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Overdose deaths in Idaho doubled between 2020 and 2021 with fentanyl the main culprit.

Today, the US attorney for Idaho and the Idaho State Police Colonel discuss strategies to reverse that trend.

I'm Melissa Davlin.

Idaho Reports starts now.

Hello and welcome to Idaho Reports.

This week, U.S.

Senator Jim Risch provides an update on efforts to stop the Lava Ridge Wind project in Magic Valley.

Then U.S. Attorney for Idaho Josh Hurwit, and Idaho State Police Colonel Kedrick Wills join me to discuss the state and federal government's efforts to stop fentanyl trafficking and overdose deaths in Idaho.

At a Thursday Legislative Council meeting, lawmakers got an update on Luma, a newly implemented accounting system that tracks payroll for more than 20,000 state employees, as well as state revenue and expenses.

This year's rollout has been bumpy by some accounts, with one hiccup delaying the release of the state's public revenue report.

House Speaker Mike Moyle once again expressed frustration with the program to the state comptroller's office.

There is nothing user friendly about this thing.

Luma is not user friendly.

Is there a way to fix this so that not just my two year old granddaughter, but me, can figure out how to navigate this?

Because it's not, it doesn't even make common sense where you have to go to do payroll.

It doesn't make common sense where I have to go get bills.

I can't even look at the invoices.

I got to go find the physical, physical one.

If I punch on it to look at it, it kicks me out of the.

The whole thing sucks.

So back to what I said.

Are you going to make it user friendly?

Or are we going to have to just learn to do what Luma wants us to do?

And are we are we are we helping them make this user friendly?

Or are they just going to tell us you got to eat what we gave you?

Speaker Moyle You definitely from the UI user interface standpoint, right?

It is always better to improve that over time.

I would say that the user interface is far superior.

far superior than our legacy applications by a significant factor.

Additionally, as we look at this, yes, the user interface will get better over time as people become confident.

It is a complex system.

Absolutely.

This was not a simple solution.

It does take time to learn it.

As we adapt those process and things.

Yes, the user interface can change.

Actually, the in the update that just released, there's a brand new user interface that we're testing that will kind of aid access to various things.

Last week, associate producer Logan Finney spoke to Division of Financial Management administrator Alex Adams about Luma and the latest state revenue numbers.

If you missed that conversation, you can find it online at IdahoReports.org This week, Governor Little proclaimed November to be Idaho Apprenticeship month, using it as an opportunity to tout the Idaho LAUNCH program.

LAUNCH provides grants of up to $8,000 to Idaho high school seniors who pursue education and training for in-demand careers at eligible institutions.

Applications for those grants are now open.

For a list of eligible career paths and a link to the application, visit NextSteps.Idaho.gov The proposed Lava Ridge Wind project would add hundreds of wind turbines to public lands in remote Jerome County as part of President Joe Biden's Clean Energy initiative.

If it goes forward, the site would generate power from wind turbines hundreds of feet tall, with that power going to California and Nevada.

But the proposal faces fierce opposition from the Magic Valley, with concerns ranging from land conservation to preserving the integrity of the Minidoka Internment Camp National Historical site.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Senator Jim Risch about those concerns and what he sees as better clean energy alternatives.

This is not what we want for our public lands.

And, so I think that as much as anything is what drives this.

People just look at that and say, you know, this is this is not what we want.

And then of course you can bring all the other factors into it, the way we generate electricity and all that sort of thing and you can generate a lot of electricity on very small, actually postage stamp sized piece of land compared to this.

If you put a nuclear, a small nuclear package, which is what the world is going to and gonna to go to over the next decades and the rest of this century.

I mean you’re talking about less than an acre versus 146,000 acres, so.

There's alternatives that are that are there that could make this go away.

On top of that, I think people are just irate that you have a New York company coming in here, going to do this to our public lands.

Looking to sell the electricity out of state.

And there's just nothing in this for us, there really isn’t.

Do you get the sense that the Bureau of Land Management is listening to these concerns?

You know, it's hard to say.

The BLM is made up of a lot of different people.

And when it comes to the people, you can have a legitimate conversation.

When it comes to the institution, I don't get a good feeling on this.

That doesn't mean I think we're going to lose necessarily.

