Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, The Arkansas Times at Little Rock Public Radio and hello again everyone, and thanks very much for being with us.

Monday begins Red Ribbon Week.

It's a period designated by both the treatment and enforcement communities for a studied consideration of substance abuse.

It crosses every demographic line.

It knows no boundaries, substance abuse.

And with every day grow the odds that everyone in Arkansas will know someone, some family, who has lost a relative or friend or significant other.

The economic loss to illegal or abused drugs runs into the billions annually.

The emotional toll, of course, simply cannot be measured.

The lives lost can be quantified.

In the latest 12 month reporting period, almost 700 Arkansans fatally overdosed, almost two every day.

Joining us to update the situation?

State Drug Director Tom Fisher Jason Van Gore is the Acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Arkansas, and Jared Harper is the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration in Arkansas.

Mr. Harper, let me begin with you because you were with us a year ago on a program similar to this.

Has anything in the previous 12 months changed for the better?

I'll tell you, we're still living in the most dangerous times in law enforcement.

In my 27 year local and federal career with fentanyl still on the rise, still one of the biggest drug threats here in the state of Arkansas and across the country we're we're losing over 300 people a day to drug overdose and 70% of it involves this synthetic opioid we know is fentanyl.

So that still dominates the the, the drug landscape as it were.

Absolutely.

Globally, yes.

And in Arkansas, methamphetamine and fentanyl, still the most dangerous drug threats here in the state of Arkansas.

Yeah.

And from the FBI's perspective, yeah, we would agree.

And we're seeing the overdose deaths.

And what we're what we're realizing is we look at this.

This is not just a law enforcement problem.

We can't arrest our way out of this.

Certainly we need to hold people accountable who are responsible for deaths.

But we need to work with the drug director's office and with the Department of Education, with schools and with the community to tackle this problem.

We recently looked at prescription rates from 2015 to 2022, prescription rates in Arkansas have dropped 39%.

During that same time period, opioid deaths have gone up 189%.

So this is not just a medical community problem.

One thing of note, though, Arkansas has one of the lowest rates of deaths from prescription opioids of any of the surrounding 7 or 8 states.

So we are making an impact, but we're not doing enough.

Yeah, it's it's.

But those two lines, yeah, it certainly shows what we believe that we can't just address this with the medical community or just with education or just with community outreach.

We need a whole of community or a whole of society approach to tackling this problem.

That's why Red Ribbon Week is so important to us.

It gets us in the schools we Last year we were in 149 school districts, reached over 40,000 students with our video Chasing the Dragon.

This is a video that the DEA and US made together a few years ago and it chronicles the lives and often times deaths of opioid addicts, giving a real life view of what it means to be addicted to this drug.

Yeah, Tom Fisher, the synthetic still dominate.

It does.

It does in the conversation currently is predominantly covered by fentanyl.

Right.

But what's what's next and what's scary for us is to identify the new and emerging drug trends.

The things that that are more potent than fentanyl, which are synthetic analogues of fentanyl nitazines, we've seen them in the state of Arkansas.

We also see other analog fentanyl in the state of Arkansas.

So this illicit market in the synthetic market is, is still what I would consider a public health emergency for Arkansas.

But we are either through awareness, legislation, whatever, we are saving lives, lives are being saved anyway.

That would have been lost in previous years, previous months for that matter, Absolutely.

And I think that the Department of Human Services, the drug director's office in partnership with Department of Health and the Criminal Justice Institute, everybody that we work with moving to get naloxone out into the community, looking to see that first responders and community members are educated about how to use naloxone and have easy access to get it.

Because naloxone is really the game changer for us.

Yeah.

But the medical community has a new awareness of it as well.

We have a graphic up here which kind of indicates, which tells its own story.

It does.

In 2022, the number of prescriptions that were were filled for naloxone tremendously increased.

And I think that's a collective effort.

What's going on with the legislature with Human Services and health.

And also what I mentioned earlier is just all of our partners to talk about we're, we're, we're, we're bringing home a message about stigma.

We're reducing stigma in the community.

We're we're getting the information out there.

But we're not only doing that, we're providing access to that product.

Jared Harper, any change, any shift at all in the sources of supply?

I'll tell you, it still still remains.

Mexico is is where this fentanyl is coming from.

And there's two cartels, the Sinaloa cartel and the CJNG, which is the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

Those two cartels are manufacturing the this fentanyl in Mexico.

It's coming across the border and it's coming right up here into the state of Arkansas and seven out of every ten of these fentanyl pills.

And what we're seeing here in Arkansas is the fake oxycodone pills, the M 30s, they're blue and little blue pills.

7 out of 10 out of our eight labs across DEA, 7 out of 10 pills have fentanyl in them.

And it's only a 2 milligram dose, which is a lethal dose.

That's about what you can put on the end of a pencil.

Yeah.

