Just a couple of weeks ago, Emily’s Hope shared data that showed South Dakota holding the second-lowest opioid overdose death rate in the country.
But the concerns of fentanyl in the streets of Sioux Falls and Rapid City and everywhere in between continue to grow. Unfortunately, there is another synthetic opioid, much more potent and much more dangerous than Fentanyl, they are called Nitazenes.
The DEA identified 18 reports of Nitazenes from 1999 to 2004, then zero for the next 15 years.
Since 2019, seven thousand reports have been identified, a growing concern for a drug 10 to 40 times more potent than fentanyl.
“What people don’t know is that you don’t know what you don’t know. You might be getting a pill, it’s pressed, it looks like Xanax, it looks like whatever you’re getting from your pharmacy that looks very legitimate, the problem is that they’re not legitimate,” Hannah Statz DeVries, a physician in psychiatry for Avera, said.
Devries said she wants the state to continue to invest in prevention and identification measures of these opioids so that their presence can be tracked as accurately as possible.
There is a bipartisan effort in Congress to classify Nitazenes as a drug with no medical use and a high overdose risk. The bill would close a loophole that allows some versions of the drug to fall outside laws banning synthetic opioids.
South Dakota has the second-lowest overdose death rate of any state in the country. Emily’s Hope founder Angela Kennecke said this does not mean the fight is over.