Fatal drug overdoses surged in Nassau County last year, an increase from 2021 that officials blamed mostly on fentanyl, a cheap and deadly synthetic opioid, although opioid deaths registered a slight decline in Suffolk County.
More than 300 people died of fatal drug overdoses in Nassau last year, County Executive Bruce Blakeman said Tuesday in Garden City.
Exact numbers for 2022 were not immediately available, but there were 270 overdose deaths in 2021, according to the Nassau County coroner’s office. Fentanyl caused 190 of those deaths, the statistics show.
Blakeman reported the jump in fatal overdoses at a press conference with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who traveled to the Nassau County Police Intelligence and Training Center to announce a bill that New York-D filed and said it would allow the federal government to seize the assets of fentanyl traffickers.
WHAT TO KNOW
More than 300 people died of opioid overdoses in Nassau County last year, an increase from 2021, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman said Tuesday.
Officials blame fentanyl, a cheap and deadly synthetic opioidfor the most overdose deaths in both Nassau and Suffolk counties.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced a bill in the Senate with the goal of allowing the federal government to seize the assets of fentanyl traffickers, he said.
“These deaths have been fueled by the illegal trade in fentanyl that is primarily made with Chinese chemicals and supplies and manufactured in Mexico,” Gillibrand said.
Last year, 412 opioid overdoses were reported in Suffolk, according to the county medical examiner’s office, including 25 cases pending final clearance. The numbers show a 4.6% decrease from 2021, when 431 people died from opioid overdoses. Most of these deaths (383 last year and 399 in 2021) were related to fentanyl.
Suffolk had 390 fatal overdoses in 2020, a nearly 12 percent jump over 2019’s 349 deaths.
Nassau Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder blamed the rise in fatal overdoses on drug makers mixing cocaine, heroin and counterfeit prescription drugs with fentanyl, which the Drug Enforcement Administration says is 100 times more potent than morphine.
Six in 10 counterfeit pills analyzed by the DEA in 2022 contained a lethal dose of the synthetic opioid, the agency said, compared with 4 in 10 analyzed in 2021.
“These kids are taking simple Adderall in college, to help them with their studies and concentration, and that Adderall has been crushed and spiked with fentanyl, to try to suck them up to get them addicted so they can sell more,” Ryder said. . “It’s strictly a business model and it’s killing our kids.”
Thousands of Long Islanders have died from fatal overdoses since the opioid crisis began in the late 1990s, and drug-related deaths reached a record 109,689 nationwide last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in May. The previous record was set in 2021, when 107,622 died of drug overdose.
“I look around the United States and I see hundreds of people dying from fentanyl overdoses every day, it’s like a plane crashing every day,” Blakeman said.
Public health experts said isolation, depression and financial hardship caused by the COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in drug and alcohol abuse and overdose deaths.
Steve Chassman, executive director of the Long Island Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, said the past three years have brought “an abundance of pain and loss.”
“I also think their fentanyl is seeping into the national drug supply, and that’s why we don’t call some of these deaths overdoses, we call them poisonings,” said Chassman, who also appeared at the news conference . “When you buy Xanax on the street or from a friend without an appointment and then end up on a gurney with fentanyl, that’s poisoning.”
Gillibrand’s bill, The Fentanyl Eradication and Narcotics Deterrence (FEND) Off Fentanyl Act, would declare international fentanyl trafficking a national emergency and require the president to sanction trafficking organizations and key members. It would allow the federal government to seize the assets of US fentanyl traffickers and prohibit fentanyl traffickers from owning, investing or banking in this country.
“There is much more we can do at the federal level to prevent this dangerous drug from entering the United States,” Gillibrand said.
Michael O’Keeffe covers the Suffolk County Police and other Long Island law enforcement agencies. He is an award-winning journalist and co-author of two books, “The Card” and “American Icon.”