I think at the end of the day, we’re going to win one way or another.

Whether it’s in court or some way, we’re going to win this.

It just, the thing just doesn't make sense.

But I think primarily this this push is coming out of it's coming from the top down.

I’m not getting the sense it's coming from the bottom up, from the local people at the BLM district in the area.

I really don't get the feeling.

I, in fact if you want a feeling I get, it's that they’re a little afraid to talk about it.

Which means clearly, that the push is coming from the top.

I think that's probably what’s going on.

And that was my next There's there's.

There's a lot of ways to skin this cat and as you know, I’ve introduced a bill to take a direct run at it.

We’ll see whether that works or not but there's a lot of ways to go about this.

This has a lot of Achilles heels attached to it and I think sooner or later it's going to go away.

You touched on this a little bit, but you've said in hearings before that you're not opposed to clean energy.

That's not the issue.

What are your proposals for clean energy alternatives, then?

Well, I sit on the energy committee here.

And obviously, with Idaho being the home of the INL, the birthplace of nuclear energy in the in the country, in the world, in the universe.

Obviously, nuclear energy is important.

I really think that over the next decades, over the next centuries, the world is going to turn more and more to nuclear energy.

Most countries are.

Even though Idaho, the United States, was the birthplace and inventor of civilian nuclear energy, we have fallen behind.

Our fleet, the highest our fleet ever got was 105 reactors.

We're down to, I think about 95 give or take a couple now because they've reached the end of their lifespan and are decommissioned.

There are some, there are some new ones coming online.

But I can tell you, I deal with people in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, I deal with people all over the world on the energy and a lot of other issues obviously.

They are all interested in nuclear energy, and much more so I think than Americans are generally.

So that is growing around the world.

And there is a, I can tell you, there is a robust nuclear industry growing all over the planet.

So that, the future is nuclear energy, like it or not.

And look, there's always going to be the there's always going to be some solar and there’s always going to be wind.

But you can’t get baseload from those kinds of energy.

You need a very strong source, You can listen to my full conversation with Senator Risch on the Idaho Reports podcast available wherever you get your podcasts.

Or if you prefer, you can find a transcribed version of the conversation online at IdahoReports.org Fentanyl is responsible for a rising number of overdose deaths in the state and is a leading cause of death for young Idahoans.

On Friday, U.S. Attorney for Idaho Josh Hurwit and Idaho State Police Colonel Kedrick Wills joined me to discuss how the state and federal governments are working to stop the influx of the drug into Idaho.

Thank you both so much for joining us today.

First of all, what is it about fentanyl that makes it so dangerous as compared to meth?

It's lethality and it's addictiveness.

It's about 50 times more addictive than heroin.

And a two milligram amount of fentanyl is considered to be a lethal dose.

And I brought a Splenda packet as a little prop, you know, a unfortunate prop, because this is one gram of, you know, a sweetener.

If this was fentanyl, pure fentanyl, this would be 500 lethal doses.

So if you think about the manufacture of fentanyl, it's unfortunately very easy to get small amounts into the country and around the country.

And it's in pills normally.

And about six out of ten pills contain lethal doses, according to recent DEA findings.

We know that between 2020 and 2021, the rate of overdose deaths doubled in Idaho.

And I know it takes a while for mortality data to become public and to process.

But from what you're seeing, are we on the same trajectory with that over overdose rate rising?

I believe we are.

And what we use at the Idaho State Police to look at that is our seizures because there's a direct correlation to how much drugs we’re seizing to overdose deaths, which by the way, is the number one leading cause of death right now, which is very scary for all of us.

And we are seeing, just a quick stat, in 2022 we seized about 65,000 doses of fentanyl.

And so far in 2023, just the Idaho State Police, we've seized almost 200,000.

So about four times what we've seen just a year ago.

And when you're talking about the it being one of the leading causes of death, we're talking about young people, too.

That's exactly right.

Yes, it is.

It is.

So that's that's why we're working cohesively with everybody to bring awareness to this issue, because it is so deadly.

And every Idahoan is at risk, unlike any drug we've ever seen.

What else are you seeing on the ground?

So you mentioned the increase in seizures.

What else are you seeing?

So we're seeing more users.

We're seeing more deaths, of course, because there are more users.

