Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to this installment of the Know the news podcast. I'm your host, Chris Swindle, metro editor for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. In this week's podcast, we look at the rise in fentanyl use, overdoses and deaths in northwest Arkansas. This is an advance of a story on the topic by staff writers Tom Sissam and Tracy Neal that will publish in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazettes edition this Sunday, December 16.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us today on Know the news. I am joined by staff writers Tom Sissam and Tracy Neal, who have written the story that will publish this Sunday about the rise in fentanyl use and deaths. We also have with us U. S. Attorney Clay Folkes and Brittany Kelly with Northwest Arkansas harm reduction, a local organization focused on reducing the harm done by fentanyl and other drugs in the region. Welcome to you all, and thank you for being here. I'd like to start with Tracy and Tom and ask how did the idea to write this story come about?
[00:01:02] Speaker C: Well, I think some of us have been discussing fentanyl here for three months. I think we've written stories over the last few years about police officers getting Narcan, and I think Tom has written stories about the test strips. But I don't think anyone is, that we have never written a story about actual the danger of fentanyl and what it is and the impact it is having in the community. So we started discussing this a few months, and so that's how the story started and Tom became part of it.
[00:01:38] Speaker D: Well, I had done a story with Brittany. Was it two years ago, a little.
[00:01:43] Speaker E: Over a year ago?
[00:01:44] Speaker D: A year ago, about your efforts to distribute the test strips, which were then.
[00:01:50] Speaker E: Technically illegal, they were founding paraphernalia.
[00:01:53] Speaker D: It was drug paraphernalia, yes. And your efforts, lobbying the state legislature to get that change, which did happen this past spring, and we'd done a couple of stories along those lines, one in advance and then one after the fact.
And I regularly have conversations with police and EMS and prosecutors, and fentanyl is just a growing problem, and information from the federal government supports that. It just doesn't seem to be under control at all. And national problems do tend to reach Arkansas at some point. And fentanyl is one of those problems that is here.
[00:02:38] Speaker C: And, and I think also, as far as covering courts, I know one of the judges have said before that she's never seen so many people who are dying, and these are not older people. Some of these people are young. And so maybe once every three weeks you hear about a person dying. And this judge. A lot of this is the contributing factor of spending all. So that's another reason I started looking into the story.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Did you guys learn anything surprising or new that you were unaware of as you started trying to uncover and write this story?
[00:03:15] Speaker D: Well, one of the things that people have mentioned to me is that a lot of the fentanyl deaths are unintentional. People don't even know they're taking it because the people who manufacture some of the drugs that are being sold make them in such a way that they resemble other drugs, like xanax or oxycodone. They make the pills that look just like the ones you might get from a prescription, but it contains fentanyl, and there's no way to know how much. And just a tiny amount can kill you.
[00:03:50] Speaker F: Yeah.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: The difference in lethality is significant.
[00:03:55] Speaker E: To add to that as well. Tom, the people that we're serving that we see just in the general public, heroin isn't available anymore. They can't find it. So they have actually been turned to start seeking fentanyl. So people are using the straight fentanyl, which has also led to the xylazine issues and so on.
But we're not solving the problem of just getting rid of a drug.
We got to help.
[00:04:21] Speaker B: For listeners who might not know, could you explain a little bit about what xylozine is?
[00:04:25] Speaker E: Yeah. Xylazine is an animal tranquilizer. It is approved to use with veterinary clinics when animals need sedated. And it is being used to cut with fentanyl to enlarge the supply and the usage. If it's being used intravenously, it's causing what they call necrosis, which is a depletion of your tissue and muscle.
And a lot of people are even dying from the wounds it's causing, and not so much the overdose.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: Oh, wow.
[00:04:57] Speaker C: And I think what most people don't realize, which I learned from this story, that Narcan is not responsible for Narcan.
So if you use that, a police officer may have Narcan, or someone near you may have Narcan, but it's going to be useless.
