Commander Vic DeSantis: The Dangers of Fentanyl

 "What is Fentanyl and why does this drug matter to me?"
" I don't do drugs and my child knows to say "no."
 Fentanyl has been found in all 50 states; from metropolitan to rural areas, no community is immune from this drug.  It is highly addictive and often mixed with other drugs or pressed into pill form, disguised, leading to the poisoning of the unsuspecting user.

Commander Vic DeSantis, Brevard County Sheriff's office,  uses this opportunity to educate our community and every community throughout America about the dangers of fentanyl-related poisonings.  It is becoming the leading killer of adults ages 18 to 45.

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Transcript

[00:01:37]
 To find information on how to contact me, to hear other stories and find valuable resources, visit www. Ianadblue. Net and please, as you listen, if the message moves you, share the story with friends and family. The more we share, the more we learn and the more we can help. Please note I Need Blue does contain sensitive topics which could be triggering.
 
 [00:02:06]
 Please seek help if needed and remember, you always come first. I would like to welcome my guest today, commander Victor DeSantis, with Bravard County Sheriff's office. We first met in August at a local Fentanyl summit where you, along with others, discuss the imminent threat fentanyl poses to our community. The summit was informative and impactful, but there is still so much more we need to do and so much more we need to learn. I am glad you accepted my invitation to speak with me about this murder drug and the fentanyl poisonings which are happening every day.
 
 [00:02:46]
 Welcome Commander DeSantis to the I need blue podcast. Good morning, Jen. Thank you very much for your invitation. A very important conversation today for something that is definitely impacting our society and in particular our young people. So it's important that we get the word out.
 
 [00:03:06]
 And again, I really appreciate the invitation to come and speak with you about this. Absolutely. This past weekend in DC. There was a national rally to stop fentanyl poisonings and raise awareness about this growing crisis. Last night I was watching a Netflix show and they were trying to take down a drug king and they mentioned fentanyl.
 
 [00:03:28]
 So there is conversation about it. Fentanyl is real. Vic, can you tell us how real Fentanyl is? Jenna, I think the best example of how real this is. If you turn on the news at any given point in the day and watch it for more than ten or 15 minutes, you're probably going to see some national or local story that relates to a fentanyl poisoning or an overdose or the trafficking coming across the southern border.
 
 [00:03:57]
 It is definitely something that is very much in the public's mind right now. As a population, we probably have a small but growing percentage of families who have been affected by it, but that number continues to grow year over year. It's very difficult to explain to the audience, who has no experience in either drug enforcement or controlled substance abuses with family members or friends, just how dangerous this drug is. I heard yesterday that the statistic is it is now the number one killer in ages 18 to 45. Is that a correct fact?
 
 [00:04:33]
 I believe it is. I'm not exactly what the source of that information is, but I can tell you in our local experiences here in Florida and throughout the Southeast, the number of fentanyl poisonings are greatly superseding those of even heroin or other opiate drugs. Yeah, it's crazy, because fentanyl is laced, right? That's what's going on with fentanyl. And that's why we are calling it a poisoning, because while somebody may have ordered heroin, while it's actually been laced with fentanyl, but they don't know that.
 
 [00:05:07]
 Yeah, let's talk about that for just a second. Fentanyl is now in the minds of a lot of people in the year 2022, but we're talking about a drug that goes back 62 years. Originally, fentanyl was synthesized in 1960 by a Belgian scientist, and it was primarily developed as a pain management and a painkiller for people with more or less terminal conditions. So go from 1960 to 1968 wasn't until 68 when the US FDA actually got involved with approving it as an analgesic medicine. And then again, it really was not put into use widespread in the United States until about four years later in 1972.
 
 [00:05:49]
 And even at that time, the FDA was using it as an intravenous concoction with another drug for pain management. So we have gone from, again, something like an Oxycodone or OxyContin, which is developed for pain management over a period of time, quickly developed into a substance of widespread abuse. To answer your question directly, yes, there is really, outside of very acute pain management, there is no other use for fentanyl as a drug. It is not a recreational drug, it is not marijuana, it is not cocaine or any of those things that you would think is party drugs or club drugs. Molly, for instance, the potency of fentanyl as it's being mixed and adulterated in with other drugs is what is causing the surge in the overdose and overdose poisonings that are associated with the drug.
 
