Over the last several years, law enforcement has gained a new foe in the War on Drugs.

Though the synthetic opioid fentanyl isn’t anything new — it was developed some 60 years ago as an intravenous anesthetic used in hospital settings — its use as an additive in other illegal narcotics to increase potency and volume of product has become more prevalent across the United States in the last decade.

According to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, seizures of fentanyl pills have dramatically increased even in the last year. So far in 2023, the DEA has seized a record of more than 62 million fentanyl pills, exceeding the 2022 yearly total of 58 million pills. The DEA has also seized more than 9,700 pounds of fentanyl powder in 2023.

-Photo illustration courtesy of Drug Enforcement Administration
This photo illustration (at left) compares a lethal dose of powdered fentanyl with a penny.

Since the start of the “fentanyl crisis” in 2014, “outbreaks” of overdose deaths have cropped up across the nation, especially in large cities, according to the DEA. Though central Iowa may not see the same level of drug trafficking that large metro areas do, fentanyl is still present in local communities.

Here in Fort Dodge, narcotics investigators are seeing some fentanyl in the local drug trade, Fort Dodge Police Chief Dennis Quinn said.

“We don’t have a ginormous fentanyl problem, per se, but [the narcotics detective] said it is becoming one of those things where the other narcotics that people are using … it’s getting added into another substance, say like cocaine or methamphetamine,” Quinn said.

Quinn said that when investigators seize and test other illegal substances, they learn that fentanyl is present as well. Powdered fentanyl is often mixed into the other drugs to increase the potency of the product, he said. But because illegal narcotics are involved, there are no regulations governing the mixing of the drugs, so there’s no way to know if any amount of fentanyl added is a potentially lethal dose.

“Say, if you mixed it with a batch of meth and you parse it out into multiple bags, your first 10 bags may have barely any [fentanyl] in it and that 11th bag may be mostly fentanyl … which is where we get some overdoses from,” Quinn said.

Though fentanyl is most often mixed into other illegal narcotics, it is also sold and abused on its own in several different forms, according to the DEA. Street names for the drug include “Apache,” “China Girl,” “China Town,” “Dance Fever,” “Friend,” “Goodfellas,” “Great Bear,” “He-Man,” “Jackpot,” “King Ivory,” “Murder 8” and “Tango & Cash.”

It doesn’t appear that fentanyl is being manufactured or processed around here, Quinn said. He said that the narcotics detective works on tracking where the drugs are coming from and said that they’re being trafficked in from out of state.

According to Quinn, the department’s narcotics detective hasn’t seen a ton of instances of counterfeit pills being seized in Fort Dodge, but they have had some cases.

“I’m not so naive as to think that we haven’t had fentanyl pills here — I’m sure we probably have, but according to our narcotics detective, it’s not a very prevalent thing,” Quinn said. “Most of what we’re seeing is some form of it found with other drugs of some sort.”

What illicit manufacturers do, Quinn said, is press pills of fentanyl and other binding agents, and then label and sell them as something else.

“Some people may not even know that the pill they’re ingesting, they may be thinking it’s Oxycodone or something like that and think that it’s ‘safe’ to take, and then all of a sudden they overdose on something that they didn’t even know they were taking,” he said.

That’s exactly what happened to Dalton Ryder, a 19-year-old native of Webster City who died from an accidental opioid overdose in 2016. Ryder’s mother, Denise Ryder, has shared her son’s story many times, most recently at the Opioid Awareness Day event in Fort Dodge on Aug. 31.

In 2016, Dalton Ryder was living in Arizona and had run out of his prescription of hydrocodone for an old back injury that still pained him, so he reached out to someone he knew to buy a pill to ease the pain. He even looked for a photo of a hydrocodone pill online so he could verify that’s what he was about to take, but instead he was sold a counterfeit pill with a lethal dose of fentanyl mixed into it.

Using contaminated drugs or taking a counterfeit pill aren’t the only ways someone can experience a fentanyl overdose. The powdered form of the drug can become airborne and be inhaled, and in some cases it can be absorbed into the skin — so unwitting exposure to the drug is also a risk.

According to the DEA, a deadly dose of fentanyl is just two milligrams.

In 2019, a patrol officer with the Fort Dodge Police Department was exposed to a substance suspected to be fentanyl when he conducted a traffic stop and arrest on the Kenyon Road Bridge. While at the scene of the traffic stop, then-Officer Chris Weiland had handled an unknown substance found in the vehicle before transporting the driver to the Law Enforcement Center.

According to reporting from the time, on the way to the LEC, Weiland began feeling dizzy and asked the dispatcher to send medical help. The officer was able to just make it to the LEC, where another officer found him lethargic and unresponsive in his patrol vehicle.

Weiland received two doses of Narcan, a drug that reverses the effects of opioids and is used in situations of overdose, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, and received additional Narcan doses in the emergency room. He recovered and was released from the hospital the next day.

At the time, officials suspected Weiland had been exposed to fentanyl, but testing of the substance was inconclusive, Quinn said.

Less than a week later, the Rev. Al Henderson and his Serving Our Servants organization began raising money to purchase more doses of Narcan for officers to carry when on patrol. Each officer already carried Narcan, but Henderson was concerned about having a “ready” supply of Narcan for officers. Narcan is delivered in a nasal spray, which is temperature sensitive and can be less effective if exposed to extreme temperatures. The medication can also expire.

Today, FDPD officers still carry a box of Narcan at all times. It’s really meant to be available in case an officer is exposed during patrol or while executing a search warrant, but many times officers have used the Narcan sprays to revive an unresponsive person when sent out on overdose calls, Quinn said.

In the last 12 months, the FDPD has been dispatched on 34 calls for service for potential overdoses. That number does not accurately reflect the number of actual overdoses in the community, Quinn said.

First, some of those calls may have been initially reported as an overdose, but when officers and medics arrived, they found the situation to be something else. Secondly, not all overdoses are reported to dispatch as an overdose, Quinn said. Sometimes, the incident will be reported as a run-of-the-mill medical call with an ill patient, but when the Fort Dodge Fire Department takes the patient to the emergency room, physicians realize it isn’t an illness, but is actually an overdose.

“Then they don’t tell us, because they can’t tell us,” Quinn said, referring to medical privacy laws. “So it would be hard for us to get an actual number of overdoses.”

He said he wasn’t aware of any fatalities in Fort Dodge that have been definitively attributed to fentanyl overdose. But as long as the synthetic opioid remains mixed in with the local illegal drug supply, the possibility is always there.

“You just don’t know what you’re putting into your body with any of these drugs, or what could potentially be in that,” Quinn said. “Because, do you really trust your drug dealer? I mean, can you really trust someone who’s selling you an illegal narcotic?”