FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. (WSVN) - Law enforcement officers are battling the opioid epidemic on South Florida streets with another drug.
This has become a crisis that health officials battle every day as emergency rooms across South Florida have been flooded with patients suffering from opioid overdoses.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump has pledged to combat the opioid epidemic at the national level.
Two people in Broward County die from fentanyl every day. Coming in contact with just a few grains of the drug can cause a person to go into respiratory distress.
Narcan nasal spray has been used to combat fentanyl overdoses.
BSO K9 officers have been required to take Narcan and all first responders will have to carry Narcan on them.
Opioids have been used for pain and anesthesia for years, but now fentanyl is being made in China. It’s being cut into and sold as heroin and other drugs, like cocaine and even marijuana.
Experts said that fentanyl is 40 to 50 times stronger than heroin. “The heroin or the cocaine they use yesterday may be totally different than what they’re getting today,” said the director at BSO community programs, David Scharf.
A small amount ingested or absorbed through the skin can kill the person it comes in contact with. “If you do this stuff, you’re gonna die,” Scharf said. “Don’t do it. Stay away from it.”
Alton Banks, a fifth-grader at Frederick Douglass Elementary School, somehow came in contact with fentanyl and heroin while at a community pool.
“This little 10-year-old boy in Overtown in a pool with his family came just within inches or some touch of three grains,” said Miami-Dade state attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle. “It only takes three grains of sugar — that size of fentanyl — to have an overdose.”
Trump has declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. “Last year, we lost at least 64,000 Americans to overdoses,” Trump said. “That’s 175 lost American lives per day. That’s seven lost lives per hour, in our country.”
He hasn’t allotted additional funding to the emergency but is optimistic. “Working together, we will defeat this opioid epidemic,” Trump said.
Now, dozens of emergency rooms in Miami-Dade and Broward counties are dealing with, what experts call, a community crisis.
“We’re seeing signs of this epidemic every single day,” Scharf said. “We have about two deaths a day, according to our medical examiner, with dozens of overdoses reported to our emergency rooms every single day. We are extremely concerned about the toxicity levels of the heroin/fentanyl.”
It is still unclear how Banks came into contact with fentanyl.
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