[00:05:12] Speaker E: Right. So even with Narcan, when you use it on an opioid, you can go back into an overdose, depending on the strength of what you're taking and how your body's reacting to it. With the xylazine prolonging the fentanyl high, you take the Narcan and it just goes right back into it. So it's a constant battle we see pretty regularly with the people that we work with four to eight doses of narcan to revive someone right now.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: Clay, can you tell us what you are seeing in regards to the number of fentanyl related arrests and prosecutions in the area over the past few years?
[00:05:49] Speaker F: Yeah, I think when you think about it, you clearly see from the statistics that fentanyl is a rising problem, and it's a rising problem nationwide, but it's also a rising problem here in the western district of Arkansas and in Arkansas as a whole. So I looked at our statistics from the last year, the last full calendar year, which was 2022. And during that time, about 3.4% of our cases that we prosecuted that were drug cases involved the distribution of fentanyl, which seems like a small amount. But when you switch that graph and you look at the nationwide trend, nationwide, the cases sentenced, the drug cases sentenced in 2022 contain 12.6% involving the distribution of fentanyl. So you see that nationwide, it's a trend that's on the rise, and that's going to be reflected in western Arkansas already. It's already at roughly double what it was in 2021, and we expect it to be much higher when we get our statistics finished for 2023. So we see that it's a rising problem for us here in western Arkansas. So if you don't mind, I can talk a little bit about why I view that as being a rising problem. And part of it has to do with the manufacture and the smuggling of fentanyl being significantly easier than the manufacturing and the smuggling of methamphetamine. If you look at our cases, methamphetamine is still the most distributed drug in western Arkansas. About 83% of our cases last year involving the distribution of drugs contained methamphetamine. And so it still is the most prevalent drug that we investigate and prosecute here. But the important thing to note is that methamphetamine is somewhat difficult to manufacture. There are a lot of different components that go into the manufacturing of methamphetamine. It's a somewhat delicate process that has to be done just right to certain specifications. With fentanyl, one of the really scary things about it is that it's very easy for the cartels to manufacture it. Our intelligence tells us that a cartel can manufacture a fentanyl, a single pill, for less than $0.15. But that same single pill can be sold on the streets of Arkansas for fifteen dollars to twenty dollars. And so it's an incredible profit margin for the cartels, which, in our view, is a significant factor towards what's driving the increase in the use of fentanyl? The other really scary thing, when you look at it, is that fentanyl is relatively easy to smuggle into the United States as well. Methamphetamine has a larger footprint. It's more difficult to smuggle in either in liquid form, powder form, or crystal form. There's a lot of it. It's bulky, and it requires a different kind of smuggling process. Fentanyl is so potent that a very, very small amount of it can satisfy a drug user. And so because of that, it's much easier for the cartels to smuggle fentanyl into the United States than it is for them to smuggle methamphetamine into the United States. And so that's some of the factors that we're seeing in the US attorney's office that we believe are really driving the increase in numbers of fentanyl.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: How do you see them smuggling it? In what kind of specific cases have we seen, and the ways that they're getting it across the border and getting it into the hands of people here in Arkansas?
[00:09:08] Speaker F: I think Tom mentioned this, that one of the big problems with fentanyl is that it is disguised as other drugs. And so a large amount of the seizures that we see here in western Arkansas, either through interdiction or through the development of an investigation from the ground up, they are concealed as oxycodone pills. They have an m on one side and a 30 on the other side, which looks identical to a pharmaceutical manufactured oxycodone pill that would be completely safe for a doctor to prescribe to a patient and for a patient to take. But in fact, that same m 30 little blue pill contains only fentanyl. And it's only containing fentanyl that's manufactured in a superlab outside the United States with no degree of care or regard to how much fentanyl is going into that pill, which is what makes it so dangerous. But the two most prevalent ways that we see it smuggled into the United States are in its pure powder form, or in those m 30 pills that are stamped with an m on one side and a 30 on the other side to disguise them as oxycodone.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: And there's really just no way to tell by looking at it that it contains fentanyl.
