Communities unite to fight flakka
Drug’s destructiveness labeled ‘bioterrorism’
Walking down a trash-strewn Pompano Beach thoroughfare during a recent rally against the latest street drug scourge, marchers experienced a firsthand encounter with the unfolding crisis.
“See that? We have a flakka patient over there. It’s taking eight of us to hold him down.”
Broward Sheriff ’s Capt. Wayne Adkins pointed to a cluster of emergency vehicles with flashing lights a half-block away. The crowd of 150 or so demonstrators in yellow T-shirts stopped and stared.
From squad car to church sanctuary to emergency room to City Hall daises, no other drug has spurred an effort quite as extensive as that aimed at stopping flakka’s destruction, organizers say. Efforts range from knocking on doors to counsel inviduals, to lobbying politicians to stem the flow of the drug from China, where it’s manufactured and praying.
“We’re in the state of emergency,” said the Rev. Rosalind Osgood, a member of the Broward County School Board and minister at the New Mount Olive Baptist Church in Fort Lauderdale.
She is also the leader of the “God Squad” that formed in May. The group organized an anti-flakka prayer vigil Thursday evening at the First Baptist Church Fort Lauderdale that drew about 50 movers and shakers from the medical, law enforcement and religious community
“It’s worse than ebola — this is bioterrorism,” said Dr. Nabil El Sana-
the cases identified in 2014.
The toll in local emergency rooms— North Broward Hospital District is tracking 20 flakka cases a day — has prompted forums, prayer marches or community meetings almost everyday, said Jim Hall, part of the Flakka Action Team and a drug epidemiologist at Nova Southeastern University.
Broward Health has posted a 3-minute video on its website with grisly images of flakka’s effect on the body. The God Squad is taking to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snap Chat to flood social media with its anti-flakka message. Fort Lauderdale police are planning a training session about the drug.
Pompano Beach City Commissioner Edward Phillips has been to four anti-flakka events this year. He said the potential destruction of flakka seems far worse than anything the crack epidemic produced.
“The flakka thing is probably two or three or four times more intense,” he said. “Crack makes you an addict. But flakka makes you hallucinate and sends you to a place where you can’t come back.”
The God Squad’s Osgood said she’s going door to door in the Sistrunk Boulevard corridor to spread the word about the synthetic drug’s devastation.
Somehow, though, Maria Bradley’s own 20-year experience with drug addiction was not enough to convince her sons to shun the flakka circulating through Pompano Beach neighborhoods. One son, Christopher, 24, is in jail because of it. And the elder, Jordan Pinkney, 25, is now three weeks sober after a few months of what police call “$5 insanity.”
He said it seemed cheap and easy to get. But then came the costs. He woke up with a head injury he could not explain. He could feel air on flesh normally covered by skin.
“I had to go through it the hardway,” he said, recounting that he learned in a hospital emergency room how lucky hewas his kidneys hadn’t shut down. “If you are going to try it, it’s going to be a crazy life.”
Bradley said she couldn’t believe how quickly flakka took hold: “This is almost instantaneous. Take it today, by nextweek, no one knows who you are.”
Nova Southeastern’s Hall said the community is better off talking about flakka — even if it tarnishes Broward’s image — than pretending it’s not happening.
“Abuse of substances have been going on for thousands of years— mankind will likely always be turning to a quick high to change the way they feel,” he said. “We’re not going to end drug abuse, but maybe by working together we can reduce the emergency risk of flakka.”