West DSM News

Fentanyl follows a winding path before it ends up in Iowa.

Sgt. Jason Heintz, who serves as the West Des Moines Police Department’s public information officer, said the deadly drug often passes through multiple hands before it ends up in the body of a drug user.

Often, the person who consumes fentanyl isn’t even aware they are using it, Heintz said. That leads to overdoses, and in one or two cases a year in the city, death.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, 841,000 Americans have died from a drug overdose in the last three decades, with 70% of those deaths linked to opioid use.

“It’s not as if it gets distributed on its own. So what drug manufacturers do is sometimes they will lace, for instance, heroin with fentanyl to increase the effect, and you're buying a drug from a drug dealer who may not even know what’s in it. The only person who really knows is the person who manufactured it,” Heintz said. “So it could have gone through several different people before it gets to the end user on the streets.”

Heintz, who has been with the police department since 1992, said fentanyl has been on the drug scene for about a decade. Police often aren’t aware they are dealing with until tests are performed.

“They may or they may not,” he said. “That’s the problem with illicit drugs, is you don’t know what you are taking. If I stop someone right now in a car and we seize what appears to be heroin and we send it in to be tested and it takes a couple of three or four months for that to happen, we wouldn't know until three or four months after the fact it has fentanyl in it necessarily. So it's not like we would know that, right?”

He said dealers may not be aware of the potency of the drug they are selling. They are just trying to offer drugs that their customers want, and if it is stronger than previous doses, that often is attractive to long-term users.

“It’s usually introduced with something else generally to heighten the effect of that drug,” Heintz said. “Just a very little bit of fentanyl is extremely potent. Because if you took any amount of fentanyl beyond a little bit, it's deadly generally.

“So what it does, like I said, is generally it heightens the effect of the drug that it's being, you know, like from with heroin. It will heighten the effects of the heroin and makes it stronger and makes it more potent,” he said. “And people who are heroin or meth or cocaine addicts, sometimes, you know, after they abuse it for a long time, they become resistant to it, so they have to take more and more to get that to get high.”

Heintz said drug users in all strata of society are vulnerable to fentanyl in West Des Moines, which has been growing at a steady pace for decades and now has a population around 70,500.

“There is no specific. So it's everybody,” he said. “There's not one specific community I would tell you.”

There was a 20% increase in fentanyl overdoses in Iowa between 2019 and 2020. The Des Moines-based Carr Law Firm PLC reported that one of the leading causes of these overdoses is the contamination of other street drugs like herfoin with fentanyl.

The Drug Enforcement Administration reported that in Iowa it has seized over 15,000 counterfeit prescription pills containing fentanyl in 2021, over triple the amount seized in 2020, KIMT News 3 reported. The DEA’s analysis concluded that two in five counterfeit pills could lead to a lethal overdose. Federal officials noted that the vast majority of these counterfeit pills are produced in Mexico.

The volume of fentanyl seized at the southern border is potent enough to kill 2 billion people, The Washington Free Beacon reported. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid drug. Opioid overdoses have accounted for 70% of the 841,000 drug-related deaths since 1991. This year is set to break the all-time record for drug overdoses in the U.S.

“Just like any other illicit drug, it comes through the borders, you know, either by carried by people or through vehicles or through by ships or by planes,” Heintz said. “The normal illicit drug channels that all the other drugs come into the United States, a lot of it through the southern border. And it winds all the way up in Iowa.

“We have marijuana, heroin, cocaine, meth, all here,” he said. “They all come the same way. So it's just one more drug, along with all the other illicit drugs that make it to Iowa and everywhere else."

Fentanyl seizures at the southern border have already more than doubled the 2020 numbers. The Drug Seizure Statistics tool run by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agency disclosed last week that agents had already seized 9,337 pounds of fentanyl by the end of July 2021, a 94% increase from the 4,791 pounds seized in the entirety of the year 2020. In 2019, the agency seized just 2,804 pounds.

The state of West Virginia has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the decision to end Migrant Protection Protocols put in place by former President Donald Trump.

“By its consequences burdening and distracting the Border Patrol, the termination of the MPP decreases the security of the border against fentanyl trafficking between ports of entry, leading directly to both increased numbers of smuggling attempts and increased rates of success in evading Border Patrol,” the lawsuit states, according to The Washington Free Beacon.