[00:10:22] Speaker F: That's right. The pill press creates a pill that looks identical to what you would be prescribed by a doctor here in the United States. And so that's the real difference that makes it scary, because I think about fentanyl and why people are dying from fentanyl. And I really think that there's three important reasons. Number one, the supply. It has flooded the market here in Arkansas for all the reasons that we've already talked about, the ease of manufacture, the profit margin that the cartels can experience, and the ease of smuggling. And so there is a lot of fentanyl available in the United States these days. But the other problem, which I think Tom mentioned earlier, is the deceit, because a drug dealer will distribute a drug and they will tell a user, this is heroin, or this is what you're looking for. You know, heroin is hard to find. This is heroin or this is oxycodone. But in reality, the drug dealer is distributing something to them that contains only fentanyl. And because of that deceit, a person doesn't realize how dangerous it is. They don't realize that it has to be treated significantly differently than oxycodone or even than heroin. Our studies show us that fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine, which is roughly equivalent to heroin in its potency. And so you're taking a drug that's 100 times more potent than what you think you're taking. And it's that deceit that really is driving a large portion of the overdose deaths that we're seeing here in Arkansas and in the United States. And a great example of that is the Ethan Driscoll case that we just sentenced a couple of months ago. And the court sentenced Ethan Driscoll to 38 years in federal prison for distributing fentanyl that resulted in the death of another person. And it's a very tragic case. But unfortunately, that kind of tragedy is something we're seeing throughout Arkansas now. But in that case, the drug dealer, Ethan Driscoll, distributed what he purported to be heroin to a drug user. And, in fact, that was fentanyl. And the fentanyl resulted in almost immediately in an overdose that resulted in death. And so that's a big part of why these fentanyl pills and this powder is causing the overdose. One is the supply, and two is definitely the deceit aspect of it, and three is the potency that we've already talked about. Just a very small amount of fentanyl can be deadly to the human body. And so people don't realize what they're taking. They take this incredibly deadly, potent substance, and it results in an overdose.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: That Ethan Driscoll case, that was the first one that was prosecuted in this area using the death by delivery statute. Is that correct?
[00:13:09] Speaker F: No, that's a little bit different. That's a state statute. And so on the federal side, we have a very similar statute, but it requires us to prove a couple of different elements that are in addition to what we would normally have to prove in a drug case. Normally, we would have to prove that a person, a defendant, knowingly distributed a controlled substance to another person. With this statute, we have to prove those two elements, that a drug dealer knowingly distributed a controlled substance, but also that that specific controlled substance that the drug dealer delivered caused the death of another person, which is a very simple statement, but it has just a world of complexities. It really is complicated by the fact that most drug users are using a variety of different drugs, and that plethora of drugs can make it difficult sometimes for a forensic examination after the fact to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that that drug distributed by that drug dealer caused this person's death. And so it is a very difficult and high burden. But correct. That is the first time that we have used our federal statute of distribution that results in death in the western district of Arkansas. And in our case, it was made much, much easier to investigate and prosecute that case because of a couple of different reasons. But one is that we were able to really, through the hard work of the agents, nail down the timeframe of when the drugs were distributed by Ethan Driscoll to our victim, when the victim took the drugs, when the overdose occurred, and when the death occurred. And because of various factors and pieces of evidence that the agents were able to gather up and piece together, we were able to prove definitively that that drug distributed by Ethan Driscoll resulted in the death of our victim. And so in so many of these cases, it's much more difficult to prove that. The second factor that really helped us go forward on that case is something that's really important to me. And I talk about it all the time. I talked about it at the press conference that we had after Ethan Driscoll. But it is so important for family members of people who have overdosed, whether that overdose resulted in a death or it didn't. It is so important for those family members to do what they can do to assist law enforcement. And the sister of our victim was instrumental in helping the DEA agents really nail down that time frame of showing when the drugs were distributed, when they were taken, and when the overdose occurred. So often people, for whatever reason, whether it's the stigma that they associate with drug use and drug abuse, they don't want to talk about their loved ones and their family members being drug users or being drug abusers. And because of that, it makes it hard for us to nail down that time frame. We don't know where they got the drugs from. We don't have access to the phone. We don't know when they took the drugs. But if family members of overdose victims would agree to provide just those small bits and pieces of information that can really help us build a case, it makes it much easier for us to be able to hold responsible the drug dealers who are distributing this deadly substance.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: We're going to take a quick break.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: And then come back with some questions for Brittany Kelly with northwest Arkansas harm reduction.