As as our U.S. attorney shared, 60% of doses are lethal doses.

That's really scary because they're literally rolling the dice with their life every time they do it.

That doesn't mean that 60% of people who use at any given time are going to die.

It just means that potentially there's the potential there for that overdose.

That's correct.

Six out of ten doses are considered lethal doses.

Do the people you arrest understand how lethal and prevalent fentanyl is?

In other words, are they aware of the risk or is there still a lot of ignorance around it?

Well, we we believe that most people that are using fentanyl, at least first time users, don't even know they're using it.

That's what makes it so lethal.

They think they're using something else.

And the the people that are providing this illegal drug into our society are very good at masking it.

That's why it looks like pills.

It looks like a pill that you should take for anything else.

And that's why every Idahoan is at risk.

So, in other words, a user may think that they are taking a hydrocodone or an OxyContin, that they don't have a prescription for, that they obtained illegally, and that is laced with fentanyl.

That's correct.

Or even marijuana could be.

Any any drug is laced, could be laced with fentanyl.

Governor Little launched Operation Esto Perpetua last year to combat fentanyl.

Is it effective so far?

Well, we're seeing we're seeing as I shared, our seizures are increasing.

We saw the Governor Little proposed and the legislature approved additional manpower for the state police.

And so our domestic highway enforcement team will be up and running shortly.

We were doing these cases before, but we'll be doing them in greater numbers now.

So we think that will help.

But enforcement is only one component of this.

We've got to focus on the education.

So we're outreaching to anybody that will listen.

State police detectives are meeting with them along with folks from our U.S. attorney's office to try and educate people on this.

We, it was said, you know, when I went around with Governor Little and we had public meetings on this, it was the comment was made I think in every meeting, we cannot arrest our way out of this situation.

So we're looking at an education, enforcement of course, but education as well as treatment programs.

And what does that look like to get people to help they need to get them well.

What does that education look like?

And are your folks in places like public libraries and shelters as opposed to I don't want to say just ad campaigns because those are effective and have large outreach.

But but where where are you educating people?

Yeah.

So I think in general, when you talk about prevention and awareness, it's an all hands on deck, everything type of approach.

So my attorneys, my colleagues at my office, we're traveling throughout the state with ISP and other partners to get into schools, town halls, community meetings.

The other part of this that's really important is education of first responders, coroners, elected officials.

It's still surprising to me when I talk to policymakers who may not understand the significance of this threat.

So that's obviously part of this, too, making sure that everyone has accurate information to understand what's actually happening out there.

So it's really it's everything and everything and everything and anything.

Let's talk about the importance of working with those first responders and elected officials, because, you know, Idaho has 44 sheriffs.

We have 44 coroners, and they might approach an overdose scene differently in all 44 of those those counties.

How does that affect your work?

So what we what we try to do is work with all of our partners, our city counterparts, our county counterparts, our federal counterparts, and help everybody understand and specifically with the first responders, there are we have a really great U.S. attorney in Idaho who's aggressively enforcing what we call Len Bias laws at the federal level.

That's going after the users when there's an overdose death, I'm sorry, going after the dealers when there's an overdose death.

But in order to do that, we there's some evidence we have to capture at the very first of this.

So we're working with coroners, firefighters, EMTs, all first responders to help understand we need to get this evidence so that we can look down the road at a successful prosecution.

And so it's it's a matter of getting that that word out to everybody.

And let's talk about your office's philosophy and approach to those prosecutions.

And so you do target just dealers or do you also target some users in those prosecutions?

We generally do not prosecute drug users.

Now, many dealers are also users.

So, you know, with that clarification, our approach is to attack the supply of fentanyl and the department, the Department of Justice, of which my office is a part, is looking at this as a global supply chain that we're trying to disrupt.

So recently there's been prosecutions of companies and individuals in China who are manufacturing the precursor chemicals or diverting the precursor chemicals to Mexico, where the cartels are turning those chemicals into fentanyl pills or fentanyl powder, and then smuggling it into the United States.

So the department is taking a global approach to this and having some real success in trying to block the further chemicals from even getting here and getting to Mexico in the first place, and then working with our Mexican counterparts to prosecute individuals associated with the cartels.

And then when you get to to Idaho, we try to work our way up the chain.

