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Rural Colorado police chief bust myths, spreads awareness of fentanyl crisis
M30 pills containing fentanyl (U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency photo).
Rick Brandt, who’s the police chief in the northeastern Colorado town of Evans, considers himself a bit of a myth buster on the fentanyl front – a battle he’s been in the trenches of since 2007 when he took over as top cop in this city of 22,000 south of Greeley following 26 years with the Aurora Police Department.
First, in training at least 230 police agencies across the state in carrying the opioid antagonist medicine naloxone, which rapidly reverses an opioid overdose, Brandt aggressively counteracts the myth that physically coming into contact with fentanyl can cause an overdose.
“That’s not true. There’s never been a bonafide, proven case of that,” Brandt said in a recent phone interview. “We see these videos of police officers, they’re searching your car and they say, ‘Oh, look, there’s white powder,’ and then they pass out on the street and their partner started administering Narcan. They’re not overdosing.”
This is an important point Brandt makes to first responders because of their possible reluctance to swiftly administer Narcan – the most widely used brand delivering naloxone – to an overdose victim. Misinformation can cost lives, Brandt argues, and the myth simply is not backed by data.
“If you think about it, if you could get high by touching [fentanyl], these users wouldn’t have to inject it, they could just hold it in their hand,” Brandt said. “So that’s one of the myths I try to bust with the public is, if you do have incidental contact with it, just wash your hands with soap and water, treat it like a hazardous material, don’t play with it, but you’re not going to overdose.”
Counterfeit opioids such as the M30 pills, or blues as they’re called on the street, are made in labs where there’s no regulatory agency overseeing how much fentanyl is going into each pill, Brandt said, meaning any random pill can contain a potentially lethal dose.
Brandt is working to get the public more involved in overdose prevention and treatment. Beyond his role with law enforcement statewide, he’s been providing community groups with training and naloxone, including the administration and medical staff of his local school district, a local university, area concert promoters, and even local libraries.
“It’s not doing the communities a lot of good if law enforcement’s the only one that has [naloxone],” said Brandt, who also encourages young people to carry the life-saving medicine. “So what I’m trying to do is penetrate this stuff out into the community so it’s more ubiquitous … and not just from first responders.”
Finally, Brandt doesn’t believe in the militarized war on drugs approach to reversing the rising tide of opioid overdose deaths in Colorado and across the nation, where at the federal level former President Donald Trump wants to fire missiles at Mexican drug labs and possibly send in troops.
Both Trump and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris are talking tough on the border (most of the fentanyl in the United States is coming in from Mexico) and about cracking down on drug traffickers. But law enforcement can’t be the only line of defense, Brandt argues.
“If what I did in my job worked — which means I arrest people, we adjudicate them, we incarcerate them, and we stigmatize them for their use, possession or distribution of drugs — if that worked, we wouldn’t be here today,” Brandt said. “The problem is that we’ve been doing this for decades and the problem has gotten worse instead of better.”
Perhaps the biggest myth Brandt is looking to bust is that law enforcement alone can win the day.
“So I’ve shifted my belief that we really need to focus on education, treatment and give the rehabilitation option,” Brandt said. “Treatment works, treatment works, I know this for a fact, and rehabilitation is possible, but throwing people in jail without those tools is not successful.”
According to KFF Health News (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), fatal opioid deaths — despite increased spending on and availability of naloxone through the state’s Opioid Antagonist Bulk Purchase Fund – increased to 1,292 in Colorado last year, up from 1,160 in 2022. There were 1,811 overall drug overdose deaths in 2022, so opioids accounted for 65%.
In 2023, approximately five Coloradans died every day from a drug overdose, and in the last decade overall drug overdose deaths in the state have more than doubled on a per-year basis. Prescription painkillers such as Oxycontin and non-prescribed drugs such as heroin and fentanyl now account for approximately 75% of those overall overdose deaths.
Mary Bono, a former Republican U.S. House member from California who moved to Durango in 2020, now serves as the chair and CEO of Mothers Against Prescription Drug Abuse.
“I got into this because I had a child who in high school who became addicted to opioids, and now I have a grandchild who’s 12 and I’m at this kind of fearful point that he’s about to enter into these very scary times,” Bono said in a recent phone interview. “Twelve isn’t unreasonably young [to worry] any longer because kids are getting fentanyl-laced pills off of Snapchat. A lot of these overdose deaths are preventable if we focus on better policies.”
Bono says border enforcement is one of those strategies.
“So I was in Congress for 15 years, and during those 15 years [the border] was an impossible problem to tackle for lots of reasons, basically special interests,” Bono said. “I’m a centrist. I’m actually a registered independent. No side’s ever going to get everything they want. [February’s bipartisan immigration] bill would’ve been something. I would’ve voted for it.”
But another thing she’d like to see is states increasing the variety of FDA-approved naloxone drugs available to first responders and community members. She concurs with Brandt that opioid antagonist medications for overdose prevention need to become more ubiquitous.
“[Alternative drugs] have gone through the FDA approval process and unfortunately some states are sort of slow to open up the opportunity for entities to purchase whatever they think is best,” Bono said. “So it’s just a little bit of a disconnect, and at the end of the day, innovation matters in all sorts of aspects of this opioid and fentanyl epidemic.”
Brandt said it can require up to six four-milligram nasal applications of Narcan to prevent an overdose death depending on the severity, and he said he’s also obtained eight-milligram doses of Kloxxado from the state’s bulk fund, adding there is some debate among harm reductionists about utilizing the higher doses. But Brandt says he’s purely focused on preventing deaths.
“Our Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Ned Calonge, has signed a statewide standing order that allows the administration of naloxone, which is based on current data and research,” Vanessa Bernal, spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) wrote in an email. “His order does not include other emerging medications.”
Perhaps more urgently, as first reported by KFF Health News, the CDPHE’s bulk fund is now without a recurring source of funding.
“I can confirm that the Colorado Naloxone Bulk Fund has less than $9 million remaining,” Bernal emailed. “Approximately $8.6 million of funding is currently available for new naloxone orders. We continue to spend approximately $500,000 per month on the distribution of naloxone.”
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, whose office has brought millions in opioid lawsuit settlement funds into the state over the years, said in an email statement via a spokesperson that he will continue to work with other agencies to ensure the bulk fund for naloxone continues:
“I was encouraged to learn that the State Behavioral Health Administration will be contributing several million dollars to maintain continued programming for the Naloxone Bulk Purchasing Program. My office is committed to doing our part, which is why we are also going to provide funds to ensure that the necessary budget remains in place for the next year. Going forward, we will be developing options to ensure that Colorado continues to have the funds it needs to support this life-saving effort and ensure that we don’t have a gap in funding.”
Editor’s note: This story first appeared on the Colorado Times Recorder website.
David O. Williams
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