More than money needed to fight drug scourge | Editorial

Palm Beach County commissioners have begun weighing how to divvy up $122 million from national opioid lawsuit settlements.

“Blood money,” one commissioner called it during a workshop.

Coupled with look-the-other-way state laws and physician-racketeers, opioid manufacturers and distributors made Palm Beach and Broward counties the national epicenter of the pill mill epidemic. Prescription drugs were a springboard to the heroin epidemic. Now, it’s a lethal influx of fentanyl, cocaine and designer drugs that’s killing local residents.

To date, Florida has secured more than $3.2 billion from lawsuits. But the settlement money comes as signs of resistance to science-informed, lifesaving options are emerging.

Take the recent spate of election flyers in Lake Worth Beach city elections. They featured pictures of people on the street, slumped and possibly overdosing. (It is not known if the photographer called 911.)

Two people linked to the political action committee behind the mailers backed candidate Mimi May. May expressed empathy for the users and quickly distanced herself from the flyers. But May, who won a city council seat in March, and others insist that jail will help homeless addicts hit bottom.

Arrests won’t solve problem

The Drug Enforcement Administration and law enforcement officials warned a decade ago that we could not arrest our way out of a drug epidemic.

In 2020, HCA’s JFK Hospital North in West Palm Beach opened a one-of-a-kind Addiction Stabilization Unit. A joint project by the county, the Health Care District of Palm Beach County and the hospital, the unit did more than detox drug users brought to the emergency room. It offered 24/7 medication assisted treatment, peer support from others in recovery from addiction, social services and help for families.

The idea was to break a lethal “treat and street” pattern: Drug users came to emergency rooms and detoxed, only to return to the street and overdose again.

Gov. Ron DeSantis praised HCA’s program. The state Department of Health used it as a blueprint to launch other units statewide last year.  But the hospital has quietly cut back the unit’s initial scope.

Statewide, the number of drug courts, which order and oversee treatment for arrested users, declined from 94 in 2018 to 83 last year. Worse, the number of drug courts specifically for children and teens caught up in the criminal justice system has shrunk from 22 to 14.

Taking cues from Texas

Sentiment for evidence-based treatment may be at risk in Tallahassee as well. The Cicero Institute, a Texas think tank behind Florida’s law calling for rounding up the homeless, has its own ideas about how to deal with homeless drug users. So does Christopher Rufo, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ point person for dismantling New College in Sarasota.

Peer counseling, needle exchanges and permanent housing are all known to be lifesaving. All are part of the proposed Palm Beach County spending plan. All have been scorned by current or former Institute members or Rufo, and they all have this governor’s ear.

The state has a hand in how counties use the funds. Led by Attorney General Ashley Moody, the Statewide Council on Opioid Abatement will make calls on whether money is being used appropriately. It will work with the Statewide Drug Policy Advisory Council, led by Florida’s notoriously science-averse Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo.

Locals, though, are in a far better position to allocate dollars.

At the Palm Beach commission workshop, users in recovery spoke in favor of the plan. Mothers who lost children endorsed it.

Two county commissioners who lost family members to addiction praised it.

All seemed open to its formal adoption later this summer.

Every dollar is needed

Ten percent of the money would be allocated to acute treatment. Nine of every 10 dollars would go to stable housing and related support.

Every dollar will be needed.

Spread over 18 years, the $122 million is not so much, and the current drop in drug-related deaths is no victory. First, the data doesn’t reflect the number of people addicted and using, only those who died. Death is less likely now because Narcan is more available.

The numbers can still shock.

Four of every 10 Floridians who died after taking a fentanyl analog in 2022 overdosed in Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to the Florida Medical Examiners Commission. Two of every 10 who died after using cocaine lived here, too. The two counties account for 15% of the state’s population.

Even oxycodone, the prescription pill that kicked off the opioid scourge, continues to claim local lives: 180 of Florida’s 1,104 oxycodone-related overdoses in 2022 took place in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

And just as oxycodone morphed into heroin addiction and fentanyl deaths, the current epidemic is changing, too.

In December, a South Bay Correctional Facility inmate was found dead in his cell. Lying next to him, a rolled Bible page contained white and brown powder. He had smoked N,N-dimethylpentylone, a designer drug so new, it doesn’t yet have a street name.

The next worst thing is already here.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.