partners and we find
Speaker 1: out who is the most impacted. You know where these
Speaker 1: overdoses are taking place, and we try really hard to
Speaker 1: get the messaging out into those areas so that people
Speaker 1: are aware that what a crisis we're experiencing. We recently
Speaker 1: now started passing out in our can um at the
Speaker 1: Department of Health in Militia County, which is huge. Last
Speaker 1: week we had one of our active participants in our
Speaker 1: work overdosed and UM her family requested that our can
Speaker 1: be distributed at her funeral. So how did you come
Speaker 1: to this line of work? I think I started this
Speaker 1: work just volunteering, being involved in my own recovery, and
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eighteen was ordered a fellowship with
Speaker 1: the Pritzkur Children's Initiative, and I focused on substance exposed newborns.
Speaker 1: I got some really great experience working in that maternal
Speaker 1: and child health world, but also with substance use. So
Speaker 1: that fellowship ended in and a position was open at
Speaker 1: the Department of Health in Blutia County. And I think
Speaker 1: it was created for me. I mean it just it
Speaker 1: feels like it's amazing to come to work every day
Speaker 1: and get to do things that I'm very passionate about.
Speaker 1: For people who use it, how does fentinel feel that
Speaker 1: makes it such a powerful drug? Well, if you look
Speaker 1: at the definition of an opioid, the first thing it
Speaker 1: says is that it creates a feeling of euphoria. And
Speaker 1: that's with a lighter dose. So when somebody uses fentanyl
Speaker 1: in in my this is my own personal experience, um
Speaker 1: that it's a feeling of euphoria, and um it's it's
Speaker 1: it's scary. It's scary because it's for somebody that experiences
Speaker 1: anxiety or depression. It could be that moment that you
Speaker 1: feel normal, like, oh this is what other people feel like,
Speaker 1: So I'm going to do it again. And then the
Speaker 1: intention is never to do it forever. But nobody wakes
Speaker 1: up every day hoping to fail. And it's progressive and
Speaker 1: deadly and after a while there's no longer that sense
Speaker 1: of euphoria. It's really just I want to feel like
Speaker 1: I can function today. And how were you able to
Speaker 1: get off of it. I was um, I was pregnant,
Speaker 1: and I was able to detox in a hospital under
Speaker 1: a physician's supervision nurses around the clock. So it took
Speaker 1: about six days of intensity talking in the hospital, and
Speaker 1: then from there I went to an intensive impatient facility
Speaker 1: where I could stay until my daughter was born, and
Speaker 1: then we stayed until she was almost a year old.
Speaker 1: So I stayed for a very long time. And how
Speaker 1: did your own experience, how does that sort of inform
Speaker 1: the work you're doing now? I think I'm able to
Speaker 1: take my personal experience and remember the feeling, so that
Speaker 1: I'm not doing the work through a lens of judgment.
Speaker 1: I'm doing it through a lens of compassion and having
Speaker 1: been there myself and understanding the pain and that it's
Speaker 1: not moral failing. It's not because people are bad, that
Speaker 1: they are struggling with substance use, and so it really
Speaker 1: creates an opportunity for me to have a really open
Speaker 1: mind with the work. Everybody's recovery is different, everybody's story
Speaker 1: is different, and how can we support everybody's recovery in
Speaker 1: a different way? Can you describe what the situation is
Speaker 1: right now in Valusia County it's not good. UM. We
Speaker 1: are second in the state capita for overdoses, so there
Speaker 1: are a lot of people dying a lot of um
Speaker 1: non fatal overdoses as well. And it's um whether they're
Speaker 1: using fentanyl because they know it UM, but we also
Speaker 1: have those who are using something else. They might think
Speaker 1: they're taking a zanex and it's pressed with fentanol, or
Speaker 1: they buy some weed and the dealer just had touched
Speaker 1: fentanyl and then it gets into the marijuana and they're
Speaker 1: exposed that way. And you know, it takes the size
Speaker 1: of two grains of salt to be fatal. So it's
Speaker 1: um pretty serious when you know a couple of crumbs
Speaker 1: get into anything else. You talked about how important our
Speaker 1: can is. Can you describe why it's so important? Simply
Speaker 1: it saves lives. But when narcan is administered, and it
Speaker 1: looks like a nasal spray, the one that is most
Speaker 1: generally in the public. But what they do it goes
Speaker 1: in and it goes to the receptors, the opioid receptors
Speaker 1: in the brain and it pushes opioids out, so it
Speaker 1: pulls the person out of an overdose. It sometimes takes
Speaker 1: a couple of tries, especially with the ventanyl. Now I
Speaker 1: have friends that I personally know that have taken six
Speaker 1: doses to revive them. And another thing that I always
Speaker 1: like to remind people if they don't go with UM
Speaker 1: the first responders once they arrive, making sure to keep
Speaker 1: an eye on them because the narcan only stays in
Speaker 1: the receptors for a certain amount of time. So if
Speaker 1: there's enough opioids in their system, then they could reattach
Speaker 1: and they can overdose again without even using any more drugs.
