Fentanyl killed my friend — Red and Blue Divide

Six people died the same week in Fairfax County in December 2017. One of those was my friend Calvin. The police were alarmed, "In my 20 years in Narcotics, I have never seen anything like this. Before this week, the highest number of opioid overdoses we had in a weekend was five, and fortunately, everyone lived," said Second Lt. James Cox of the Organized Crime and Narcotics Division.

Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated incident. This is happening in towns all across the country and the numbers of deaths just keep rising. The total number of overdose deaths in 2016 are estimated to be over 64,000. Think about that number for a second. That is enough to fill most college football stadiums. It's a huge number and continues to grow. My hometown of Lancaster, PA had 16 deaths in December alone and a total of 155 for 2016 which was a 32% increase over 2015.

This is happening in town after town and seems to be unstoppable. The lethal dose of Fentanyl is 2 milligrams. That is 2/1000 of a gram. Compare that to 75 milligrams to 375 milligram range for a fatal heroin dose per the Oxford Treatment Center website. It only takes a tiny amount to be fatal.

My friend Calvin was a great guy and had a personality that lit up the room. He was the last person anyone expected to fall prey to Fentanyl. Up to that point the opioid crisis had been a distant problem. It was somewhere else in bad parts of the country and only affected bad people. Calvin brought it all home. He wasn't a bad guy, he was a great guy. He wasn't a junkie, just someone who took a poison accidentally. He didn't live in Appalacia or a downtrodden area. He lived in one of the areas with the highest median income in the country.

When his friends got news that he was found unresponsive and that he had lapsed into a coma we were stunned. I had seen him the day before and he was his usual slightly darkly witty self. There was a memorial service held for him at Lake Anne in Reston. Hundreds of people came. The crowd spilled across the plaza and grew so large it was hard to hear the speakers in the back. There were a lot of tears for his untimely passing and a number of funny anecdotes about his life. But one thing was clear. He had touched the lives of many, many people. All those people would be worse off without him. He had a quick wit, a warm smile and never met a stranger. He was the kind of guy that people gravitated to and that could make you feel better about the day.

So the question is how do people like Calvin die? We hear about the opioid crisis in the media and generally assume that the people who die just make a mistake and take too much heroin or cocaine. A simple overdose. It's just a mistake, right?

Unfortunately, that's wrong. They aren't overdoses by traditional standards. They are people who are ingesting a poison unknowingly. It's not taking too much heroin or cocaine. Which is the way it seems to be reported in most cases. Illicit drugs being mixed with a poison as powerful as Fentanyl is killing people every day in every town across America. The question is what to do about it? These aren't suicidal folks, they simply didn't know what was in the substance they were taking. They didn't know they were being poisoned.

There are no easy answers. Obviously, not using heroin or cocaine is the best answer. Beyond that there really isn't one because you never know what you are getting. With drugs being illegal there is no way to determine the chemical makeup of what you are ingesting. In effect it's a crap shoot and one that can have a lethal effect.