 [00:06:47]
 Thank you so much. I know when you and I first talked, I did not realize that fentanyl had existed so long and that it was used previously for pain management. So again, we have something that was beneficial and now has been taken and is used to kill people when it gets into the wrong hands. So we know, fence and all, there are no labs in America. I am unaware of any existing, what we would call a super lab that would generate fentanyl is a completely synthetic drug.
 
 [00:07:22]
 It's not a plant like cannabis. It's not processed from a coca leaf like cocaine would be. It is strictly a concoction made up by chemists. And over time, the original fentanyl equation or formula, if you would, has been adulterated. Now we have car fentanyl, which is even a stronger derivative of the original fentanyl drug.
 
 [00:07:41]
 And again, with a background in chemistry, you have to think Breaking Bad a little bit here. Anybody that has that basic pharmaceutical knowledge and chemical background, and I'm not saying everybody can do it, but those that are of the mind to do it, they can change the molecular structure of the drug. And as we've seen, as it's morphed into car fentanyl, it has become even more lethal because it's more potent than the original version. Wow. How is that drug getting into the United States?
 
 [00:08:09]
 Well, that drug is primarily coming in through the United States, through the southern border. The fentanyl trade probably at its origin as an illicit drug substance. The majority of that was coming from China and the Chinese criminal enterprises have now joined forces with their fellow criminals down in Mexico and South America. Because there's money in it. If you make it illegal, somebody will find a way to sell it.
 
 [00:08:39]
 And that goes for just about every product. If you think about it, you outlaw this drug, somebody will create a black market to sell it. You make vape juice illegal, somebody will find a way to produce it and get it to market. You make gun control more strict. People will find a way to produce ghost guns and sell them on the black market.
 
 [00:08:57]
 So it's kind of the law of unintended consequences. Every time we try and outlaw something that there is a profit margin to, somebody is going to find a way to make a dollar bill all that. The same thing is happening here with fentanyl. And again, outside of strict pain management, and when I mean pain management, I mean under the supervision of a medical professional, there really is no legitimate purpose for fentanyl when it's being mixed in with even the most benign of substances, cannabis. Sometimes that happens on purpose.
 
 [00:09:32]
 We've seen fentanyl poisonings or overdoses occur by people smoking cannabis that had been placed on the same scale where powdered fentanyl had been laid. So they're not expecting to go home on a Friday night to relax and smoke a little bit of cannabis and watch whatever their favorite show is, get up and eat some Fritos. Later they're not expecting to smoke something like that and end up in respiratory and cardiac arrest because the drug that they've chosen, which is by itself relatively, and I'm going to say relatively harmless, has been adulterated or accidentally mixed with something else. We've had instances where the fentanyl has been pressed into pill like substances that greatly resemble Xanax or Z bars. So you have these teens or young adults, particularly in the university setting, what have you, who are maybe exploring that for anxiety or getting prepared for tests or things like that, and they go to somebody that they may or may not know and say, hey, I'm really nervous about this test.
 
 [00:10:39]
 I really want to calm down a little bit. Can I get a little Xanax from you? And what they don't realize is they're not ingesting Xanax to calm down. They're ingesting something that has been polluted with fentanyl and they don't survive it. Yeah, you said so many things there.
 
 [00:10:56]
 So, yes, they're pressed to look like pills, like you said, Xanax, but I've also seen them now they're colored like candy. How much fentanyl does one person have to ingest to die? Because this is called the murder drug. Yeah, it's usually about two milligrams. For an average person that has no tolerance for that whatsoever, it's about two milligrams, really.
 
 [00:11:21]
 If you took a number two pencil and you dipped it into a bag of fentanyl and whatever was left on the tip of that. That's just about enough to kill an average adult. Let alone a child. Again. Who has no fentanyl tolerance.
 
 [00:11:35]
 Who has not ingested it before and survived it. Or has stepped up from lower milligrams of that. It will stop your heart and will stop your breathing. Wow. So essentially a few grains.
 
 [00:11:47]
 Yeah, about two grains of salt, if you think about it in that point. So if you could look through a microscope at two grains of salt, that's about two milligrams of fentanyl. And that's really all it takes to kill the average human. And that's why it is so important that people recognize fentanyl and understand truly how dangerous it is. So we talked about the southern border and that it's coming through there.
 
 [00:12:11]
 Let's get a little bit closer to home. So now we're in Florida, and you and I kind of talked about the major highways and how that's impacting the numbers here in Bervard County and whatnot. So can you break that down a little bit for us? I can. When we talk about the southern border, we're talking about the southern border of Texas and Mexico or New Mexico and Mexico.
 
