 Hey there, we are a CCV students and each one of us study different aspects of the opioid crisis. My name is Marcel and I analyzed the harm of fentanyl in the state of Vermont and how it has increased deaths in this opioid crisis that we are still currently trying to solve. My name's Abe, I'm going to be going over where this opioid crisis came from and how it's affecting Vermont. My name is Corey, I focused on harm reduction in Vermont and how it's helped save lives over the past few years. Alright, to start the opioid crisis is a national wide event and it really started in 1990. 1990 was when doctors first really started to over prescribe opiates and a larger percentage of the population started to abuse opiates. So the reason that these companies, these doctors started to prescribe them at such a high rate is because a lot of big pharmacy companies were lying to the doctors, they were lying about the effects of some of the drugs they were prescribing, they were lying about the amounts that should be prescribed and so because of this they were pushing a lot of these really potent pills to doctors and telling them to prescribe them to just about anyone and because naturally with more people taking these pills that were much more addictive than the companies let the doctors know, naturally a lot more people got addicted to opioids. So that was in 1990, the second wave of the opioid crisis where a lot more overdoses started to come in was in 2010. 2010 was when heroin started to become more cheap and accessible on the market and so a lot of these people who started with an injury and they got an opioid prescription, prescriptions are expensive, they switched to heroin, it's a lot cheaper and it helps them with their addiction. And then the third wave came shortly after 2010 and 2013 when Fentanyl first hit the market and Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is very potent, she's going to talk more about that later. And then, sorry, so Vermont was hit especially hard by the opioid crisis. With 114 deaths in 2007 and 108 deaths in 2019, it's been consistently above the national average with opioid deaths per 100 people. Since then, Vermont has thankfully done a lot to help combat the opioid crisis and it's been a leader in many aspects in treating addicts and treating addiction like it's a disease and not like it's something to be punished and it tells more about what we've been doing. So I focus mostly on safe recovery of Vermont. They provide clean needles, Narcan in case of overdosing, drug testing kits to test for things like Fentanyl. They provide resources for recovery and jobs and housing, things like that. And one of the biggest goals in their program is obviously to get people clean but they don't just focus on that, they really help people every step of the way. So you don't have to be completely sober to get help from them. It's a judgment-free zone and I think just having the access to people that are non-judgmental, that you can form a relationship with is really important for addicts and will make them want to make better choices and get help. So yeah. Going off of what Abe was saying, Fentanyl is a huge issue, especially in the East Coast versus the West. We have a huge problem along the East Coast and the West Coast, you still have a large problem with heroin, but in the East Coast we're seeing a huge rise in Fentanyl drugs and also Fentanyl deaths because of overdose. Fentanyl is extremely potent and what Abe was talking about with the third wave of the opioid crisis, similar to what happened in the 90s, Fentanyl is an extremely powerful drug and therefore it is extremely expensive. Massive amounts of money were made off of Fentanyl. So now we are in a place where we do have a solution. We have Narcan, which can reverse an overdose, but that doesn't mean that Fentanyl is in any way, the market is in any way swayed. People are still using Fentanyl and even more dangerous, they're cutting it with other drugs, so if someone goes to use heroin it could very well be cut with Fentanyl and even the smallest dose of Fentanyl can cause someone to die. So there is a huge issue and there are things being done, especially in the state of Vermont we are seeing that, but across the US there is not nearly enough recognition and there is not enough punishment for people who are cutting Fentanyl into other drugs. Do you want to talk about the hub and spoke system? Yeah, and just to kind of reinforce just how crazy Fentanyl is, between 2011 and 2017 there was a 1,125% increase in Fentanyl related overdoses and nowadays in Vermont 75% of all of our overdoses are directly from Fentanyl. So it's becoming the main problem with the opioid crisis in Vermont. But yeah, the hub and spoke system is a system that was introduced in 2016 in Vermont and it's been pretty nationally studied because of its success rates. So essentially the hub is these centers where they give addicts treatment, they give them access to drugs to help them get off street drugs and the spoke is the contact they maintain with them when they're not in the system exactly. Since 2016 the hub and spoke system has gone from only 100 people using it to over 8,000 and of those 8,000% not a single one of them has overdosed