(Via Dave Herndon, The News-Herald Newspapers)
Taylor
School District families should take note that the war on drugs is heating up,
thanks in part to the ever-changing, more potent market for illegal drugs that
kill users at a much higher rate than before.
Taylor
Police Chief Mary Sclabassi said she worked on an undercover team in the 1990s
where it was a huge deal that she bought a couple of bindles of heroin. Now it’s
common to find large amounts of the drug during routine traffic stops.
Hundreds
of people, from teens to elected officials, turned out at Wayne County
Community College on Thursday evening for the first of what likely will be many
town hall meetings on heroin and other opiates. Heroin and other illegal
opiates kill more than 90 people a day nationwide.
“This
isn’t just a problem, it’s an epidemic,” 23rd District Judge Geno Salamone
said. “Just 10 years ago almost no one had a heroin story; now most everyone in
that room does.”
Attendees
learned about the increasing number of users, deaths and other statistics;
where to turn for help if friends or families become addicted; and many other
ways to identify issues relating to the problem.
According
to a report released by the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, there were
19 deaths in Wayne County between August and September 2016. For the entire
year, there were thousands of overdoses and 507 deaths in the county.
Eight
communities in the county had at least five opiate-related deaths in 2016,
including Allen Park, Lincoln Park, Southgate and Taylor in the Downriver
region.
During
the town hall meeting, which lasted more than two hours, speakers from the City
of Taylor, Beaumont and many other organizations spoke on their perspectives of
what opiates are doing to society.
Of
the 507 opiate-related deaths in Wayne County last year, 486 were accidental.
Sclabassi said that is because drugs are now far more potent than they were
just a few years ago and people are accidentally overdosing themselves.
“People
are dying, not because they are choosing to,” she said. “When people are
dabbling in prescription drugs, at some point that is no longer satisfying that
high and they move on to heroin.”
Lt.
Mary Capp of the Michigan State Police said part of the problem is that drugs
such as fentanyl are far more potent than heroin, and are cheaper to produce.
“Fentanyl
is used to treat terminally ill patients,” she said. “It is 80 times more
potent that morphine. It is being cut into heroin because it gives people a
better high and it’s cheap.”
She
said drugs are coming in from Mexico and are laced with both fentanyl and
carfentanyl -an even more potent drug- because the average user doesn’t know
the difference and it increases profits on the sale of the drug.
“They
put the fentanyl in there and sell it as heroin and make a lot more money,”
Capp said. “The non-pharmaceutical forms come from Mexico and China.”
Lethal
doses of fentanyl are about the size of 32 grains of salt; carfentanyl can be
lethal at about nine grains of salt.
“No
one knows what they are buying if they buy it off the street,” Capp said.
