South Florida leads charge against the opioid epidemic
- Grace Mackey
- Feb 11, 2024
- 6 min read
Opioids were once known as painkillers. Now, many see them as just a killer. Synthetic opioids are notoriously deadly, yet available almost everywhere. Though they may be the most effective solution to extreme pain, they do not discriminate in killing more than 136 Americans every day, from newborn babies to elderly people. The 2023 NCDAS report recorded 3,189 deaths in Florida state due to opioid use. How did we get here?
South Florida is not immune to these statistics, but rather at the forefront of many of the issues surrounding opioid abuse in the United States. The Florida Health Department of Children and Families released a report of “Patterns and Trends of the Opioid Epidemic in Florida” in 2018, which placed Palm Beach County in the highest category of a report covering the number of deaths where at least one opioid was identified as a cause of death, reporting 150-547 deaths of this category in 2017.
Synthetic opioids are a type of drug used to treat moderate to severe pain. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, they are, “substances that are synthesized in a laboratory and that act on the same targets in the brain as natural opioids (e.g. morphine and codeine) to produce analgesic (pain relief) effects.”
Their prevalence can be somewhat explained by the history of their emergence as a painkiller with incredibly addictive qualities.
According to research published in the peer-reviewed journal Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, the initial use of synthetic opioids can be traced back to claims of the undertreatment of pain within U.S. healthcare. The “Fifth Vital Sign” educational campaign in the 1990s, held by the Joint Commission of the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, brought awareness to the lack of pain treatment from doctors who feared addiction among their patients and eventually resulted in a wider use of narcotics.
The JCAHO based their claims of undertreatment on two flawed health reports that showed drug abuse to be rare among patients. Other studies have shown that 40% of patients become addicted to opioids, or at least become physically dependent.
Time magazine, despite the flaws in much of the scientific basis for this push of narcotics, published a cover-page feature story on the topic of physicians undertreating pain by not prescribing opioid analgesics.
Once synthetic opioids were brought into the picture for physical pain, it didn’t take long for consumers to rely on them for internal turmoil as well, and become addicted. This same review done by the NLM reports that the most common reason given for analgesic pain-relievers among patients is stress coming from trauma, psychological issues, or emotional pain.
Nurse Alex Hubley, a professor at Palm Beach Atlantic University, has seen the effects of opioid addiction firsthand in her previous role as a nurse in the emergency room, where she regularly would encounter opioid addicts who had nearly overdosed.
“Individuals who have trauma turn to substances,” Hubley said. “It’s a lot of individuals who have had abuse. They’ve been abused at a young age and parents have alcohol problems or drug problems, and it just gets normalized and passed down.”
The data surrounding opioid addiction today is chilling. The National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics reported that opioids accounted for 67.8% of overdoses in the U.S. in 2023, with cocaine in second place at 21.1%. There is no drug abuse quite like opioids in America.
Fentanyl seems to be a monster of its own. Florida has followed the country in the rise of fentanyl use, with the Medical Examiners Commission reporting fentanyl as the most frequent of the reported drug occurrences.
Brad Buhl, the assistant special agent in charge of the DEA West Palm Beach district office, spoke on illicit fentanyl’s presence in South Florida.
“When we talk about illicit fentanyl, the DEA has identified that all of it is coming from China.; it either has fentanyl or precursors of actual fentanyl; it is being sent to Mexico, where it is produced and manufactured into look alike pills that look like, maybe a Percocet, or an oxycodone, or Adderall,” Buhl said about the entrance of illicit fentanyl into Florida and the U.S.
Buhl emphasized that Florida’s regulations on fentanyl are even slightly stricter than the rest of the country. In Jan. 2024, the prosecution of Will Catis was held due to his involvement with a major fentanyl drug bust involving China. Catis, a 42-year-old man, was identified as a U.S.-based drug trafficker helping Jiangsu Bangdeya New Material Technology send 172.3 grams of Protonitazene, a synthetic opioid, to the U.S. and Mexico. He is facing 20 years in prison.
In October of 2023, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida announced eight indictments against chemical manufacturing companies based in China. Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, shared a statement on drug trafficking.
“The international dimension to the deadly scourge of fentanyl requires the all-government response that we are delivering today,” Mayorkas said.
Drug trafficking is not the only potential reason for high amounts of opioid abuse in South Florida. Hubley referenced the high number of recovery centers in South Florida as another possible explanation. She explained that getting people to go to addiction recovery is already difficult enough, so it makes sense that vacation-land is a more bearable option.
Chief Assistant State Attorney Alan Johnson shared the history of the complications with opioid recovery in South Florida, specifically through healthcare fraud in the form of places called sober homes. In 2017, there was a high number of these in South Florida, and with them, healthcare fraud. Sober homes provided housing for those from out of state participating in addiction outpatient treatment but exploited them for their money. In 2017, Johnson took the lead of the State Attorney Addiction Recovery Task Force, which prosecutes bad actors in the opioid treatment industry and lowered the number of sober homes dramatically, and reduced overdose deaths by 40% in 2018.
Johnson described how sober homes often supported the relapse cycle by using housing as an incentive for continued opioid use; according to him, the patients would be baited to come back to the sober home with drugs in their system to find housing there again.
“That was what the marketers were doing to induce people to relapse. So you had this cycle where there was money in everything except sobriety; sobriety didn’t pay,” Johnson said. “There’s so much money flooding the recovery industry that these bad actors began.”
With all the moving factors in South Florida and opioids, Governor Ron DeSantis has not neglected the issue in the past. August of 2023 marked one year since the beginning of the Coordinated Opioid Recovery Network (CORE), which aims to “eliminate the stigma of addiction and treat Substance Use Disorder as a disease, with the same level of continuous care.”
DeSantis has also passed stricter laws surrounding opioid distribution in recent years, including law HB 95 in May of 2022, which strengthened state penalties for the sale and distribution of opioids, such as fentanyl.
“While the Biden administration has failed to stop the flow of dangerous drugs, including fentanyl, across our southern border, we are taking action in Florida to lower both the demand and the supply of illicit and illegal drugs,” DeSantis said.
In Florida, both the government and the many addiction recovery centers are dialing in on opioid addiction in the hopes of saving thousands of lives. Florida’s crackdown on treatment fraud and push for effective recovery is now a hopeful model for the rest of the country.
Johnson highlighted Palm Beach County’s Addiction Stabilization Units and the local Hub System as effective recovery systems that serve as models for the rest of the country. ASUs provide assisted treatment from hospitals and psychiatrists, while the Hub System provides lounges where those struggling with opioid addiction can meet and support one another.
“Florida was ground zero,” Johnson said. “Many of our laws were adopted by the National Association model. They adopted most of our laws as a model for the rest of the states.”
Hope for those battling opioid addiction has risen in South Florida in recent years, and many believe that with the right approaches to recovery, this could happen across the nation.
By Grace Mackey
Comments