Mexican and American authorities captured Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán yesterday in a resort hotel in Mazatlan. Guzmán is considered to be the largest drug trafficker in the world, with a fortune worth at least a billion dollars. His criminal enterprise, the Sinaloa Cartel, has overrun this country, littering the bodies of our kids in morgues from one coast to the other. He is a major supplier of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin.
This is personal, because the opioid problem in the Philadelphia has become an epidemic that is ravaging our communities.
“Mexican [organizations] are the dominant wholesale suppliers of cocaine and heroin to drug-distribution groups in Philadelphia and Reading and in surrounding areas, such as Norristown, Montgomery County, and southern Chester County,” it said.
Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said Norristown was “a place where we are vigilant” about removing opportunities for the illegal drug trade – whether they are homegrown, as most are, or come from Mexico.
I’ve written a lot about this lately, but if you read my local papers, you would understand why. In my home county (Chester), there were 31 deaths from prescription opioids and 21 deaths from heroin overdoses in 2013. The numbers would be far, far worse if not for the paramedic teams that are saving kids and young adults every day by employing Narcan to reverse the effects of overdose before death occurs. That some conservatives are resisting making Narcan more readily available is one more sign that their stupidity can be lethal.
Read this, and consider the implications of the conservative argument:
Officer Greg Hartnett patrols Quincy, Mass., armed with a life-saving weapon. It’s a heroin antidote called Narcan that’s sprayed into an overdose victim’s nose.
Last fall, Hartnett used it to revive a young woman.
Hartnett said administering Narcan can — in one sense — bring a person back to life.
“In many cases you get there — sometimes blood coming out of their nose, they’ve already started to turn blue and stop breathing,” he said.
A heroin overdose blocks signals from the brain to the lungs — and stops breathing. Narcan restores that signal. But the effect is temporary. Immediate medical treatment is still required.
Nineteen other police departments across the country have also started using Narcan, which costs $20 a dose.
It saved Nicole Gaudet, a former high school athlete who got hooked on heroin. Asked how bad it became for her, Gaudet said, “It led me to prison. It just ripped apart my whole entire life and those around me.”
Gaudet overdosed 10 times – and 10 times Narcan saved her life.
And that’s the primary complaint of critics who say Narcan enables some addicts to keep overdosing.
Gaudet said of Narcan, “It gives you another chance at life. I mean, it essentially gives you a chance to recover.”
Gaudet has been clean since April, and is building a life for herself and her daughter.
Imagine. Which one of those ten times that Narcan saved Ms. Gaudet’s life should she have been left to die? The sixth? The eighth?
The treatment may have enabled her to overdose again, but it also enabled her to live. Now she has been clean for a good period of time, and she’s trying to keep things together so she can be a decent mother to her daughter. There’s a decent chance she will relapse again. Heroin is a notoriously difficult drug to kick. In fact, the problem is opioids. There is nothing particularly unique about heroin other than its strength and the fact that it is illegal. As I noted, more people died from prescription opioid overdoses in Chester County than from heroin overdoses last year. And they died the same way and for the same reason. In any case, Ms. Gaudet is alive today for one reason, and one reason only. Narcan.
And the Mexican kingpin most responsible for trying to kill her is now in custody. That won’t stop the deadly pipeline or fix our flawed policies for dealing with the crisis, but it could bring a small measure of justice.