So that's why we prosecute dealers so that we can hopefully maybe flip them and learn where their source of supply is.

Usually it's out of state and then we can work with our partners, you know, generally in the southwest border districts to attack those that distribution networks at the highest levels.

Is that philosophy consistent across districts, you know, administration down?

Do you talk to other district attorneys about this?

Yeah, absolutely.

I work closely with my colleagues in this.

We call them the Southwest border districts.

So California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas.

There are a lot of great task forces that are located down there, but we are constantly working with them to make sure that any case that we generate here that leads to a large source or supply.

If there is a connection with one of those states in one of those districts federally, that they're able to take the next steps.

Speaking of the Southwest, Governor Little recently deployed ISP troopers to the Texas-Mexico border for Operation Esta Perpetua, what did those troopers bring back with them as far as knowledge and techniques?

Yeah, so we a couple of years ago we sent troopers down to the Arizona border and learned some of the techniques.

We sent our domestic highway enforcement troopers.

So those are working these kinds of cases and learned some of the techniques and how Arizona Department of Public Safety was working.

This year, we went in support of Operation Lonestar, which is Texas Department of Public Safety, and we sent two groups down there.

We sent a group of tactical operators, and they were their role was different near El Paso, but their role was to look for those people that are illegally crossing the border.

Then the other group that we caught that we took were our domestic highway enforcement folks near Brownsville.

And so they had two very different missions, two very different experiences.

But what they brought back is the cohesive ability to see and to share with all of our law enforcement counterparts in Idaho what they're seeing at the border, the smuggling techniques, how they're bringing it across, how much they're bringing it across, all these kinds of things, which has been very, very helpful.

So we were there kind of in a twofold mission, really to support Texas, certainly with the border crisis, but also to bring back that information.

And now we're hosting trainings for all law enforcement in Idaho, kind of a train, the trainer concept for those troopers who did go down to the border to see what's going on there and to help them come back.

And so we can be more effective at keeping this out of Idaho.

We know that Idaho State Police has had an employee shortage for a while, you know, wanting to get more full time positions in your in your office, out out on the streets and out on the highways.

Was that an effective use of resources?

Are you seeing that pay off?

Yeah, we're we're seeing that it was very effective because of the information that I don't think you can glean any other way other than seeing it right there.

And being part of that experience to come back and be able to use that information and to be able to use that knowledge here, you know, we send our people to training all the time, all over the place to become better trained at their jobs, just like any job does.

And this was probably some of the best training we could have possibly sent these troopers to.

We talked earlier about how a lot of users don't realize that they're even taking fentanyl in the first place.

They think that they are consuming marijuana or hydrocodone.

We know that students at University of Idaho are currently lobbying or launching an effort to make fentanyl test strips legal in Idaho so users can better understand their risk and know exactly what they're taking.

Right now, it's classified as drug paraphernalia and is not legal here.

Where do you stand on fentanyl test strips?

So my position on any kind of drug is we have a great place, that's foolproof right now of how we can do that.

And that is not to take any drug that's not issued by a prescription, by a physician.

That's really the only foolproof method.

I know that there's a push for these other things, but the reality of it is all of those have flaws.

The only foolproof method is to get it from a health care provider.

That the reality is counter to that, that there are still drug users who are going to buy and obtain and consume these drugs.

From a harm reduction standpoint, is this something that might prevent some of those overdose deaths?

We think that we're better off to provide the education of what this does to society and what this does to individuals.

Now, another harm reduction strategy is, is providing Narcan, which is a nasal spray that can effectively reverse an overdose in process.

This last session, Idaho lawmakers voted to limit who could receive free Narcan kits from a grant.

They limited that to first responders as opposed to family members or friends of people who are addicted to opioids, or users themselves.

And these kits are expensive, making some doctors hesitant to prescribe it.

Do you see Narcan availability as a barrier to reducing these deaths?

So the availability of Narcan for first responders was not impacted.

I think it's important that our legislative partners that we they understand our legislature was very clear in that to make sure that this was a tool for first responders, because that's where it's getting used the most and that's who generally is going to use it first.

But Narcan is not foolproof either.

And the the fallacy in that concept in that thought is, if I take this drug, there's something that can save me.