 [00:12:35]
 Here in Bervard County, we are actually part of a federal initiative, and you and I spoke about this before. It's called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. And that's not a term that's used in a derogatory fashion. It's basically just a grouping of counties or agencies within a specific region. They usually have an executive director of some kind.
 
 [00:12:57]
 What they do is they coordinate the information among those respective counties or agencies, and they also provide some additional funding that comes from the federal government for drug enforcement initiatives. So here in Florida, we have some very large points of ingress into the state with a lot of people traveling through there. And my examples would be the port of Miami, the port in fort Lauderdale, port canaveral. You have major airports in Miami, in Tampa, in Lauderdale and Orlando, and not to mention two specific corridors which are I 95, which leads from Miami all the way up the eastern seaboard, and then I 75, which connects southern Florida up into the Georgia area. Before it leaves the state, you have another major quarter that runs east and west, and it's called interstate ten.
 
 [00:13:47]
 Historically speaking, I 95 and I 75 have been major corridors for drug trafficking, and that probably hails all the way back to the 1980s when we talked about the cocaine cowboys back then. Cocaine is not indigenous to Florida either. It's grown in south America in process from coca leaves and then TCOs. Transnational criminal organizations are the ones that bring that by whatever method they can into the United States. And I'm talking about kilos and kilos of cocaine.
 
 [00:14:16]
 So step forward to 2022. A little bit different distribution process, but it's still coming into Florida through those methods. So whether it's flown into Florida or it's traveling by truck or car, that narcotic that's entering down there through Texas, being pushed by those cartels, making money in partnership with the Chinese, it's filtering out to the United States, and it's certainly coming into Florida as well. For my local audience, it's going to say, bring that in even a little bit closer and where we sit in our surrounding counties. Okay, so let's talk about our region, if it will.
 
 [00:14:51]
 That's a little bit easier to talk about. What we have seen since 2018 is the majority of the, let's call them at this point, overdose deaths that were occurring between the orange ozeola boulevard county area. Those debts that were attributed to illegal or illicit drug use were primarily based on heroin products or other opiates. So we were coming off the generation of the pill mills and moving back into strait heroin, which was finding its way into the country, and that is a result of, I call it the sausage effect. So when you squeeze one end of a sausage, what's going to happen?
 
 [00:15:34]
 Something's going to come out on the other end. When I was operating as a supervisor in narcotics, we had come off a period of methamphetamine and moved back into the cannabis trade because the drug trafficking organizations in south Florida had moved back into cannabis. They were springing up grow houses all over the place. So my guys were chasing grow houses all over borvard county, and there were a lot of them. When I departed SIU to go into the command, they were moving back into the pills because that had become the prolific drug.
 
 [00:16:09]
 It's a very secular process. So for probably four or five years, they clamp down on the pill mills and the opiates and the prescriptions that were being written by unscrupulous physicians. Then we kind of got our head wrapped around that problem. It was about that time that people were moving away from opiates and discovering fentanyl. So here we are in this period of time dealing with yet another drug.
 
 [00:16:36]
 Because we've enforced this one so well, this one has now sprung up. The unfortunate part about fentanyl is its lethality is much greater than the ones that preceded it, even in heroin. Let me answer your question directly. About 76% of our debts that are occurring in this region for the past two years have a fentanyl component to it. Now, that's not all debts.
 
 [00:17:02]
 That is debts related to illicit drug use, overdose or poisonings. Let's put that into context. So a little over seven out of ten people that will end up at a medical examiner as a victim of a poison or overdose, there is a fentanyl aspect to that death. So think about that number. Seven out of every ten of those.
 
 [00:17:27]
 Wow. And then you go back to the fact that it was just like a few grains of salt amount of fentanyl. Yeah, it's a staggering sum when you add it up. I think in 2019, we were looking at, I don't know, somewhere around 1100 in this region between the different medical examiners. And in the course of about 18 months, that jumped up 404%.
 
 [00:17:48]
 It was over 2200 change. Obviously, the problem is not getting better. And again, a lot of these people who are using drugs recreationally or as a byproduct of developing an addiction to them, they're not taking fentanyl to ease their mental strain. They're being poisoned by fentanyl because it's being put into the drug that they're choosing, whether that's a pill or, like I said, a Xanax or even cannabis. I can't give you an exact estimate of out of that, seven out of ten people, maybe four or five of them, had no intention of ingesting fentanyl whatsoever.
 