in that time. So that's really promising and not only that but the patients who are in the hub and spoke system have seen some crazy numbers when it comes to slowing down with opioid use. Like 96% of them have stopped using injection drugs, 92% of them have already started to lean off opioids in general. So that's really promising. But yeah, the issue with Fentanyl is that even though we have this new system that seems really good, the hub and spoke system, it's helping a lot of people, Vermont has had a steady increase of overdosed deaths in the last year. That's because even though less people are using these drugs and access is more accessible to treatment, the Fentanyl is so deadly that the fact that it's still out there means more people are dying still despite the treatment available. So with that kind of out of the way, it raises a couple of questions which is, is Vermont doing enough to stop the Fentanyl, to stop the opioid crisis and what could we do to help these people who aren't being treated and are still dying every year? And as a group we actually made a video about this which you will see now. This is Vermont, so you want me to lie to you or you want to tell you the truth? Yeah, there it is. There's a lot going on and I'm just me, I'm just Daniel. Everyone just calls me just Daniel because they got really sexy blue eyes. You know, this is Vermont, so. No, I wouldn't say so. Not today, not in today's world. Today everything has been keeping right with itself, trying to keep the place clean. You know, I like that place. I mean there's absolutely a drug problem, not just Vermont, everywhere. Like you said, it's, it's bad. I mean I've had friends that I've lost to it and you know, it's not great. It's a bad thing. It's not effective and comprehensive. It seems like there's a, there's been a historical misunderstanding about how to treat and approach addiction generally. No, I wouldn't say so. Not today, not in today's world. Today everything has been keeping, keeping right with itself, trying to keep the place clean. You know. I absolutely do personally. Yeah, I think it's important that, you know, even if we're trying to fight one disease addiction, it's important to keep other diseases out of that fight. Well, people who have that affliction can find others in this type of same, type of play almost if they get that far, deep far into it, where they actually need help by helping hands, you know. I mean they can find others in the same boat, you know, people of the likeness and I think that'll probably work for them, you know, to try to find groups, that sort of thing. I don't know what's being done. So there's some places you can go to help save harbor and next month it's going to be a wet shelter it'll open up. Now that you've seen that video, I hope that it gives you a little bit more insight into how the citizens of Vermont feel about the current opioid crisis that we are trying to solve. I think it should also be said that like safe-using spots are a huge help. I mean, Hubbin spoke obviously as trying to wean people off, but there are people who are extremely addictive, extremely addicted to drugs and aren't necessarily in a place where they can go to the hubbin spoke so if you want to talk more about safe-using spots. So as I had said before, they provide like a variety of different things to just aid people in their recovery, whatever step they're at. So they could be like very, very set on not quitting and just, you know, things like that but their goal is overall just like reduce the harm that comes with, you know, using needles such as overdoses, spread of disease, all that fun stuff. They just really help not only like do that but like when you're talking to addicts about drug addiction and things like that, it like kind of naturally goes in a different direction. Like they'll kind of naturally like want to get help once they realize that these people are there to help them and not really judge them. So yeah. And I also think you brought up a really interesting point about kind of going straight to like mayors, like local mayors when you talked about the, where was it? Oh it was, there was a, there've been a couple examples of success stories and a lot of them actually revolve around these safe-using zones because if someone's using in a safe-using zone they're not going to have fentanyl in their heroin or whatever they're shooting up and they're not going to overdose, especially if they're being monitored. And at the end of the day the goal is to have as little overdose test as possible. And so there was a story about this guy in LA County and he was homeless and all his friends were overdosing all the time and he wanted to do something about it. And so he started, he got together with all his homeless friends and they came up with a system where every day, every couple hours throughout them they would all check spots where they know that the homeless people go to shoot up. And because of that they would consistently find people who were overdosing. And so just like that the overdose deaths of homeless people in this area dropped significantly because a lot of these homeless people are trying to get away from the cops, they're trying to be secretive about it, they're