Investigation: In 2016, a group of health experts sent a private letter urging the Obama administration to declare fentanyl a 'public health emergency.' Officials considered the request but did not act on it.
At the same time, in the wake of Holder’s memo, federal drug cases were dropping. In a year, the number of people charged with federal drug crimes fell by more than 4,700 — from 27,106 in 2013 to 22,387 in 2014.
Dominick Capuano, a former veteran New York City narcotics supervisor who worked with federal task forces on Staten Island, said his agents traditionally launched their cases by arresting low-level dealers. Prosecutors would then offer plea deals for information about bigger traffickers. Law enforcement would work its way up to the kingpins. Federal laws carry long prison sentences and provide powerful incentives for people to talk.
Jonathan Squire Jr., 25, a dry cleaning employee and part-time college student in Louisville, was one of them. He died on Jan. 12.On March 18, 2015, nine months after its presentation to Holder, the DEA put out its strongest warning yet to law enforcement agencies and the public about the mounting threat, issuing a “The alert was a distillation of what the agency had learned about the drug in the previous two years.
The report said the surge in opioid deaths “may be related” to a rise in heroin being laced with fentanyl. It called for the creation of response teams to warn police and the public about overdoses, some of which may involve fentanyl, and said there should be more research into “opioid use disorder,” including the use of fentanyl.
“It was not ignored and it was on the radar and we did talk about it, but it was sort of like another problem on top of everything else,” said David Hickton, former U.S. attorney of the Western District of Pennsylvania, who co-chaired the task force. “The big problem at the time was opioids in pill form. Fentanyl was episodic at that time. It looks so different to me today than it did then. Now, it looks like its own problem. At the time, it looked like a spike problem.
At the same time, the state of Rhode Island launched its own task force after newly elected Gov. Gina Raimondo Two experts advising the task force visited the state morgue in Providence. Josiah Rich and Traci Green, epidemiologists from Brown University, pored over the autopsy reports that had so alarmed Michael Fine two years earlier.
Lynch, the attorney general, did mention fentanyl in one sentence during a keynote address she delivered at the Opioid Misuse and Addiction Summit in Massachusetts that fall. Lynch said the DEA had recently taken “several major actions” against drug traffickers and was “raising awareness about the growing presence of fentanyl in heroin sold on the streets, which substantially and tragically increases the risk of overdose.
The drug czar’s office depended on overdose data from the CDC. But data from the field was sometimes a year behind, and local coroners and medical examiners were not always testing for fentanyl. “There was not an interagency understanding of what this drug is, where it’s coming from and how it’s getting into the country,” Chester recalled.That November — eight months after the DEA issued its national fentanyl alert — the Obama administration sent its annual National Drug Control Strategy to Congress. The 107-page report devoted one sentence to fentanyl, noting that it was showing up in heroin.
“We are now seeing synthetic opioids that are oftentimes coming in from China through Mexico into the United States,” Obama said. “We’re having to move very aggressively there, as well.” In their 14-page letter, the experts pointed out that the fentanyl epidemic appeared “to be intensifying after two years.”
But an administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter dismissed the idea of a declaration, saying it would have been “largely symbolic” and required emergency funds from Congress. Botticelli, the drug czar and another recipient of the request, said the Obama administration’s priority was getting more money from Congress for treatment.
In the summer of 2016, a few months after the fentanyl letter, the Obama administration declared the Zika virus to be a public health emergency and had already requested $1.9 billion from Congress to address it. Two people in the United States died of Zika-related illnesses. As part of the “awareness week,” Attorney General Lynch traveled to the University of Kentucky, where she highlighted the rise of opioid overdoses and said “more than a third were caused by fentanyl.”
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