Abbott, North Texas police, families call growing fentanyl use ‘a poisoning crisis’
Virginia Krieger’s daughter Tiffany was having back pain when a friend gave her what they believed was a pill for pain. Stephanie Hallstorm’s son was 16 years old when she had to try and resuscitate him after he digested a pill that a friend gave to him.
Both fatal pills were laced with fentanyl.
Krieger and Hallstorm were two parents who joined Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn and Collin County Sheriff Jim Skinner in a news conference Tuesday afternoon in an effort to promote awareness of fentanyl poisoning and the drug’s growing commonality in North Texas and across the country.
“Texas law enforcement alone, for the past year alone, has seized enough fentanyl to kill every man, woman and child in Texas, California, New York, Florida and Illinois combined. They’ve seized more than 225 million deadly doses of fentanyl,” Abbott said. “A deadly dose of fentanyl is just two milligrams, which is almost imperceptible to the eye, but if consumed is deadly. … And most tragically, to understand how deadly fentanyl is, if you look at the age group of those between the ages of 18 and 45, the leading cause of death is not COVID. It’s not cancer. It’s not car wrecks. The leading cause of death of Americans between 18 and 45 is fentanyl.”
Abbott continued that throughout the last year, over 1,300 Texans have died from consuming fentanyl, a synthetic opioid which often is laced in counterfeit pills, marijuana or other drugs like cocaine.
“According to the DEA right now, four out of 10 pills that we find are fatal, four out of 10,” Waybourn added. “The odds are that it’s better to play Russian roulette than with these pills. As we’re here today, and we look around, we also find out just how easy it is. Just last week, our teams took down 1,000 pills right off the street.”
Krieger, who presented a slideshow from the Federal Fentanyl Awareness Coalition, said one, “just one,” of those pills killed her daughter in 2015.
“Pre-2013, the typical drug crisis [was] use the drug, get what you intended, become dependent, 10 to 20 years of opportunities to get clean. Drug-related deaths stayed limited within the substance use community. Counterfeit pills did not exist,” Krieger said. “Flash forward to 2013, get a fake pill or take a drug, you don’t know it has fentanyl. You have a one in 20 chance of instant death. Drug-related deaths include all segments of the population. In 2021, the DEA seized 24 million fake pills; 40% of the pills they tested were lethal.”
Krieger added that the first step in awareness from the community is shifting the narrative from an overdose to a poisoning.
“An overdose means that you ingest excessive amounts of a known substance with or without instruction for safe use,” Krieger said. “A poisoning, disguising a harmful substance as something else or in something else for another to consume. When someone gave my daughter a pill that was stamped with the trademarked symbol for Percocet, and it was fentanyl, that was a poisoning. That was not an overdose. She did not intend to consume fentanyl and that’s happening to a lot of our young people and we keep calling them overdoses and it’s masking what is a poisoning crisis. The key distinction here is intention.”
Hallstorm’s story echoed that of Krieger, who said she knows the friend who sold her 16-year-old son a pill he had no idea would be fatal.
“This is just six of hundreds and hundreds of stories like my own,” Hallstorm said, holding a stack of papers titled “6 Texas Fentanyl Victims out of 100’s” that contained her son’s story.
Across North Texas, in Collin County, the region has seen a 485% increase in fentanyl poisonings over the last two years with over 50% of drug-related deaths in the county related to some form of opioid use, Skinner said.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics recorded over 100,300 deaths, an increase by nearly 30%, across the country from April 2020 through April 2021.
“We need to make partners in the community, with our churches, with our schools, out on the playground. And in our homes, we need to be sitting around the kitchen table and we need to be talking to our kids,” Waybourn added. “We need the community to start screaming to the high heavens. It’s a clear and present danger to our people.”