No.

But in terms of Asia, specifically, China as a source of supply for the precursors, has that shifted at all?

Changed at all?

No.

The lion's share of these precursor chemicals for fentanyl are coming from China and they're being manufactured there in the pharmaceutical company, in there, in the Pharmaceutical industry there.

They're being shipped to Mexico and they're coming straight across the southwest border right up here in the state of Arkansas.

OK. And gentlemen, for any any indication at all of it, ports of entry were where we were told in previous years that a great deal of the precursors at least we're moving through conventional shipping channels.

Has that changed?

Any way that these cartels can get this, these chemicals across the border, they're going to use it.

Whether it's passenger vehicles, whether it's body carrying it, you know, semi trucks, shipments, commercial freight buses, trains, however they can get it across, they're using any method, Airways, every method you could think of, they're using it and it's all about the money it comes back to make.

It's it's all about the money.

DEA has seized 62 million of these fentanyl pills just this year.

We're already surpassed all of last year where we seized 58 million of these pills.

Jason, in terms of enforcement, in terms of the judicial aspect of it, well, you as you know that we can't arrest our way out and we can't enforce our way out of this mess.

But at any rate, do you see a different changes anyway on the judicial end in terms of sentencing protocols options anyway for the judicial.

So one of the options we're looking at is holding people accountable when they are responsible for a death.

If you provide opioids to someone who overdoses, we want to hold that person responsible want to charge them in the criminal justice system with anything up to including homicide, whatever the prosecutors believe is allowed.

We have a gang enforcement task force that's been operating here in Central Arkansas since 2017.

It was formed in response to the violence and drug problems in Central Arkansas and it's made a real impact this this team has law enforcement officers from most agencies in Central Arkansas, federal, state and local working together to combat the violent crime and drug problem.

One thing I will note is if to avoid getting charged with homicide.

We don't want people to die.

If you are in a situation where someone is having a problem, we asked you not to run, but to call 911.

If you can save that life, If we can get a medical responder on scene to save that life and nobody dies, that's the best case scenario.

OK, gentlemen, go ahead.

I'm sure.

No, no.

And I'll just say in my previous life when I was a Drug Enforcement agent as well, that was what we normally put our hat on, was the federal enforcement, the federal statutes that were allowed that, the penalty and the severity of penalty for those that are distributing that poison fentanyl that's killing people.

And I'm proud as an Arkansan to see what the legislature has done this year in cooperation with the government, the Attorney General's office, the governor, the attorney General's office to come forward with the fentanyl Enforcement Aware Accountability Act.

And now Arkansas to and through states state charging and state statute is going to hold these distributors.

Those that are responsible for deliberately aggravated death by delivery hold those same distributors accountable the same way that we were traditionally used to doing that at the federal level.

So as in our Kansas.

And I'm glad to see that yeah, if we cannot arrest our way, if we cannot enforce our way out of out of this dilemma.

Nonetheless, is there any evidence that interdiction and enforcement is making a are we making any headway at least on that front if if that's not the sole solution, Sherrod Harper, yes we are.

And the big the way we make our biggest impact in law enforcement is, is working with our state and local and federal partners.

That's how we make the biggest impact.

We're doing it.

DEA has launched Operation OverDrive.

We're in phase three of that right now where we've we've arrested up into this date since the beginning of the year over 50 people in this state that are actually involved in this fentanyl opioid trade.

And we haven't stopped and and we're working with with our partnering with the Little Rock PD and and and we have 31 other state and local agencies that we work with on a daily basis.

So we are making an impact and it's going to be a relentless pursuit.

We will not stop.

And from the Bureau's perspective, other statues involved too.

And and not not just Drug Enforcement per SE, but conspiracy and other other aspects of the Criminal Code.

Conspiracy, wire fraud, traditional white collar offenses, anything we can do, taxes, whatever it takes, anything we can do to stop the distribution, to stop the drugs from coming into the state and to interdict them once they're here.

There's no boundaries on that within the law.

We're going to work together as a community, as a law enforcement community and as community at large to tackle this problem.

Yeah.

Is there a message that you gentlemen, primarily your.

Yeah and enforcement.

Is there a message that you would offer Arkansas on this particular Red Ribbon week?

Tom, we'll begin with you.

I will.

I want to echo just a little bit on what Jason had mentioned and Jared as well.

And that was what I think the viewers need to know in the state of Arkansas is that Arkansas is a very unique state.

I've had the opportunity to work across the country like these gentlemen and see the ability for our federal partners, our state and local partners, the partnership we have with the Department of Public Safety and Secretary Haggers, they really work well together in the purpose of prosecution, but also education and awareness.

And that's not really what happens across the United States unfortunately.

And I think we're very fortunate to have that the state of Arkansas.

