On Tuesday, The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration released a report on the increased abuse of heroin and the issue of fentanyl, deemed much worse than heroin, being disguised as prescription pills.
The number of people reporting current heroin use nearly tripled between 2007 and 2014, and deaths involving heroin more than tripled between 2010 and 2014, according to the National Heroin Threat Assessment Summary.
Lt. Brett Rowlands, the commander for the Alachua County Drug Task Force, said his team sees heroin cases in the county on a daily and weekly basis.
“It’s a very common drug these days,” he said.
According to the recent threat summary, fentanyl disguised as prescription pills was possibly responsible for the death of 19 people in Florida and California during the first quarter of 2016.
“We tend to overuse words such as ‘unprecedented’ and ‘horrific,’ but the death and destruction connected to heroin and opioids is indeed unprecedented and horrific,” said DEA Acting Administrator Chuck Rosenberg in a press release. “The problem is enormous and growing, and all of our citizens need to wake up to these facts.”
Fentanyl, Rowlands said, is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin.
“We’re starting to see a lot of deaths from it in America as a whole,” he said.
Fentanyl, according to the summary, is easy to sell and inexpensive to make.
Rowlands said he believes heroin and fentanyl use has gone up because it’s no longer possible for Florida doctors to write an excessive amount of prescriptions, as was common in the past.
“Up until a couple of years ago, there was an abundant amount of pill mills in South Florida,” Rowlands said. “The government cracked down on them, and all of them shut down.”
People were left with withdrawals when authorities shut down the mills, Rowlands said, and cartels took advantage by supplying more heroine to struggling addicts.
However, The U.S. DEA and local authorities are not the only ones to address the nationwide problem.
CVS Health decided on May 25 to include naloxone, an antidote to opioid overdoses, in locations throughout seven more states during the summer, including Florida locations this month, according to a press release.
“Expanding access to the overdose-reversal drug naloxone is a critical part of our national strategy to stop the prescription drug and heroin overdose epidemic – along with effective prevention, treatment, and enforcement,” said Michael Botticelli, the director of National Drug Control Policy, in a press release.