 [00:18:28]
 They just were the victim of it and it caused their death. When you're given something and you don't know that fentanyl is in there, then, yeah, technically that's poisoning. I think the intent of the dealers, frankly, is to get you addicted to it because it is an addictive substance. It's no different than oxycodone or OxyContin. Once you start on that path, you can need more and more and more.
 
 [00:18:54]
 Back in the heroin days, we used to call that chasing the dragon. You would start out near the first time you thought this was the greatest drug you'd ever taken, and you could not believe the sensation it gave you. And two or three more times down the road, you were needing more and more and more of that to try and achieve that same level of high, if you will, that same euphoric feeling you had the first time, because your body builds that tolerance to it. So at some point, you need so much that that drug and fentanyl is one of them, is you're going to reach the lethal dose where your body is going to say, yeah, I had a tolerance until yesterday, and today I'm just going to shut you off because your heart is going to stop. You're going to go into respiratory arrest.
 
 [00:19:39]
 Your brain is going to die. And if we can't bring you back very quickly, you're either going to die or you're going to end up disabled for the rest of your life. And if it is possible to bring someone back, how do you do that? For years now, we've used narcan, which is readily available to all first responders. It's becoming available to members of the public now, too.
 
 [00:19:59]
 The narcan is nasal spray. It's very easy to administer. It usually takes one or two doses to actually bring somebody out of an overdose or a poisoning fog in order to get them to a medical facility to be treated. And my understanding of it, and I'm not a medical professional, but the narcan itself actually disrupts the attachment of the connectors within the brain so the drug can stop having that effect on the brain and shutting it down again until you can move them to a medical facility where they can be treated properly. It's not the end all and be all.
 
 [00:20:31]
 It's a Band Aid treatment so you can get somebody to an emergency room. Because we have seen people that when they know they're doing drugs, they'll have narcan nearby and they'll try and administer it. And you can bring somebody out of an overdose or a poisoning temporarily, but when a narcan starts to wear, they can relapse back into that. So what we do as first responders is if we have to administer it, that person goes to the hospital. They need to be under the care of a medical doctor.
 
 [00:20:58]
 Are you able to share any recent drug busts or anything that you've had in our area to kind of put into context? This is here and this is what we have seen. Great timing on this podcast. Yeah. Just last week on Thursday afternoon, we culminated a case that our Special Investigations Unit have been working for some time.
 
 [00:21:20]
 That was a group of players, as we call them, up in the Titusville area. And over the course of the investigation and all of this has already been released, I'm going to share it with you. It's not a secret anymore. That case was worked by our agents in coordination with one of our federal partners. Over a period of time, we purchased, I believe, 300oz of fentanyl from a dealer locally.
 
 [00:21:46]
 By the time that we had culminated those purchases. We worked up a search warrant and an arrest warrant for the offenders. I believe when they hit the house on Thursday. The last report I saw was nearly another 200 grams of fentanyl that was seized. Along with some other drugs and the other paraphernalia of the drug trade.
 
 [00:22:08]
 Some guns and things like that. That went with it. A little bit of cash. That one investigation alone resulted in a seizure of about 500oz of fentanyl and that's a half a kilo is probably enough to kill a few thousand people, if not in the tens of thousands, depending on how it was distributed and what it was mixed with. So, yeah, that's a lot of fentanyl.
 
 [00:22:33]
 We are a bit fortunate here in Bovard County where we have strong law enforcement. We have great prosecutors here that go after this stuff. I can't say to you, do we have a handle on it? Of course we don't. We don't really have a handle on any crime.
 
 [00:22:46]
 If you think about that, in any law enforcement leader that tells you that they do is probably being disingenuous. You can reduce the crime level, you can reduce the drug abuse level in your community, but the one thing we cannot control is the user base, because somebody is always going to want to do it and they'll find a way to get it, whether it's locally or they have to travel to another county or to another state or have it shipped to them. If they want it and they're going to use it, they're going to find a way to get it. Richard Nixon started the war on drugs in the 19 seven s. It's 2022.
 
 [00:23:18]
 It's been going on a long time. I'm not sure if we're winning, I'm not sure if we're losing. Seems like we're fighting it to a standstill, though, right? So we have our law enforcement out there to fight this and do everything you can with the resources you have available. What can parents do?
 
 [00:23:36]
 There's always, like you said, somebody that's going to want it, that's going to want to sell it, that's going to want to make the money. So we have to, as parents, take control then of what our kids do, what can they do? Well, my best advice, and I'm not going to pontificate on this matter, but I'm the father of four children. They're all adults now and they're all healthy and employed and I've been very fortunate. You grow up the child of dad's a cop and Mom's a schoolteacher, there's not a lot of latitude in your life.
 