[00:16:39] Speaker G: If you're enjoying this podcast, consider a newspaper subscription to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette or the River Valley Democrat Gazette. We have a special offer for our podcast listeners, so visit nwanline.com podcast 23 to get started. You can also click the subscribe button on our websites, nwanline.com and rivervalleydemocratgazette.com. Or call us at 479-684-5509 and be sure to say that you're a podcast listener. Now back to the show.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Brittany, you founded Northwest Arkansas harm reduction.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Can you tell us why it is.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: So important to you to find ways to combat drug addiction and deaths in the region, both in general and specifically as it relates to fentanyl use?
[00:17:19] Speaker E: So I became passionate about harm reduction after the death of my brother in 2017. He'd been sober for five years and he relapsed on heroin.
We knew who dealt him the drugs. We tried to work to make something, anything happen for that closure, and we were told there was a dead end. There was nothing they could do.
When we got to looking at medical records, there was no evidence of EMS giving him Narcan when they arrived at scene and he had a pulse.
So advocacy began since then with northwest Arkansas harm reduction. In the last year, we've been able to save over 70 people in northwest Arkansas that we know of from overdose.
What we do is we distribute naloxin. We do training on naloxin, commonly known as Narcan, to people who request it. No stipulations, no stigma involved. We have a number they can text and they reach out to.
We don't ask names. We don't ask personal information. We show up. We train them how to use the kits and we send them on their way. Tell them to get back with us with any questions or anything further. We don't bring up recovery. That is a resource that we have, but we want to build that relationship first and foremost with them so they know that someone is there for them.
We also do things along the lines of sterile syringes for people to use so they're not sharing. This helps reduce things like Hep C and HIV spread, as well as, sorry, general damage to veins and stuff that they would be doing if they were sharing or reusing their own needles.
We advocate for the people who don't feel like they have a voice. A lot of our volunteers are people in recovery, long term, short term, some still use, and we're just trying to do what we can to keep as many people alive as possible.
We're working close with the city of Fayetteville to start a program here locally, which I'll disclose more in time, but I'm excited to see that take off.
And then we are working to get a continuing education course approved throughout the state for law enforcement officers to kind of aim towards compassion over incarceration, ways we can show up with resources to people instead of just sending them to jail to make their life more difficult.
We can't arrest our way out of this problem.
We've got to show compassion somewhere and.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: Get people real help when people are ready.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Clients of yours that are ready to try for recovery, what does that look like with your organization?
[00:20:10] Speaker E: We don't call them clients because everything we do is free.
[00:20:13] Speaker F: Fair enough.
[00:20:15] Speaker E: But we have peer support, recovery specialists that are certified through the state that volunteer for us. So as soon as people reach out for recovery, we send them to one of our peer support specialists, and they've networked across the state. Actually, I was supposed to have one of mine with me today, Chris Jones. But he is driving someone to Louisiana to get into rehab.
But we will send him to them and then they will start talking to them, kind of see what they want, see what their situation is, network to find the best placement for them, the best detox, depending on their life situation. Not everyone can do residential, so they just kind of work that whole process to see what fits them.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: This is just a general question for anybody who wants to weigh in and discuss on know as I read through the story that Tom and Tracy worked on, and it's a great story. It's got a lot of really good information, and I learned a lot reading it. But the one thing that just keeps coming up is the deaths are increasing and we think they're going to increase.
