PLEASANT VALLEY – Sheriff Will Akin opened the Community Drug Education Summit with the reason for calling together law enforcers, mental health specialists and the public:

“We are investigating an unprecedented number of cases involving deaths due to drug overdoses. We’re talking about teens and young adults here.”

A DRUG HUB

Poorly made, deadly drugs – primarily fentanyl, a synthetic opioid – flow into Ray, Clay and Jackson counties.

“We have active overdose drug investigations going on in Ray County,” Clay County detective Jeremy Fehrmeier said after the program.

“The thing about fentanyl you’ve got to remember is, it may come from Jackson County, go to Clay County, go to Ray County and come back to Clay County,” sheriff’s Sgt. Gary Blackwell said.

Interstate Highway 35 through Clay County is the international trade corridor between Mexico and Canada. Drugs flow along the route, but there are connecting routes, too, Blackwell said.

“If someone veers and they want to stay off I-70, once they come through (Kansas City), then they get off at Higginsville and come up through (Missouri Highway) 13,” he said.

“We also have (Missouri) 210 that runs from coast to coast,” Fehrmeier said. “That’s also a thoroughfare … that we try to work.”

LAW ENFORCERS

During the summit at Shoal Creek Community Church, Blackwell said the Clay County Sheriff’s Office Drug Task Force works with agencies inside and outside Clay County to target drug creators and sellers. The task force is a partner with the Missouri Western Interdiction and Narcotics Task Force, or MOWIN.

“I don’t believe that everyone who’s involved in narcotics consumption … belongs in jail,” Blackwell said. “What we try to do is go to the source of supply.”

Those caught dealing drugs that cause overdose deaths are referred by the county for federal prosecution, he said.

“Our goal is to see the supplier of these (drugs) do time in prison,” Blackwell said.

In 2020, MOWIN partners seized 32,639.4 grams of fentanyl valued on the street at $134 per gram, or $4,373,739.

“What we’ve seen is a giant uptick, even from 2020,” Blackwell said.

So far this year, the group has seized 38,723.4 grams worth nearly $5.2 million.

“That’s just fentanyl. That doesn’t include your heroin,” Blackwell said, with nearly $3.9 million worth seized this year. “Your heroin, your fentanyl, your (other) opioids are what we’re seeing the most uptick in.”

Legal fentanyl addresses medical needs, such as cancer, but is harmful if misused. Worse, Blackwell said, are pills made to look like legal fentanyl that are not “pharmacy grade” and have killed area users.

“They look like the legitimate oxycodone tablets,” he said.

A fatal amount of fake fentanyl, mixed by a backroom “chemist,” might be roughly 3% of the size of a penny.

Fehrmeier said ingredients might be tossed together and pressed into pill form by a backroom chemist without ingredients being distributed equally throughout the tablet.

“We’re … working a death investigation right now where two girls buy one of these pills here in the Northland, paid $30 for the pill and they split the pill in half,” he said. “One girl uses one halfpill, and the other girl uses the other half. One girl is fine. She doesn’t have any symptoms at all, doesn’t have any effects of it. And the other girl, by the time that they got to their destination, … she had already overdosed, and they had called an ambulance for her, and she didn’t make it.”

The investigation into who sold the killer pill is in progress, Fehrmeier said.

“These things are just so deadly that, even if you use half a pill or a quarter of the pill, people are still overdosing and dying from it,” he said.

Two out of every five pills seized contain “a lethal dose” of fentanyl, though not every person who uses one of the potentially deadly pills dies, Blackwell said.

“You have a better chance of living playing Russian roulette than you do taking these tablets,” he said.

Some pills are made in the Northland – Ray, Clay and Platte counties.

Blackwell said middle- and highschoolers buying fentanyl tablets expect the real thing, though the color might be off or the effect extra “strong.”

Fentanyl might be mixed with other drugs, even marijuana, he said.

“We had an overdose case here in the Northland where EMS was called to a residence” where the person who overdosed had smoked pot, not knowing fentanyl had been added, Fehrmeier said.

Narcotics are not a victimless crime, Blackwell said, with the need to feed addiction resulting in assaults, sex crimes and property crimes.

“Here’s three things that go together – drugs, guns and money,” he said.

A FORMER ADDICT

A white man going only by the name of Frank addressed the audience.

“I’m a recovering heroin and meth addict,” he said. “I’ve struggled with addiction since I was about 15 years old in high school.”

Frank, 23, said he abused oxycodone, hydrocodone and other drugs. Like many addicts, he said he thought he could stop whenever he wanted, and his self-delusion led him to use “harder and harder stuff.”

“By the time I was a senior in high school, I was already using heroin,” Frank said.

At that point, he tried to get clean and failed. He started injecting drugs, he said. He still wanted to get clean but did not want to seek help or be judged for the addiction.

“When I was 20 years old, I got (involved in) an incident where I was selling heroin and I got carjacked and stabbed by two people,” Frank said. “That’s when I knew I wanted to get clean.”

At the same time, he said, he still did not want to admit to being an addict and he relapsed.

“That’s when I realized I was an addict, because not even death itself could scare me enough to stop,” Frank said.

With that realization, Frank said he has been clean for nearly six months. He said he has made life choices this time to help separate himself from people and conditions that might enable him to return to drug use.

“This is the first time he’s done this and we’re proud of him for coming up and helping us with this,” Blackwell said.

Fehrmeier said Frank had gone from being thin as a pencil to “jacked.”

MENTAL HEALTH

Representing Tri-County Mental Health – which works to prevent alcohol and other drug use in Ray, Clay and Platte counties – Laura Bruce said prevention can save lives and money.

“Substance abuse – it is a disease, it’s treatable and recovery is possible,” Bruce said, adding community partners are a vital part of overcoming the attraction of drugs for young people. “(We help) equip and empower parents to make sure that they are doing things to keep their kids safe and healthy.”

People use opioids, Bruce said, because doing so opens the body’s dopamine neurotransmitter, causing a feel-good sensation. But opioid use can quickly create dependence and at the same time block the release of dopamine, leaving the user wanting what the body can provide no longer.

About 90% of abusers start before they are 18, Bruce said, and parents have the greatest ability to prevent children from using and becoming addicted to drugs.

Representing Signature Psychiatric Hospital, licensed counselor Angie Winkler presented information that dopamine is natural and helpful, keeping the mind alert. But opioids pervert those purposes while causing addiction.

“It’s so much cheaper to invest in prevention and to support treatment options,” Winkler said, versus allowing a person to become an addict.

Children need protection from “toxic stress,” which is among the reasons they might turn to using addictive drugs, she said.

“When children experience high amounts of adversity – particularly while their brains are developing, and they don’t have resiliency factors, they don’t have buffers to say, ‘This is hard, but we’re going to get through this’ – (they experience toxic stress),” Winkler said. “There’s a very, very, very high percentage of individuals with substance abuse disorders who also have significant trauma in their history, so it’s important to understand there’s always a reason someone is using and that they are a person in pain, not a defective person, and treatment does work.”