![]() ![]() We need a statewide protocol on how every law-enforcement agency addresses these deaths and how they investigate.” “Of those five counties, only one has ever had any death-by-distribution prosecutions, and that being Franklin County. “We need to see to it that the death-by-distribution law is enforced in this state and it’s not happening,” Drewes said. The law gave prosecutors across the state the right to charge distributors with a felony if their product led to someone’s death.Ī WCNC story from early 2022 showed that after two years on the books, the death-by-distribution law had been used fewer than 75 times despite around 7,000 people dying of drug overdoses in the state during that period. In addition, Drewes said North Carolina needs to use the death-by-distribution law that was passed in 2019. ![]() We need people in the schools educating our children. We need public service telling people what to do with fentanyl. “When COVID came out, within weeks we knew exactly what to do. “And another thing, public service announcements,” she said. She said the answer is to close the southern border and to take the fight to the drug cartels. Graphic illustrating North Carolina fentanyl deaths by year, as reported by NCOCME They don’t know they’re getting fentanyl.” ![]() “We’ve got children being murdered, and they are being murdered. “It’s made in China in illegal labs and is sent straight to Mexican cartels and through our open southern borders,” Drewes said. In the first quarter of 2022, the NCOCME reported a 5% increase in overall overdose deaths from 2021, showing 2022 is on track to meet, or maybe even exceed, last year’s record devastation.įor Drewes, she thinks both the national and state governments have failed to address this disaster. This was a 30% increase from the 2,426 deaths the year before. The most-recent data released by the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner showed that in 2021, fentanyl-overdose deaths hit a record, with 3,163. The majority of these deaths, over 71,000, were due to fentanyl. But the current problem now dwarfs those numbers, with 107,000 dying last year from overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. While only about 5,000 people typically died from drug overdoses per year in the United States, this number jumped to over 10,000 per year in the late 1990s due to a surge in heroin use. On that billboard there is a 15-year-old girl, a 14-year-old boy, and a 2-year-old baby, all dead from fentanyl. “My daughter is on a billboard in Kentucky. “We see it every day every day it’s several new moms on that Facebook page that just lost their child to fentanyl poisoning,” Drewes said. She said she is also in Lost Voices of Fentanyl, a national group that has over 20,000 people, so she is not surprised at the kind of response she gets when organizing gatherings. “I thought I was the only one this had ever happened to, to my child then through social media, I was finding all these other mothers,” Drewes said. She did not die for nothing.”ĭrewes said her group, the Forgotten Victims of Vance, Granville, Franklin and Warren Counties, was an organic meeting of mothers who had lost their children to opioid, especially fentanyl, overdoses. “I fight so that she did not die in vain,” Drewes said on why she organizes on the issue.
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