“Scourge” and “plague” are among the words used to describe the fentanyl crisis by local and federal leaders looking for ways to battle it.
The people who have faced addiction say fentanyl enslaves a person like no other drug we’ve seen. Snohomish County Executive, Dave Somers, who we told you recently lost his brother to a fentanyl overdose, was joined by Democratic U.S. Senator, Maria Cantwell, and several people who have faced the devastating effects of fentanyl.
Taylor Madison, a young mom in recovery, says she couldn’t have done it without support, a long stint at in-patient treatment and with help from local group, Hope Soldiers, where she says the people were able to guide her through things she wouldn’t have known how to do herself. “When you’re in active addiction, if it’s hard, you just keep doing what you know,” Madison says, “So having an organization behind me that was able to set everything up for me so all I had to do was be there and, as time when on, put in the work, that was really key to my success.” Madison says one of the ways to break down barriers to treatment is to get people help right away when they ask for it because, she says, even delaying one day could be too late.
Lindsey Arrington, founder of Hope Soldiers, is a heroin addict, now 12 years sober. They provide peer support for others struggling with addiction, and Arrington says one of the things they try to do is to help people seeking treatment to get over some of the hurdles they face. Arrington says, “I feel like some of the main priorities here are access to treatment, removing barriers to accessing treatment and mandating treatment for those who are unable to make the choice themselves.”
Northwest Newsradio’s Ryan Harris asked Senator Cantwell about how we can stop the flow of precursor chemicals from China to Mexico, where the fentanyl is made and then smuggled across the border into the United States. Cantwell says part of what she wants is to bring federal money here to go after the network that uses the I-5 corridor to more easily distribute drugs, but she does also want to see the federal government do more to deal with China on the flow of those chemicals to Mexico.
Everyone we talked to agrees that we also need more treatment beds available that are much easier to access and that we all need to be involved now because few of us are not somehow touched by fentanyl.