King County sheriff, Mitzi Johanknecht, shows a picture of a common fentanyl pill that was found throughout King County. (Aaron Granillo, Radio KIRO)
Fentanyl has been a determining factor behind deadly overdoses in Washington State for years, and in 2020, this has never been more evident.
The context behind Washington’s fentanyl overdoses
The second quarter of 2020 saw 171 overdoses involved with fentanyl, according to data cited by Caleb Banta-Green, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI).
In the same period in 2019, Washington saw only 63 overdose of fentanyl; two years before that, there were 18.
This creates a trend that Banta-Green describes as “impressive”.
“We are at the end of a wave that is forming across the country, so we went from low to high quickly,” he told UW Medicine in a recent question and answer session.
Fentanyl is commonly found in counterfeit pills made to look like prescription opiates, such as oxycodone. The risk comes from the fact that fentanyl is 30 to 50 times stronger than pure heroin, and a dose the size of a few grains of salt can be fatal.
As Banta-Green introduces, it began to spread prominently along the East Coast and Midwest in 2013, before gradually making its way across the United States to the West Coast. As to whether the sharp increase in 2020 could have been caused by the pandemic, he believes there may well be a correlation.
“We know that a person is more likely to die from an overdose if they are alone. Everyone spent more time alone last year, ”he said. “It is a reasonable theory that overdoses would increase with a drug on high supply, mixed with the continuing pressures of social determinants of health and, in addition, with the isolation and stress of a pandemic.”
“What is interesting, however, is that we have not seen that same sharp increase with heroin and pharmaceutical opioids – only fentanyl. We don’t know why, ”he added.
In the coming months, Banta-Green believes that Washington has a chance to “better control” the situation, pointing to exclusive intervention methods being used across the state.
This is driven by the “fast and low barrier access to non-judgmental care” advocated by the ADAI, educating people on how to recognize fentanyl in counterfeit pills, distributing thousands of overdose-reversing naloxone kits and promoting addiction treatment with drugs like buprenorphine and methadone.
Seattle to fund 700 naloxone kits as part of fentanyl awareness
“A lot of our job at ADAI is to try to understand the problem, understand how doctors are dealing with it and train doctors across the state in a medication approach that includes shared customer-centered decision making,” he said.
You can read more about the work that ADAI is doing in Washington state on its website here.