What is the solution that you see?
If money was no option, if there was just some magic wand you could wave over this, how do you see us getting ahead of this and reversing that trend?
[00:21:36] Speaker F: Yeah, I think I'll take a stab at know. We're looking hard at thinking outside the box, because this is not a traditional drug, and it's going to require not a traditional response to this drug. And so what Charlie and I have done, we've traveled the height and width of western Arkansas. We represent the 34 counties on the western side of the state. And Charlie and I have visited a ton of them, really getting to know local law enforcement and county sheriffs and police chiefs. And it is a common theme that we're hearing from them, that fentanyl is on the rise and that fentanyl related overdoses are on the rise. And so what we would like to do, step one for us, is ensuring that we capture each one of those overdoses, whether it results in a death or not, and make sure that we're doing everything we can to understand what happened in that situation, potentially, who caused the overdose, who's the drug dealer that distributed that drug, that caused the overdose? And so many of them, in our experience, go unreported for various reasons. So what we're doing is we've started a pilot program in Washington, Madison, and Benton county, and we call it the overdose response team. And so what we do with the overdose response team, in an effort to capture all of these unreported overdoses, we are trying to train up a small group of law enforcement officers and develop, for lack of a better word, a phone tree. And every time the coroner goes out to a death that looks like it may have been an overdose, or every time a paramedic goes out for what seems to be a drug overdose, they have a select group of people that they can call who are trained in the investigation of that type of situation. And so that hopefully, we're capturing those overdoses, whether they result in death or whether they don't. And it'll help us really get a feel for exactly what's happening, exactly how many overdoses we're looking at in western Arkansas. And it will help us get an edge in perhaps beginning an investigation into the large scale distributors of the fentanyl. And I couldn't agree more with what was said about, we can't prosecute our way out of this. We can't just put a million people in jail and expect that to fix the fentanyl problem. First of all, we have limited resources. We simply can't do that. And second of all, it's not going to solve the problem anyway. It's going to require a concerted effort from the community as a whole to be able to solve this problem. But our job, the way we look at it, is that we need to deploy our resources in an intelligent, in a smart way. And that means going after the largest fentanyl suppliers, the ones that are flooding the market with fentanyl. And if we can take those people out of the community for a lengthy period of time, we can start to beat back some of these numbers that we're seeing increasing. And so part of that overdose response team is developed through the community. We're trying to engage our coroners and trying to engage our emts and our paramedics and the community as a whole, which is why I love to do speaking engagements, because it's important to get the word out about it, and it's important to motivate people to assist in this area and to assist with these problems. And so that's part of it. And part of it is to really give us an edge into investigating these large scale fentanyl distributors that we're looking to prosecute.
[00:25:07] Speaker E: I'm working on gathering a lot of data right now, and I spoke to a couple of our local EMS yesterday.
A part of the reporting problem that I think needs focus on is how are the loved ones going to feel when they see this?
So a lot of these younger teens who are presumably overdosing, having heart attacks, are being looked as heart attacks instead of, if they're not found with a needle in their arm, it's obviously not an overdose.
And so that's become an issue. And that makes our numbers very askewed. We know they are a lot substantially higher than what is actually reported just because of that information.
And so that's one of those stigma barriers we need to work on.
With my brother Matt, I know through my childhood, my late teens, he was on drugs. I worked three jobs, and I helped provide things for him because he wasn't allowed to be around us. So I would do what I could for him.
I took care of him as a little sister. And when I heard the doctor call us and say that he was in ICU from a cardiac arrest event, I immediately knew it was an overdose. And my initial announcement to people when he died was that it was a cardiac arrest. And I got questions and all kinds of things, which there was nothing to be ashamed of. I mean, everyone knew. And so it quickly turned into advocacy for overdoses, for drug use, and to help people.
