Fentanyl deaths dip in Orange County, but worry remains

Fentanyl-laced drugs were again the leading cause of fatal overdoses in Orange County in 2022 with toxicology data showing the powerful synthetic opioid present in over 70% of drug fatalities, according to preliminary data compiled by the Medical Examiners Office.

But fewer people died in Orange County from fentanyl last year than in 2021, a hopeful data point for Thomas V. Hall, director of the Orange County Coalition for a Drug Free Community, who helps shape strategies intended to lower the street drug’s death toll.

“I think expanded access to naloxone in Central Florida is working,” he said, referring to the medication which can rapidly reverse effects of an opioid overdose. “I think targeted messaging of ‘One Pill Can Kill’ also has been effective in raising awareness.”

Hall said the message is displayed on a Lynx bus, some gas pumps and some police cars, including one patrolling the University of Central Florida campus and an Orange County Sheriff ’s Office vehicle participating in the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade.

The slogan was part of a campaign by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to alert the public to the danger of fentanyl after testing revealed that as many as six out of 10 fake prescription pills seized by the agency contained a potentially lethal dose of the drug.

Only two milligrams of fentanyl is considered a potentially lethal dose, according to the agency’s fentanyl-awareness page.

In Orange County, from January through September 2022, the Medical Examiner’s Office reported 342 overdose-related fatalities. Fentanyl was present in 73% of those deaths, Hall said. As staggering as those figures may be, they represented an improvement from the same period in 2021, when the county recorded 426 overdose fatalities in which fentanyl was present in 79% of the deaths.

Despite lower death numbers locally, fentanyl remains a worry.

“This is still an incredibly prevalent issue,” said Kendall Cortelyou, a professor at UCF’s School of Global Health Management and Informatics and author of a 2021 report on the drug. “So much of it is that fentanyl’s getting put into fake pills and people don’t know what they’re taking.”

Without discussion last month, Orange County commissioners approved a request from Health Services to add three new positions for the Coalition for a Drug-Free Community to expand prevention initiatives targeting fentanyl use, including access to naloxone.

The life-saving medication, also known by the brand names Narcan, Zimhi and others, is available for free at eight sites in Orange County, including the LGBT+ Center, 946 N. Mills Ave. and the

Orange County Medical Clinic Pharmacy, 101 S. Westmoreland Dr.

Other locations can be found at isavefl.com, which also includes information and links for addiction prevention and treatment.

Funding for the new positions will come from grants, said Raul Pino, Health Services director.

Fentanyl has been a focus of national drug policy with DEA Administrator Anne Milgram calling it “the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered.”

Fentanyl overdose deaths nationally have become the number one killer of 18-to 45-year-old people, surpassing deaths from car accidents, gun violence and heart disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC describes fentanyl as up to 50 times as strong as heroin and 100 times as strong as morphine.

The DEA lists two kinds of fentanyl on its site: a pharmaceutical variety, prescribed by doctors to treat pain, and a street drug, manufactured illicitly and mixed with baking soda and pressed into pills to masquerade as Oxycontin, Vicodin and other prescription painkillers.

“Fentanyl is going to be with us for some time,” Hall said. “This isn’t something that’s going to just go away.”