But on the on the hills of Red Ribbon week this is really an opportunity for us to get out in front of and I think the most at risk in Arkansas are those you know junior high school to college age students that we are seeing an increase that's this one population that we've seen an increase over the last two years on overdose deaths in and we want to let them know the severity and the danger of 1 pill can kill and that recreational drug use is is no longer a safe use That's what we want.

We want to be on on platform with everybody here on the table.

Wish we had more time we got to end it there we're simply time it.

Gentlemen thank you for coming in.

Thank you.

And we'll be right back.

We are back several key figures.

Key figures in the campaign against substance abuse in Arkansas will be key figures in a documentary film scheduled for release next year.

It will be worth the wait.

As you can judge from these few scenes from the documentary film The Next Best Fix.

Early airplanes were coming in with loads of cocaine into Arkansas.

At our rural airports, I'm seeing drug addiction, this substance use disorder, it's all around us.

It's just a perfect storm for illicit drug dealers.

It's all about money.

Like I would go to any length to get high.

I'm out in Macon, Arkansas, burglarizing houses.

I'm no longer timid.

I'm no longer afraid of physical confrontation.

Our overdose deaths were climbing in our state.

When I got high, there was three things I wanted to do get dope, use dope and hide from Kirk Lane.

Pursuing Jimmy McGill became a challenge.

His name kept popping up.

He's a freaking boogeyman.

And we were at a point where we had to change things.

These people were dying.

My son died from an overdose.

And Dixon had reduced my son to a picture.

Two of those documentary participants join us now.

Stacy James, executive director of the Hope Movement Coalition.

It's a resource for families such as hers that have lost a loved 1 to substance abuse.

As a former drug abuser, Jimmy McGill might have lost his life.

As it was, he served a multiple prison terms for drug activity.

Now, though nearing a dozen years in recovery, he leads Next Step, which provides housing and counseling to individuals seeking freedom from addiction and returning to our table this year.

Doctor Buster Lackey.

He too counsel addicts, counsels addicts, and advises the North Little Rock Police Department on drug abuse and recovery policy and procedures.

And joining us via Skype to provide a clinical a medical perspective is Doctor Srinivova Gokarakonda of Professional of the of Psychiatry at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

A quick note here footnote here Kirk Lane, he was formerly the Arkansas Drug Director and who has been with us on previous programs such as this is still in the fight.

He is so to speak.

He is now Director of the Arkansas Opioid Recovery Partnership and we all wish him well on that.

Stacy James, let's begin with you.

It's been some years now since you lost your son.

Four years.

The hurt never stops it.

It doesn't stop, but it evolves.

You, you grow around that hurt.

It becomes something that you carry with you, and it is a battle.

It's a constant battle to live as opposed to survive.

And that's what we do at Hope Movement.

We help families choose to live.

You channeled it, in other words.

Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

You know, with so many Arkansans that struggle with this disease and the number that we've lost, I knew Hagen wasn't alone, which meant I wasn't alone.

And so losing him helped me find my purpose.

And that's how I channel this grief and this pain.

It is forming a community of families that are not ashamed of our loved ones cause of death, because we know that that cause of death doesn't define them and it doesn't define us.

Yeah, Jimmy, you know that from both sides, from counseling and from as a user, I do.

Yeah, I do.

Absolutely.

So for me, I stayed in the shadows and didn't ask help for a long time because of the stigma that Stacy was talking about there.

Recovery wasn't as broad as it is now.

It wasn't as loud.

It wasn't as obvious.

We didn't know that there was a solution for a long time.

And that's the main reason that I am as loud with my personal recovery as I am is the louder we get, the less people suffer in silence.

For you, what was the trigger?

What was the threshold?

What pushed you into recovery?

What led you into rigger pain and desperation?

I was at a point in my life where I, you know, tried to successfully reenter society from incarceration multiple times.

I had tried to find sustainable recovery, and I never could until the last point of incarceration where I successfully reentered society.

But something really simple took place that last time I was offered services.

Never before had I been offered services, right?

Like I would come home, I would go to the same place, I would do the same thing, I would get the same results.

But the the last time, instead of going home back to that old toxic environment, I found myself in the atmosphere of recovery where a community of people just like me had authentically found a way to recover from returning to substance use.

And from that moment on, my life changed.

And.

And it's approaching 9 years since I've done any kind of mind or mood altering substance.

Yeah, Buster, likely the love the availability of those services in the months since you were at this table with us before.

Is it more available?

Are those services more available?

Yeah, we're always trying to build up more services.

I mean, of course Arkansas has, maybe I should say, yeah, Arkansas has a, you know, a shortage of of mental health professionals that that specializes in alcohol and drug abuse treatment.

And I think that, you know, they're out there.

We just got to find them and get them accessible to the level of care that the people that's coming into the services need.

You know, it's a, it's it's create.

You've got to create a whole new ID for people that are willing to come into treatment.

They can't have this the old self.

