As covid crisis deepens, opioid crisis continues in the background

As President Joe Biden settles into office amid the coronavirus pandemic, nonprofits and organizations battling drug addiction are urging the new administration not to lose sight of the national opioid crisis that predates covid-19 and has not slowed.

“At the same time the coronavirus death toll grows, there is another killer in our midst taking the lives of far too many Americans: fentanyl,” said Jim Rauh, founder of Families Against Fentanyl, based in Akron, Ohio. “Already fentanyl and its analogues are considered chemical weapons banned from warfare by an international treaty. Yet a growing supply continues to infiltrate our borders.”

Rauh’s son, Tom, died of fentanyl poisoning.

In a December speech to the Heritage Foundation, the acting Homeland Security secretary at the time, Chad Wolf, said his department seized “enough fentanyl (in 2019) to kill every American four times over, much of which is believed to have originated in China.”

The synthetic opioid was originally developed in Belgium in 1960, and is 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

In Westmoreland County, overdose deaths rose slightly in 2020 after dropping from a 2017 high of 193, to 115 in 2019.

In neighboring Allegheny County, 2019 saw 564 overdose deaths, its third-highest yearly total. In 2016 and 2017, the county had 1,387 overdoses, according to data from Overdose Free PA.

Carmen Capozzi of Irwin also knows the pain that drug addiction can bring to families. He lost his son Sage in 2012.

“From a father’s point of view, the powerlessness I felt trying to help save my son from the grips of substance abuse disorder is unimaginable heartbreak,” Capozzi said. “Family education is a key piece for me. We don’t kick a diabetic out for relapsing — we educate the family and the conversation changes at the dinner table.”

Capozzi founded the nonprofit Sage’s Army to help bring awareness and battle drug addiction a few months after Sage’s death. He and director of operations Katrin Fieser said groups like theirs need more funding for “boots on the ground.”

“Peer-based recovery support services and family support — the families need help,” Capozzi said. “We need to fund our community recovery organizations that are doing the backbreaking work and help get the harm-reduction agencies the support they need.”

Rauh said Biden likely shares that view.

“President Biden knows the pain of seeing his child struggle with addiction issues, a pain far too many families are now suffering and seeing result in unintended death due to the fentanyl poisoning crisis,” he said.

Biden spoke publicly during the 2020 campaign about his son Hunter’s addiction issues.

“From one father to another, I urge (him) to act swiftly to tackle the fentanyl crisis by fully funding harm-reduction programs across the U.S. and deploying the full resources of the federal government to detect and stop the flow of illicit fentanyl as it would with other chemical weapons,” Rauh said.

In October 2017, the Trump administration declared the opioid crisis to be a public health emergency, as overdoses joined gun violence and vehicle crashes among leading causes of death in the United States. Trump also signed 2018 legislation boosting federal funding for drug treatment.

Capozzi said he hopes Biden’s administration will listen to voices from the recovery community and their families.

“We lived it,” he said. “We are on the front lines.”