A metropolis official in San Francisco described overdose deaths from fentanyl and different medication as essentially the most critical “disaster” in the town because the AIDS disaster.
“We are seeing a loss of life here that is twice as deadly as COVID-19 from drug overdose deaths. It is the most serious public health calamity we have faced in this city since the AIDS crisis, and it’s getting worse,” District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey advised a city corridor assembly hosted by the News Nation cable tv community Monday.
He stated metropolis within the state of California was going via the deadliest 12 months of drug overdoses in its historical past. “That is what is driving a lot of the highly visible kinds of street level crime, retail theft, and I believe we have to do more to involve law enforcement,” he stated.
San Francisco is among the cities hardest hit within the US by habit and homelessness.
Echoing Dorsey, Paul Humphrey, a deputy police chief in Louisville, Kentucky, stated: “Fentanyl has been a crisis for years now. It’s a scary, scary deal. The heroin and fentanyl crisis.” Humphrey additionally stated the problem was among the many issues Black and brown communities have been dealing with for years.
“We shouldn’t have to wait for something to become a pandemic or an epidemic for us to solve that problem. We should treat people like people and human beings and get to them before we reach a crisis level,” he additionally stated.
Dorsey, who has publicly acknowledged his private struggles with habit as he fights to take care of his sobriety, stated: “As somebody who has been in recovery, I think if we can make an intervention in somebody’s addiction and do it in a way that we’re making sure that they have access to medically-assisted treatment and health services, we don’t have to make this punitive. We can make it a lifesaving intervention”
California Highway Patrol this week reportedly seized 9.2 kilos of fentanyl — sufficient to kill greater than 2 million individuals.
More than 932,000 individuals have died within the US from drug overdoses since 1999, based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The US hit a document of almost 110,000 drug overdose deaths final 12 months because it finds itself within the midst of a biting drug epidemic, as nicely.
Fentanyl is estimated to be between 50 to 100 occasions as highly effective as morphine, and overdose deaths associated to the artificial opioid proceed to rise. That features a 56% enhance from 2019 to 2020, based on the CDC.
Source: www.anews.com.tr