behind a dumpster, people don't know where to look for them. So just by looking for them they made a difference and he really stopped the overdose deaths. And so I think it's really an important thing to remember is that a lot of these people who are addicted, it wasn't their plan to get addicted to heroin and they don't want to be there just as much, they're preyed upon by these big pharmacy companies. I mean 80% of all people addicted or 80% of all heroin users have said that they started on a prescription opioid. So I think it's important that we look at them as victims of this crisis and we try to give them as much support as they can instead of just saying you're a drug addict, go kick sand. And there are also other places in the world that are actively trying to do things that decriminalize these people like in Portugal, the decriminalization of drugs and trying to make it so that way these people aren't put in a position where they're having to hide and they're not having to seek out drugs that are potentially laced with something as dangerous as fentanyl. So as like a long-term solution if we were to decriminalize certain drugs in the U.S. it could very well decrease the amount of overdose deaths we're seeing from people seeking out drugs that are cut with lots of incredibly dangerous substances. That's the thing about fentanyl is a lot of these users, they don't want fentanyl in any of their stuff, they're trying to avoid it, but it's a cheap way for drug dealers to cut their product, make it a little more potent, they cut it with fentanyl without the user's knowing. And so that's kind of the unique situation with fentanyl is nobody wants it. The users don't want it, there's no market for it there, but it's still being pushed. And so what you were saying about Portugal is how can we be sure there's no fentanyl in these drugs is if you decriminalize them and it became a statewide thing to distribute them because then you know where they're being made, you know they're safe, you can monitor who's using them and where it's being used, and then if you spend all that money that you've been spending on the war on drugs and in mass incarceration, you instead spend it on treating people and figuring out why they want to get addicted to drugs in the first place, that's where people have seen really successful long term. And Portugal's a great example of that. And you know having the hub and spoke system but not just having like you know having it across the U.S. just having spots like that because I know that I'm originally from Texas and there is not, there really aren't a lot of places like that where I'm from. So there is a huge addiction rate where I'm from because people don't have proper resources and the bigger the city the more access you have, the closer you are to the border, you have easier access to certain drugs and it just creates this climate of people who are constantly dying because they don't know what they're putting into their body. Yeah and you bring up a good point where it's hard in Texas because you have a lot of state borders and that's kind of the issue is this is a Vermont issue but it's also like an issue across the country and not enough is being done to first of all stop fentanyl getting into the country. Like there's a study where they studied six different fentanyl dealers and they would send it to the U.S. from China just through the mail system because of how outdated the U.S. mail system is they couldn't check it they couldn't make sure that wasn't happening. So I think for Vermont we can make it we can do examples like the hub and spoke system we can be a shining example but for this problem to really get solved it's going to need to be a national issue which it just doesn't seem to be at the moment. You also made another point where like the money that we invest on the Warren drugs if we were to invest that into making rehab centers with people who truly care and are invested in helping these people get off of drugs and to be clean then we could see the current rates that we're seeing like the one thousand one hundred twenty five percent we could see that go down to one percent zero percent if we tried hard enough it's just where we're investing our money are we investing it in the right places because from what has been going on and the rise in deaths obviously money is not going towards the right programs. Yeah I mean it all started I mean the war on drugs the mass incarceration it's the system in itself is pretty broken and is going to need to be a lot of big change to help the opioid crisis that's the big problem is you know decriminalizing drugs would be a huge issue I mean that's not going to pass overnight of revamping the postal service it's not a big issue and because you need these huge issues to take to tackle this huge issue it's just it's not being treated with the same you know intensity that it is I mean it's killing more people than anything else it's killing more people in car accidents it's the number one killer of America of Americans and it's kind of being pushed aside as like a secondary issue when it really needs it needs more limelight it needs more focus and it needs more more people to care about it. Thank you for watching.