One thing to also talk about, which is going to take a lot more change, but the death by delivery law that passed in Arkansas. People are terrified of it.
I think it's going to increase the fentanyl deaths that are happening in Arkansas.
I talk a lot with U of A students. We're very heavily integrated on campus, doing trainings with the students there, and they come to us and ask us questions like, what has fentanyl in it? And I'm like, well, we've been reported that your xanax, your cocaine, your perks, everything pretty much you have seen on campus has fentanyl in it. If you're not testing it, assume it has fentanyl in it.
If you're testing it and it tests negative, assume it has fentanyl in it. That's where we're at. But the way the law is written is in conveyance.
So essentially, a student can go out and buy some pills from someone and come back to their apartment, their dorm, whatever, and just say, hey, I've got an extra one if you want it.
If that person does not wake up, the person who shared, did not sell, did not exchange, is now potentially at risk of going to prison, and they're terrified. And it's going to cause more people to use alone. It's going to cause more people to die.
We have been advocates for the Joshua Ashley poly act for years. Don't use alone. Use with a friend. Call. You won't get in trouble. And we can't promote that as much anymore. We still encourage people to call, but we also educate as much as we can. And it's scary to.
To. It's going to ruin a kid's life.
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Does anyone have anything else they would like to mention?
[00:28:48] Speaker D: Yeah, I would.
When I was talking to the Washington county coroner and when I was talking to Chris Jones with harm reduction, both of them, from their different perspectives, stressed that we need to have people realize that this is not somebody else's problem. It's not the problem of a certain subset of people in the society. It's everywhere.
It's in your home, it's in your church, it's in your business.
It's people you know, it's people you respect. It's not just homeless people or bad people.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: Absolutely. I know people with substance abuse problems. I feel like everyone knows, friends, family members, colleagues, people they've known over the years who have had substance abuse problems. And the idea that their problem might be something that's more of an upper, like a cocaine or a meth, and they could get something so potent as fentanyl and not even expect it is terrifying.
[00:29:52] Speaker D: And both of them also mentioned that there is still a stigma attached to drug abuse, that somehow you're a bad person or there's something wrong with you other than you have this particular issue. And that needs to change, too. And that's one of the things that's kept me interested in. This is just what little we can do to try and put the information out there for people so they can be aware of the whole picture.
[00:30:26] Speaker A: I'd like to say thank you all.
[00:30:27] Speaker B: For joining us, sharing your expertise on this topic, all the work you do, it's very important and really appreciate it.
[00:30:37] Speaker F: Thank you. Thanks for having us.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: In other news coming this weekend, Fayetteville city reporter Stacey Ryburn looks into a possible city plan to build a solar array, likely in Fort Smith, before the state's new net metering rules take effect at the end of September. Washington county reporter Tom Sissam writes about new information available on the county government's website pertaining to the county jail that officials say will help people better understand the issue of jail overcrowding. Bentonville and Benton county reporter Mike Jones delves into proposals to build battery energy storage systems near Centerton and Sylum Springs, and education reporter Al Gaspeny will look at proposed legislation at the federal level that would provide funding to study the effects of cell phones in schools. Sports writer Paul Boyd will provide coverage from the battle of the bling wrestling tournament in Fayetteville in our what's up arts and entertainment guide editor Becca Martin Brown writes about Richard Moss's film Broken Specter, which is part of the enduring Amazon exhibition at the momentary in Bentonville. Music writer Monica Hooper interviews Jimbo Mathis of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, about the band's upcoming Christmas performance at the Walton Arts center in Fayetteville. All of this and more will be available to our subscribers on our tablet and smartphone apps and at our websites nwanline.com and rivervallecratgazette.com. I really appreciate you listening to this point and want to thank you for your support of local journalism. Know the news is a weekly podcast brought to you by the newsrooms of the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette and the River Valley Democrat Gazette. Again, I'm Chris Swindle, your podcast host this week. Have a great weekend and until next Friday, so long.
