Fentanyl sounds an Ozaukee County drug alarm

No place is safe from America’s drug plague, not even the comfortable, well protected communities of Ozaukee County.

The deadliest drug—fentanyl—is here. Type “fentanyl” into the search box on the Ozaukee Press website and half a dozen headlines from recent local news stories involving the synthetic opioid appear.

“Woman’s brush with fentanyl could have been deadly” is the most chilling of them—because the brush with fentanyl happened close to Port Washington High School.

On New Year’s Day, the woman was walking her dog near the school when the dog found a cellophane packet containing white powder on the sidewalk and tried to eat it. Police were called and the powder was tested. It was fentanyl. It would have killed the dog quickly if it ate it, police said. If some of the powder had become airborne, it could have put the woman at risk of inhaling a dangerous dose of fentanyl.

There is no way of knowing whether there was a connection between the drug packet and any of the roughly 800 teenagers who attend the high school, but the finding so near the building has frightening implications.

Other fentanyl news stories reported criminal activity, including dealers arrested in the county in possession of large quantities of the drug. The law enforcement workers of Ozaukee County know a lot about fentanyl. Dealing with it has become a significant demand of the jobs of municipal police officers and county sheriff’s deputies.

Police work involving the criminal side of the fentanyl plague can be dangerous; there have been high speed chases to apprehend drug-dealing suspects and discovery of loaded guns in their vehicles. Much of the drug-related work of local police, however, is not the encounters that get headlines. Besides law enforcers, police are first responders to health emergencies, a duty that makes them participants in life-and-death drug overdose crises.

In response to the growing demands on county services related to drugs and mental illness, the Ozaukee County Health and Human Services Department voted to recommend for County Board approval a request from Sheriff Christy Knowles and Human Services Director Liza Drake to apply for $2.7 million in U.S. Department of Justice grants. The federal money would be used to hire a behavior health officer and crisis intervention specialist.

Data on how fentanyl and other drugs are affecting law enforcement agencies in the county emphasize the need for those full-time county staff positions: The Sheriff’s Office is on track for 30 overdose calls this year; Port Washington police responded to 21 overdose emergencies in the past three years, including five that resulted in death; Grafton had similar overdose statistics; Saukville recorded 83 drug offenses in 2022 alone.

Commenting on a factor that contributes to the deadly outcomes of some fentanyl overdoses, Ozaukee Undersheriff Marshall Hermann told Ozaukee Press that “almost all of the heroin that we have seized since 2020 had some amount of fentanyl in it.” A Grafton police officer told of finding the drug disguised as an Oxycontin pill.

Many of fentanyl’s victims, including teenagers experimenting with drug use, consume the drug unknowingly when it is mixed with other less lethal opioids and narcotics. Fentanyl is 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin.

Besides relieving overstressed police, the grants would provide care and guidance for those suffering from mental illness and drug addiction. Mental illness, with its harmful consequences for sufferers and society, needs the attention the grants would make possible.

The need for the drug-related support the federal funds would provide can be summed up in a single word—fentanyl. It’s here and it’s killing people, just as it kills more than 70,000 people in the country each year. It is so widely used with dreadful effect that some states have installed vending machines that sell Narcan inhalers made to reverse fentanyl overdoses. It has been reported that some parents send their children to school with Narcan in their backpacks.

As it faces these daunting issues, the county needs all of the help it can get. The County Board should quickly approve the federal grant applications.