 [00:24:06]
 We tend to think we raised them the right way. I think by the grace of God, we did. So my advice to parents is it's probably never too early to start talking about these issues. We want our kids to be kids and we want them to enjoy the benefits of childhood because once it's gone as, you and I know it never comes back. So they should be enjoying that period in their life, but when they get into the ten, 1112 and 13 years of age range, that's a time where you probably need to start sitting down with them.
 
 [00:24:41]
 One of the greatest conduits, best word I can come up with for getting these children to do things they would not do is the cellular telephone. We have a lot of parents that are quick to give their twelve and 13 year olds the latest and greatest iPhone version and that seems to be the end of their responsibility as handing them a phone and said, if you need me or something happens at school, call me. There's a lot that goes on with those electronic devices. We see that every day in all aspects of law enforcement and in the drug trade in particular. Probably one of the greatest inventions ever for the drug trade with Snapchat you have these instant messages you can send back and forth.
 
 [00:25:23]
 You can make them disappear so that they're not on the phone. So as parents. If you're going to have that kind of resource off to your young person. You need to be mindful of who they're communicating with. What they're talking about.
 
 [00:25:37]
 What applications they're using. And if need be. Maybe put in some parental controls on that and stay involved because if you divest yourself of interest in what your kids are doing on the phone. There's a good likelihood they're going to get themselves in trouble one way or the other. If you think about that.
 
 [00:25:55]
 Absolutely. I had a conversation with my son this weekend and even at 22 I felt compelled to have a conversation about Fentanyl because even though my son may not be doing it, he has friends. And I just felt that as his mom who loves him, it was my duty to at least have a Fentanyl conversation with him about, hey, this is Fentanyl, this kills. I don't know what any of your friends do if they're doing anything, but please, you need to be aware and you need to just tell them about this to be careful because as parents, the messages that we send to our kids will they take those messages and they share them with their friends. So even if you don't think your kid is doing it, by telling your child you may be saving one of their friends.
 
 [00:26:46]
 Oh, I totally agree with that. One of my mantras with I have three boys and a girl. Two of my boys are identical twins, so it was easy with them because I can talk to one of them at a time and the other one will get the message. There's a lot of peer pressure in school, particularly in junior high school and high school, and you want to go along with the crowd and you want to be cool and accepted. I think the one thing that at least from my personal perspective was I was a success at was can you just please be your own person and not worry about anything else again?
 
 [00:27:17]
 Being involved in their lives and paying attention to what they were doing. That was always something I stressed them. Was. Look. If you find yourself in a bad situation.
 
 [00:27:25]
 If the little hairs are going up on the back of your neck and you're saying to yourself. I'm here at this party tonight. And everybody's doing this and everybody's doing that. And I wonder if my dad or my mom were standing over my shoulder. Would they approve of what I'm about to do or what I'm doing now?
 
 [00:27:41]
 And if those little hairs are standing up on the back of your neck, you probably need to stop and either leave or call somebody to come and pick you up. And if that's somebody is me, I would be more than happy to come and pick you up. We've seen those on the after school specials. If you go to a party at 16 and you've had too many beers, don't get in your car and drive home. You need to call mom or dad or something.
 
 [00:28:04]
 Find a way home that's safe, because we'd rather have to scold you than bury you. Absolutely. Growing up, I was of the Dare generation, if you remember that. Don't do drugs. And everything we had law enforcement would come in and they would teach a class to us about saying no to drugs, and we had a little coloring book, and I absolutely loved it.
 
 [00:28:27]
 And that was pretty much the education that I got in high school. Little did I know my boyfriend's friend would roll up joints, put them in cassette tape holders. That's when we listen to cassette tape, and then that's how he would sell the drugs. And I was in the car one day when this went down, and I remember talking about having the parent on your shoulder. I remember witnessing this, thinking, oh, this is not good.
 
 [00:28:56]
 This is against the law. My parents would kill me. I don't want to be involved in this anymore. And so whenever they want it to all go out, I didn't go because I was like, no, this is wrong. It's not worth the risk for me to get caught.
 
 [00:29:11]
 So the messages that we instill in our children, whether it be through school or through the parents, even if you think your child is not listening, or they may not ever be in a situation, you're wrong. They're listening, and they very well may be put into a situation that they didn't expect. I lived in a small town, so I think there was this thing about that's not here. Well, yes, it is. Oh, it's everywhere.
 