They've got to change.

So a lot of the services like service, like like Jimmy runs and some others, that's what they're doing.

They're bringing these people in to give them a new ID, to give them a new life.

And by doing that we're we're helping them change everything that they ever knew.

Well, the possibilities that Stacy James and the Jimmy offer are they that they represent, that they embody.

Why what?

Why not more?

What's missing here?

Money, commitment.

You know, I think that we have the schools that are graduating the students, but they tend to go out of state because it's more money out of state.

Then what Arkansas starts our counselors and therapists off at Doctor Gokarakonda your comments on this please, Your thoughts?

So like the previous speaker said that we have a lot of shortage of substance abuse doctors that provide care for substance abuse and especially in Arkansas rural state, we have a severe need for specialists that provide substance abuse care.

So we at UMS have substance abuse providers that provide buprenorphine that provide naltrexone for substance abuse disorders.

So we are excited to start a new program at UMS in collaboration with Arkansas Children's Hospital.

This is a program for young adults and adolescents age 12 to And this program will provide a comprehensive assessment of treatments for adolescents and young adults with substance use.

And we are also planning on reaching the community by raising awareness about substance abuse and also provided prevention efforts to enhance the prevention efforts by also increasing the screening in primary care providers, heart clinics across the state.

And we also want to educate the teachers in identifying this in schools.

And there is a lot of stigma like in the previous speaker said there's a lot of stigma around this.

So substance abuse is a chronic disease unlike any other disease like hypertension, like diabetes.

So we need to treat this chronic disease.

It's a long term treatment and we have to provide these treatments consistently and removing stigma around this will help providing these treatments and all the mental health providers and substance abuse treatment providers in the state provide the service.

So we have to remove the stigma to encourage people to receive these treatments.

Stigma.

Stacy James is still the big stumbling block for a lot of people.

Oh, absolutely.

Anyone that is touched by this disease is, is touched by stigma.

There's a common misconception that this is a moral problem or that these are bad people, that this is a choice.

Just say no.

Absolutely.

And and honestly, that's just not understanding the disease itself because it is a disease.

When Hagan was struggling, he was less than he was one of those people.

That's how society saw him and as a result that's how he saw himself.

Once we lost him, that stigma and the way it treated our family and and other families is it's we can't talk about it.

So the casseroles, the comfort, the condolences are not there because we just can't talk about addiction, we can't talk about drugs.

And ultimately, for families that are grieving, it's detrimental to their grief.

And many, many times isolation is is deadly, whether you're struggling with the disease or you've lost someone to the disease.

Because that silence keeps you from healing.

It keeps you from getting to a place of acceptance.

It it keeps you from reaching out, from help.

And many, many times, excuse me, we see multiple members of families lost to this disease because of stigma.

Yeah, Jimmy McGill, you didn't much like yourself in the old days.

I did not.

I was very ashamed.

Addiction is a shame based disease, right?

Like it is the only the person living in addiction is a shame.

The friends, the spouse, the children.

Everybody is ashamed and shame is a killer, right?

So when I think of of the stigma of substance use disorder, the stigma itself takes as many people to the grave as the actual disease does.

And for a long time, I was not OK with Jimmy.

And so I turned to a substance, and I used and abused chemicals for 23 years because I didn't like myself.

And I was afraid to ask for help because of the judgment and the shame that came with asking for help.

Buster Lackey, working with both law enforcement and counseling users, is that stigma beginning to fade?

I mean, we're we're, we've heard so much about it.

I mean, do you we is our recognition of this issue as a disease, is it growing?

I mean, we're recognizing it, but the stigma still there, just like Stacy said, you know, it's the elephant in the room.

We don't talk about it.

Everybody knows that your son or daughter has got this problem, but no one talks about it as we tiptoe around this subject.

And you know, in the law enforcement world, you know, we're arresting the same people over and over and Jimmy's proof of that.

You know we've over and over, you just keep going back to the same thing and getting arrested.

So one of the things we're looking at is, is starting a police referral program so that you can walk into the City of North Little Rock Police Department to tell us that you've got a problem, turn in whatever drugs you have and we will take you to treatment.

The law was changed this year.

So law enforcement can now transport people incident to jail to a treatment facility and we want to capitalize and use that that what what's happening in North Little Rock there, Can that be applied to other departments?

Is that being applied to other law enforcement agencies?

So other two seconds remaining.

Yeah.

Others other agencies does have it around the United States.

It's correct to become a new program.

We've got a couple other programs as agencies that that do that.

In Arkansas, I think it's like 3 counting North Little Rock.

So in other words, intervention at the enforcement.

Absolutely.

All right.

We have to end it there because we're simply out of time.

Thank you all very much doctor too at the AT UAMS, but thank you all for participating in the program.

Come back again soon, We'll come back to the subject.

Thank you for joining us.

See you next week Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio.