According to provisional data from the State Department of Public Health, opioid deaths are on the rise in Illinois. Nearly 29-hundred people died due to an overdose of opiates last year. That’s a 30 percent increase over 2019. 83 percent of those cases involved fentanyl laced drugs, which Marnell Brown, founder of the non profit Chicago based group “To walk in my shoes” says is turning up everywhere.
“The community I have been in, I’ve been in since 1966. In all my years I have never seen none like this, no. I have never seen anything like this, no. You know, because some of these guys are young and they actually don’t know what they are passing out, they don’t. They don’t know.”
Brown was speaking before a senate committee on the issue. Other speakers talked about the need to get drug users long-term treatment instead of putting them in jail and to aggressively pursue dealers who sell tainted drugs that end up killing someone.
Dupage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin says they are tackling the problem in two ways: getting users into treatment, and really going after dealers.
“The people who are dying in these cases are victims. Their drug users that drug dealers take advantage of and that is why I believe it is very important to hold these dealers accountable for their actions because what they are doing is really spreading these drugs that, for lack of a better term, contain poison and they kill people.”
IDPH says black men account for the most opioid overdose, but that the biggest increase seen over the year has been among Hispanic and Latin-X populations.
***Report Courtesy of the Illinois Department of Central Management Services***
