Drug deaths in flyover country

OPINION:

Anne Arundel County, Maryland is an outer suburb of Washington and Baltimore. Formerly, the County Police had a billboard outside their headquarters in Millersville that listed the dead and injured in county auto accidents on a year-to-date basis. The billboard is still there but now it reads “Anne Arundel County Heroin Overdose Awareness.” As of late August, the overdoses were 536 and the “Lives Lost” were 78, year-to-date.

Still in Maryland, but this time on the rural Eastern Shore, the twice-weekly Dorchester (County) Banner ran a headline on August 19 that read: “Bad heroin cause overdoses, death in Cambridge. Six overdoses caused by suspected Fentanyl in street heroin.” The lead article states, “The drug cocktail (Mexican heroin laced with Chinese fentanyl) has ravaged the mid-Atlantic for more than three years.” The Banner’s competitor, the Dorchester Star, ran a same-day story headlined, “Fighting the heroin epidemic in Dorchester” and noted that 1,259 people had died in Maryland in 2015 of overdoses.

During the single week of August 21, a bad batch of fentanyl-laced heroin got loose, mostly in the Ohio Valley, that produced over 225 heroin overdoses in just four counties in four states — Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and New Jersey. The previous week, 27 people had overdosed in and around Huntington, West Virginia in only five hours. As the LA Times reported on the overdose inundation in the ER, “They are just showing up and dying.” As of this writing, authorities are not certain but they suspect that the culprit is a variation of regular fentanyl called “carefentanil,” which is much more potent and often used as a sedative for large animals including elephants. This variation began to show up in the region in July.

And so it goes in “flyover country.” All of the United States, mostly outside the Washington to Baltimore corridor, Los Angeles and San Francisco, people are dying, sometimes falling dead in their tracks on the sidewalk. It includes small towns as are common in New England and other places in America but it also larger cities such as Cincinnati or Columbus, Ohio.

As an experiment, one can put the name of any state followed by the word “heroin” into the GoogleNews search engine and find alarming results. For example, searching for the first state in the alphabet, Alabama, and heroin yields a story in the Birmingham newspaper reporting that 80 people in Jefferson County had died of heroin and/or fentanyl in the first six months of 2016, 25 of them in June alone suggesting the pace is picking up. One Alabama woman had a heroin overdose beside the bed of her seven-month-old baby who was in the hospital for an operation. Her husband overdosed hours later, also in the hospital. The baby and her sister, Molly, are alive but their mother is dead and their father is in jail, likely making them orphans for the rest of their childhood.

At the other end of the alphabet, is Wyoming and it is not immune from this scourge. Looking at the local Wyoming media yields headlines like this: “Cheyenne Heroin Arrests have Skyrocketed” and “Police Seize Heroin in raid at Wyoming Home.” Kebin Haller, the head of the Wyoming State Police was quoted in the spring as saying, “I never thought I would say that we have a heroin problem in Wyoming, but we do now have a heroin problem in Wyoming.” As it does elsewhere, Wyoming’s heroin problem leads to other crimes including prostitution in Jackson Hole as the addicts become desperate for their next fix.

Alabama and Wyoming are not being singled out. They were just chosen at random. If you choose “Alaska” and “heroin” for example, you find a terrible story from the Alaska Native News about another bad batch of Chinese fentanyl-laced Mexican heroin turning up in Quinhagak Village on August 15 producing three overdoses within hours. The first two persons were medevaced. Then, when 19-year-old Jamie Roberts came into the community clinic, the plane was already gone. They did what they could for her at the clinic including two hours of CPR but the clinic has limited facilities and she didn’t make it. No rescue plane for her. Anchorage is 420 air miles away.

You can find Quinhagak, population 669, if you look west-north-west of Anchorage along the Kanektok River, about a mile from the Bering Sea. So it’s all over the United States. Somehow it seems the littlest ones are the biggest victims — a tiny baby in Alabama and a tiny village in Alaska. All to feed the greed of the Mexican cartels and their Chinese suppliers.

Secure the border.

• William C. Triplett II is the former chief Republican counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.