DO CARE ABOUT DRUG DEATHS

It sounds like a Watergate-era question, but it fits: What did they
know and when did they know it?

Last August, the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office began seeing
more drug-related deaths involving a mix of the prescription drug
fentanyl and heroin or cocaine.

In November, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency announced how easily its
undercover officers were able to buy the lethal mix in areas that
included Wayne County.

By December, 63 of the 457 drug-related deaths the Wayne County
coroner handled had been caused by fentanyl-laced heroin or cocaine,
an increase of 34 such deaths over the previous year.

But county officials didn't issue a health alert until May 19 of this
year, after 12 people had died in two days. Now, the county is in full
crisis.

I can't help but wonder: Should an alarm have been sounded sooner?
Would it have been if the drugs were killing someone besides those
people we refuse to look at on the street, or walk by outside the
pharmacy or whisper about at work?

An Uncaring World?

I don't want to beat up county officials, who've had to endure phone
calls from taxpayers asking why they're wasting so much money looking
for something that is killing junkies.

I want us all to look at ourselves and answer these questions: Is this
what we've come to? Is this where we are in the world, in Michigan, in
Wayne County? Since our coroner handles more than 400 drug-related
deaths a year, have not only authorities but John and Jane Q. Public
become too complacent about what we consider inconsequential deaths?

Did any authorities react quickly enough?

"We don't issue health alerts every day about people needing to not
take cocaine or heroin. We don't," said county spokeswoman Teresa Blossom.

She's right, of course. Addicts who try anything risk everything. But
when is a crisis a crisis? If you're a county medical examiner, and 17
people die in one month from a new brand of street drug (as they did
last November), do you alert the Centers for Disease Control, the
public? Do you use the Emergency Broadcast System to warn dealers,
many of whom live quite well? Or do you quietly work with police and
small community groups to tell "those people" to be more careful?

Fatalities Up on Weekends

Drug deaths always increase on weekends. As we enter the Memorial Day
holiday, expectations are that the lethal mix of pleasure and death
that some dealers are marketing as "The New Heroin" and "Drop Dead"
will send more people to the morgue, where Deputy Wayne County Medical
Examiner Cheryl Loewe will be waiting for them.

"The strike's against us for this weekend," said Loewe, who called the
drug crisis the worse she has seen in her 12-year-tenure. "Whenever we
have a warm-up in the temperatures, we always see a lot of fatalities.