EDITORIAL: The fatal scourge of fentanyl

Published 1:30 pm Wednesday, July 13, 2022

A recent study by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) about fentanyl is disturbing, and not only because agency officials say the powerful synthetic painkiller has become a leading cause of overdose deaths.

It’s also troubling that fentanyl is so ubiquitous that OHA officials can only concede that people will continue to ingest the drug. As a result, one of the agency’s chief goals — and a worthwhile one — is to strive to ensure that Oregonians have access to naloxone, a drug that saves lives by rapidly counteracting the effects of fentanyl and other opioids. The state has programs that supply naloxone for free, as well as strips that test drugs for fentanyl.

Fentanyl is frightening in large part because many people don’t even realize they’re ingesting it. The drug is frequently present in illicit drugs, including pills. The Oregon-Idaho High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area said in April 2022 that 40% of all counterfeit pills in circulation contain fatal amounts of fentanyl.

In the same press release listing data about fatal fentanyl overdoses, OHA recommends that “unless a pharmacist directly hands you a prescription pill, assume it is counterfeit and contains fentanyl.”

Obviously it’s preferable that people simply don’t take illicit drugs.

But some people will do so, and although the effects of drug abuse are serious and occasionally deadly, the prevalence of fentanyl has dramatically raised the risk of deaths that wouldn’t, in the absence of fentanyl, have happened.

OHA’s study found that fentanyl overdose deaths listed as either unintentional or undetermined increased from 71 in 2019 to 519 in 2021. Fentanyl was implicated in 47.5% of unintentional or undetermined overdose deaths in the state in 2021, up from 32.1% in 2020 and 14.3% in 2019.

These terrible statistics highlight how vital it is for police, at the local, state and federal levels, to combat fentanyl trafficking.

Moreover, the overdose epidemic emphasizes the need for Oregon to make better use of marijuana tax revenue to bolster drug treatment programs. That was supposed to be a benefit of Measure 110, the law Oregon voters approved in 2020 that decriminalizes the possession of small amounts of drugs, including heroin and methamphetamine.

Naloxone saves lives. But it’s far better to help people overcome their drug addictions so that they’ll never need a “rescue drug” to save them from fentanyl.