 [00:29:40]
 Yeah, it's definitely in the big cities, and it's definitely in the small towns. And you get in the rural communities, it's even more prevalent than it is in some cities. I'm not picking on small towns, but there's places where there's not a whole. Lot to do. We're fortunate here.
 
 [00:29:56]
 You can go to the beach one day and Disney World the next day and SeaWorld the next day, and this place and that place you're living in a small place in Kentucky. So going back generations, they've been in mining or something like that. That's the lifeblood of that town. But for outside recreation, there's not too much to do there. And that's why you saw during the pill mill era, there was a lot of abuse in those states, ohio and Kentucky and West Virginia and places like that.
 
 [00:30:23]
 But you're right when that little bird on your shoulder tells you this situation isn't right, that's what you need to tell your kids. That's what you need to teach them. I think if you do it strategically with kids, they'll get it. They'll catch on to it. The best example is your example to set it so you live clean.
 
 [00:30:43]
 And I'm not saying you have to be overly Godly about things. I understand society as it is today. I may be a dinosaur, but I'm still living on the planet. I think that family values go a long way, and for the most part, kids tend to still listen to their parents. Yes.
 
 [00:30:59]
 At least I hope so. Have you ever had to witness a parent who has just found their child in cardiac arrest? Or have you ever had to witness that? Yeah, I have. Probably a couple of hundred times.
 
 [00:31:13]
 And that never gets easy. It doesn't matter if you're making a notification on a car crash fatality. Probably the difference between those two is where a car crash it's an incident of fate and maybe some poor decisions while driving or maybe poor decisions on the part of another driver that resulted in that. I think people as a whole can kind of wrap their head around. That kind of stuff does happen.
 
 [00:31:40]
 It's been happening since Henry Ford invented the automobile. But to try and explain to a parent why their son or daughter was smoking a little bit of cannabis or was thinking they were taking a Xanax or something else and ended up deceased at the age of 18 or 20 or 22, that's something all of us have a hard time in wrapping our heads around. That concept of why did that happen? It makes no sense to them whatsoever. And I think it has a much greater effect on parents who lose young people and children and their young adult offspring to fentanyl or other drugs than an accident, because it's not something you can understand.
 
 [00:32:31]
 Right. Thank you for sharing that. I think that sometimes in regards to our law enforcement, we forget that they are human and that they have to deliver this very sad message to parents and other people. And I can't imagine having that conversation or witnessing that real time with the parent or whatever the situation may be. So thank you for all you do.
 
 [00:32:56]
 I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Jenna, I wish I could share what the answer to the problem was going to be with the audience. And right now I don't know what the answer is going to be.
 
 [00:33:10]
 We pride ourselves on being prepared for emergencies. That's what we do. We respond to emergencies. So we tend to think that everything is critical. This is probably one of the biggest law enforcement challenges that I have seen in the 34, 35 years that I've been wearing a badge is fentanyl in this problem.
 
 [00:33:32]
 I don't think that we're going to make any better progress on this until we as a nation, and particularly our government, decides that they are going to either stem or eradicate this issue. And it's going to have to be a full fledged effort. I don't mean to pick on politicians. I'm a super voter. I like to vote.
 
 [00:33:55]
 That's the only way I can have my say in the government. But we hear a lot of talk, we hear a lot of accolades, we hear a lot of rhetoric. But somebody is going to have to get very serious about this problem and they're going to have to do it very soon because it is starting to spiral a bit out of control. And until we force our elected officials into the position of you will control this border, you will control this drug trade or knock it down, then it's going to continue. Because as I said before, as long as there is a dollar to be made in this business, somebody is going to find a way to make it.
 
 [00:34:37]
 And they are making billions of dollars in this drug trade. Either we fight the war and we win it, or we're going to risk losing a generation of young people to this drug. And we are in the, I think, the infancy of what the problem? Once it is totally exacerbated, this is what we're going to find in the years to come. I don't choose to live in that society.
 
 [00:35:02]
 I don't want to be there dealing with this. We have other problems in the country. This is one that we could solve if we put our minds to it and we put the proper resources to it. But again, it's mixed in with a whole other genre, political issues, whether it's immigration or border security or things like that. It's going to continue until we decide to do something about it.
 
 [00:35:25]
 There's no simple answer. No, if there were simple answers, we'd all be out of a job, right? Because we would fix the problems and you wouldn't need us anymore. I'm not going to get on the horse here, but look, defunding law enforcement is not the answer to the solutions of society. We don't create problems, generally speaking.
 