There's so many factors in that timing being one of them.

Be having it administered at the right time, having administered correctly all those issues.

So first responders are trained in how to administer it.

And so we think that that the safest again, the safest thing to do is to make sure that we're we need we need Narcan and we've had a lot of saves.

We've also had instances.

We had one instance over in eastern Idaho where one of our troopers, a woman, was passed out in a car and got to her too late and could not save her and did CPR and wasn't able to save her.

So Narcan is absolutely not foolproof.

It is a last ditch resort.

But there's all these other things, education, treatment and all these other things I think we should focus on before we get to the last ditch effort.

When you say that Narcan is most commonly administered by first responders, is that kind of a chicken and egg thing?

Because they're the ones who have the most access to it in the first place, as opposed to people who are in the household with the users, like their family members or friends.

Well, I think part of the issue with Narcan is that, like I said, that's a last ditch effort.

So I think that that's not going to solve the problem.

What we need to do is we really need to get these people the help they need.

And so we're focused also on treatment to get them the treatment they need to get out of this.

Narcan does nothing to treat the problem.

Does the administration have a stance on Narcan availability.

Generally we’re supportive of Narcan availability.

I’m not commenting on state legislation at all, but I agree with the colonel.

You know, Narcan isn't something that's foolproof.

It's not a solution to the problem.

When it's used effectively and saves lives, that's that's a great thing.

So I think that's reflected in the administration's position.

But, you know, people shouldn't think that this is like the drug problem we had 20 years ago.

I'll date myself, when I was in college.

Right.

In terms of, you know, going out and experimenting, that was always, you know, kind of a distinguishing line between those who experimented with drugs, used drugs casually, and then those who are addicted or had substance abuse problems.

That really doesn't apply now because of Fentanyl.

Because one one experiment like we talked about is like playing Russian roulette.

And so Narcan’s certainly important part of the conversation.

But we also need to recognize that it's not going to get us out of this crisis.

Are there any other strategies that can reduce the risk that that we haven't talked about yet?

So, you know, one thing I would focus on from the prosecution standpoint is we've seen cases and when bias or death results in cases, in urban settings, in rural areas, in all regions of our state.

And that means targeting the the dealer instead of the users.

So so a death resulting case is when we are charged someone with making a distribution of fentanyl that results in a death that causes the death that has a heightened penalty under the federal system.

And what's good about the penalty, apart from, you know, individual justice in that case, is that allows us to usually get dealers to cooperate with us to explain where the source of supply is, which helps us get these drugs off the streets.

So that's why we use these use this this particular statute so aggressively.

But I think all Idahoans need to understand that this can affect you no matter where you live, no matter what your characteristics, no matter your socioeconomic status.

You know, we've seen really wealthy people succumb.

We've seen obviously people without money succumb.

So I think it is just different than what we saw with meth, which was, you know, limited based on availability in certain areas of the state.

Fentanyl, because it's like I said, you know, so small and so lethal really impacts every single community up and down in Idaho.

Any other strategies that you want to touch on that you'd like to see implemented?

Well, we're focusing just really the threefold we're focusing on the education piece.

We're focusing on enforcement, but we're also focusing on treatment.

And we have a pilot program right now at Kootenai County with the Kootenai county prosecutor.

And I'd like to say that while we have a great U.S. attorney for federal cases, we have fantastic county prosecutors for state cases that are working in concert with us and we're working with them as well.

And so this this pilot project we have in Kootenai County is if they're first time offenders and they're arrested as first time users, not dealers, but users, and they're willing to get treatment, right then they go into treatment right then.

And so we recognize that enforcement is not the only tool, it's a tool.

But we've got to look at all the tools we have to be successful here.

Because as I said at the beginning, this is every Idahoans problem, unlike any other drug we've ever seen.

And when you say treatment is that through the traditional drug courts, is that where are they getting the treatment?

So we have treatment facilities in Kootenai County in this pilot program specifically, we have treatment facilities already set up to take them in right then.

From the traffic stop to a treatment facility.

It's that fast.

Idaho State Police Colonel Kedrick Wills, U.S. attorney for Idaho Josh Hurwit, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

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Check with your county election office to see if you have any city or school board races on your ballot, as well as any bonds or levies.

Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you next week.

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