Since 2019, accidental drug deaths have been rising in Texas, with the number tripling in Travis County.
When Travis County Judge Andy Brown got a phone call two weeks ago about a rash of overdoses that claimed at least eight lives in Austin over a span of 27 hours, he knew the dark day he had been preparing for had arrived.
“The number of overdoses was extraordinary,” Brown said. “But dozens of people who overdosed didn’t die, and that is the only good I have seen come out of this because if this happened three years ago, the death toll most likely would have been much higher.” The rise in both the illegal use of fentanyl and now the manufacturing of counterfeit prescription drugs that contain this lab-made drug has made this a particularly deadly problem across the nation., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Texas Health and Human Services reported last year that, on average, five Texans die every day from fentanyl poisoning.
Eastlick said these operations uncovered that fentanyl is being mixed into crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and even marijuana by drug dealers to increase the volume of their product and their profit. He said when the synthetic opioid, which is 100 times more potent than morphine, isn’t mixed correctly, it can trigger overdoses.
“We listened to the community when they came to us a couple of years ago and asked us to do more. And since then, we’ve given out almost 15,000 doses of Narcan around the county,” Brown said. “The city has done the same and more. While the number of overdoses is increasing, so are the number of overdoses that are reversed by Narcan.”
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