Can this town save itself from fentanyl addiction? The race to turn around a threatened community

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2023-03-29/the-deadly-fentanyl-scourge-in-a-new-mexico-town

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Shoppers and workers drove past addicts roaming Riverside Drive, the main drag in this town of 10,500. Kids played in trailer parks. Contractors loaded pickups. Cars came and went from a methadone clinic. Men wearing hoodies and expectant gazes drifted toward a house with barred windows. They rustled pockets for cash. Others headed toward the marshes on the city’s fringes, where, as the morning frost lifted, Cristian Madrid-Estrada, a bearded man of 23, sat with a gun holstered on his hip at the Española Pathways Shelter.

“You can’t believe it sometimes,” said Madrid-Estrada, the homeless shelter’s chief executive officer. “I was here last night when my fiancee called and told me someone was trying to break into our house. He was at the windows.”

Madrid-Estrada spends much of his time at the shelter, giving addicts beds and warmth on frigid nights. But like others in this city, he contends with burglaries, robberies and thefts carried out by fentanyl addicts desperate to fuel their next high. The state police and the county sheriff have been called in to help Española’s understaffed Police Department, which reported 224 burglary calls last year, up from from 155 in 2020.

Rallying voices are trying to fix this community under siege. But it’s unclear if the story of Española, where a quarter of the population is poor and the murals of the dead are painted on junction boxes, will be a narrative about how to save a town from addiction — or lose it. In a one-year period ending in June 2022, Rio Arriba County reported 50 fatal overdoses, giving it the highest rate in New Mexico. It was about four times the national rate of approximately 33 per 100,000.

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But over the last two years, the market has been taken over by fentanyl, which is cut with other substances and at times is so potent that it can take at least two doses of Narcan to revive an overdose victim.

[NJCher]

1. If anyone ever doubted

That there could be hell on earth, this article is proof that there is.

Can you imagine wasting 40 years of your life on drugs?

I personally think a big part of the problem is the dollar hoarding by the top 2%. This money needs to be distributed throughout society in the form of helping people find meaningful work, having jobs that produce meaningful work, and social services that help people who have had a tough upbringing.

Not everyone thinks they are deserving of a rewarding, meaningful life. I happen to think everyone has some unique quality or gift that can contribute to the overall good. We need to help people find that quality, that gift, or talent and help them put it to work.