Speaker 1: And is narcan something that anyone can carry and if
Speaker 1: they see a person is overdose, they can administer it. Yes,
Speaker 1: there's a good Samaritan Act that that covers someone. So
Speaker 1: what we're taught is if anyone is unresponsive, assume that
Speaker 1: it's an overdose. If it is not an overdose, it
Speaker 1: won't hurt them. But it's just something that you want
Speaker 1: to tell the paramedics when they arrive. Hey, I didn't
Speaker 1: mr narcan just in case, but anybody can do it.
Speaker 1: We also often hear about needle exchanges. Is that something
Speaker 1: that you do and is that in an effective practice?
Speaker 1: We don't currently do the needle exchanges in Felicia County
Speaker 1: but they have been found to be very very effective,
Speaker 1: you know, lowering the risk of endocarditis, appetitis, C, HIV,
Speaker 1: all of those you know, all those things can ultimately
Speaker 1: lead to death. You know, you might not even have
Speaker 1: to have experience and an overdose. So having access to
Speaker 1: clean syringers is really really important. Are there things that
Speaker 1: you find, uh are part of the treatment policies that
Speaker 1: just aren't working very well that that need to be changed. Well,
Speaker 1: we you know, we talked about syringe syringe exchange. That's
Speaker 1: a huge one. Final test trips. The test trips are
Speaker 1: not legal in the state of Florida. They're considered paraphernalia.
Speaker 1: There are groups that that they go to dance parties
Speaker 1: or different venues like that concerts and they will provide
Speaker 1: this strips there. So if you are using something and
Speaker 1: you want to test it to make sure it doesn't
Speaker 1: have Fenton All in it, they can do it without
Speaker 1: you getting in trouble. I think that should be everywhere.
Speaker 1: I think that you know that that's something that should
Speaker 1: be easily accessible, just like narcan is. Now, are you
Speaker 1: starting to see results from your work? Can you see
Speaker 1: that you're making a dent in overdose numbers. I would
Speaker 1: like to think. I hope that. UM. I know that
Speaker 1: our community partners from since the beginning of the year
Speaker 1: have been tracking the amount of narcan that they're distributing,
Speaker 1: and they also track how many reversals are reported. So
Speaker 1: a reversal would be if someone had to use their
Speaker 1: narcan and they revived someone and they come back and say,
Speaker 1: I need some more because I had to use it.
Speaker 1: So they're reporting that they were able to save a
Speaker 1: life with that narcan. But at the beginning, there wasn't
Speaker 1: that trust, so no one was reporting. And now people
Speaker 1: are reporting, and we have had over with just one
Speaker 1: of our community partners, over one reversals reported. And have
Speaker 1: you found the public is more receptive now to taking
Speaker 1: and carrying our ken in the event that they come
Speaker 1: across someone who's overdosed. I think we have work to do,
Speaker 1: but UM, I think so. I think, UM, if you're
Speaker 1: able to have that real conversation, people are becoming more
Speaker 1: open to it. Helena Gerard, thanks so much for taking
Speaker 1: the time to talk to me today. Thank you. You
Speaker 1: can read the Fentel story by Ema Court, Leonardo Nicoletti,
Speaker 1: Linley Lynn, and Madeline Campbell at Bloomberg dot com. Thanks
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