 [00:35:44]
 So let me pitch law enforcement for just a second while I have everybody's attention. I go to a lot of speaking engagements for the sheriff. A few years ago, I went to one and I said this can you tell me what members of law enforcement passed this law that you don't like? And nobody in the audience could raise their hand because it was a trick question. Because law enforcement, the police, the sheriffs, we don't pass laws.
 
 [00:36:09]
 We just enforce the ones that the wise men in our state capitals get across the finish line. And sometimes when you ask serious law enforcement professionals about the over criminalization of society, you might get some hands raised and go, there are some things that we've passed that are kind of stupid. And what that does is it takes the heat off the politician because they don't have to enforce the law. They hand it down to the minions down here at the state and county and local level to deal with. The political realm is very transient if you think about it.
 
 [00:36:43]
 So we have lots of ideas that come and go every two or four years. And I always like to say the greatest disasters in history have started with the words, I have a good idea. So we passed some laws and they become ridiculous after time or they become outdated or what have you. But the ladies and the men down here in the trenches are still having to enforce it because they're on the books now until the courts decide otherwise, that's ridiculous, we're going to get rid of that or don't enforce that method. And that has happened over time too.
 
 [00:37:13]
 But let me circle back. We don't pass the laws, we don't create the problems, and then you pass a law, you don't fund the proper resources to deal with it, or you say, that's your problem to go deal with now. And then here we are sticking our fingers in the dam, trying to stop the water flow because nobody wants to turn off the water on the other side of the wall. That's where we're at today, particularly as it relates to fentanyl, is nobody wants to turn off the tap and they expect us to stand there with our finger on the wall. For how long?
 
 [00:37:46]
 Until we can't do that anymore and that water is going to come gushing through that's. The stage that we're in right now, at least as it relates to this drug, is are we going to decide to turn the tap off or do you just expect us to stand there for the next ten years trying to plug up the leak? Because sooner or later something's going to give. Well said. Common sense.
 
 [00:38:07]
 Like, right, common sense. It's common sense. And again, let me give a caveat. That's my personal opinion on the matter. I'm speaking to you as a law enforcement veteran.
 
 [00:38:15]
 I'm not speaking on behalf of any agency. So I'm not giving an official position. I'm just giving you my personal opinion because I literally have been there and done that for a long time. Whether it's direct supervision of those activities in drug enforcement or now in my capacity of overseeing those supervisors who are supervising that activity. I see it every day.
 
 [00:38:36]
 And again, I don't know what the answer is moving forward, but I'm pretty sure we're not going to have any solution to it until we get serious about the problem. And right now, the United States is not serious about the problem. No, we'll talk about it. Yeah, we'll put it on the news every night. We'll write some articles about it.
 
 [00:38:54]
 We'll have events to mourn the losses of people, and we'll feel sad as we're watching pictures of people's children come across the screen. But where is the intestinal fortitude to finally say, okay, we're going to win this war and here's our strategy, and we're not going to stop until we've won? Yes. I don't know how many more lives we have to lose before there is some action. Like you said, I have a plan.
 
 [00:39:20]
 That's great, but until you actually start taking some steps and making some movements, some momentum, it's just words on a paper or words in your head. There was a good movie many years ago. It was a Tom Clancy novel originally. Could think about it, and I'm trying to think of the exact title of the book. There was a scene in there where the President was in the Oval Office.
 
 [00:39:45]
 I believe some very good friends of his were murdered on a yacht in the Caribbean by some drug dealers. They made the decision that they were going to send the CIA and all the black ops people down into Mexico and South America to wipe out these drug distribution networks. I'm not advocating for assassination, but that movie brings in this specific focus what it would take. And it was only until the leader of the country was affected in a very emotional way himself that he decided he was going to take very drastic measures to stop the problem. I don't know what it's going to take.
 
 [00:40:21]
 Maybe members of Congress losing their children before somebody finally steps up and pushes the government into securing the border or addressing this problem in another way. Maybe that's what it's going to take. Maybe they're not too concerned down here because it doesn't affect anybody personally. But I remember that all the time, that scene in that movie, how angry the President was that he had lost his friends to this. And I thought, is that what it's going to take?
 
 [00:40:47]
 Sometimes I look at 911 and how that brought us together as a country and just we became one. We honored and loved and cherished our first responders. Part of me is like, what is it going to take for people to recognize the fentanyl and where it's coming in? And how do we plug the hole that's in the wall, which is just getting bigger? There's not enough fingers that you could stick in there to stop it.
 
 [00:41:21]
 Something has to be done. And for me, in this moment, it's providing information and getting it out there, hoping people are listening and then taking that information and sharing it with their friends, with their kids. No matter what age they are, their community get involved. I agree. What we can do as communities is to try and reduce the consumer base.
 
 [00:41:51]
 The drug trade, like everything else, is a free market venture. It's supply and demand. We're not affecting the supply side. What we can do is affect the demand side, which is a good portion of the population in this country. People will talk about gateway drugs all they want.
 
 [00:42:10]
 I place a good amount of money on a bet that if you went back and asked any parent who lost a child to a fentanyl poisoning over the past five or six years. Tell me. Mom or dad. Would you have rather discovered that your young person was smoking marijuana as opposed to taking pills that they were getting over the Internet or being handed off by friends in high school or in college? Which would you prefer?
 
 [00:42:38]
 I'm not again condoning or advocating for the use of cannabis, but it's a serious question to ask people. Which would you prefer? What did you do last night? Well, I went home and smoked a joint and watched SpongeBob Square Pants. Okay.
 
 [00:42:52]
 Because you didn't wake up dead this morning, and that's a good thing. Absolutely right. I'm not a big legalization advocate. I think we've probably stretched that rubber band out a little too far in many places in this country that have legalized harder drugs. Florida has medical marijuana.
 
 [00:43:08]
 Now, that's helped a lot of people, or at least it says they're helping them to get into the open use and decriminalization or legalization of heroin or opiates or fentanyl products or things like that. I think that's just it's short sighted insanity to think that that's going to have a good outcome. Arguments on both sides. Well, you don't want to criminalize abuse, and I get that. But at some point, one final time, we need to stem the demand of the drug and choke off the money supply.
 
 [00:43:42]
 And that will be at least one part of a pincer move that we can take to deal with fentanyl and the other drugs that are coming through the border. Yes. If it's not available, you can't sell it. You can't make money. Right.
 
 [00:43:54]
 People can't become addicted to it. But then you also, I guess, have to question why would people take it in the first place? Everybody has their own individual answers, whether it be peer pressure, their addiction, whatever. But mental health also very much plays a role in that. And that's another topic where it's like we don't have the answer.
 
 [00:44:14]
 There's tentacles. When it comes to mental health, the. Tentacles all lead back to a dollar bill. I take prescription meds on a daily basis. I have a blood pressure, so I'll share that with everybody.
 
 [00:44:27]
 It's no wonder after 30 years of doing this job, everybody's got blood pressure issues. But our society, we're so overmedicated on everything. I'm one of those guys, like, I hate to take a pill, I can't stand it. I've had a couple of surgeries from injuries and I've told my doctor, I don't need 30 oxycodone or oxygen or hydrocodone. I need like, six to get me through the next two days.
 
 [00:44:51]
 And then I'm off this stuff because I don't like the way it makes me feel. I don't want any danger of becoming dependent upon it. So that's my personal perspective on it was, all right, take it to manage the second day after surgery and be done with it, and then I'm going to take a Tylenol or an Advil or something like that. I just can't stand that I've taught that to my kids as well. Here.
 
 [00:45:13]
 I don't need 60 hydrocodone pills laying around the house. For what purpose? You're not going to go through this whole bottle. It's not necessary. Get off of it.
 
 [00:45:21]
 You'll feel better. Vic, I appreciate you being here and sharing all that you did and also bringing in the law enforcement perspective of everything as well, which is so important. Well, first, thank you very much for the invitation. I greatly appreciate that. And second, thank you for what you're doing here to get the message out and to share this message with other parents and other members of our community.
 
 [00:45:47]
 You can only go to so many speaking engagements and talk about things, but let's use the resources we have, just like you're doing right now, and get this message out. And maybe if it only affects one parent or set of parents to say, what is my son or daughter doing on their phone? Or who are they hanging around with? Or Am I witnessing or observing some changes in their behavior, that's unusual. Are they digressing in their schoolwork?
 
 [00:46:13]
 Whatever that is, that's throwing up those little red flags. That's something that needs to have an honest conversation with your kids about. So you and I are going to solve this problem, but we can maybe affect some families. And if it saves a child, well, then it was worth the time, wasn't it? Absolutely.
 
 [00:46:35]
 No parents should bury their child. No, absolutely not. So what I'm going to say to the audience is, you've listened thus far, now share it. Share the message. It's easy.