A Mesa police officer overdosed on fentanyl while on duty. Will that shock Arizona awake?
Every major crisis has a moment that jerks people awake, that knocks them from their slumber and forces them to focus.
We may have had such a moment with fentanyl in Arizona.
A Mesa police officer overdosed on the drug in his patrol car and was found unconscious with his engine running and doors locked.
The car was in the middle of the street. Rescuers had to bust a window to save his life.
It was a story like this that grabbed a nation’s attention in 2017.
A West Virginia story shook us awake
In her groundbreaking report on the opioid crisis, The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot went to ground zero — rural West Virginia — to comprehend it.
In the first words of her highly touted essay “The Addicts Next Door,” she described a Little League softball game that ended when a couple watching the game fell unconscious, suffering simultaneous drug overdoses.
Paramedics rushed to save the man and woman as the children they brought with them grew hysterical, screaming, “Wake up! Wake up!”
What Talbot had described was a society ripping at the seams with all the telltale signs of despair and decline.
“At this stage of the American opioid epidemic, many addicts are collapsing in public — in gas stations, in restaurant bathrooms, in the aisles of big-box stores,” she explained.
That was seven years ago.
America's opioid crisis never ended
Since then, the opioid crisis has provoked enormous public scrutiny — congressional hearings and legal proceedings. Government regulators and prosecutors have cracked down on Big Pharma and the doctors who overwrote prescriptions.
But the crisis isn’t over. And it’s roaring in Arizona.
Since 1999, more than a million Americans have died from overdose deaths, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What was a prescription opioid crisis in 2017 is now a “synthetic” opioid crisis dominated by the deadly street drug fentanyl.
Today nearly 88% of opioid-involved overdose deaths are caused by synthetic opioids, the CDC reports.
“It is the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told a U.S. Senate hearing in February.
Arizona is a hub for fentanyl trafficking
West Virginia continues to lead the nation in overdose mortality, with 91 deaths per 100,000 population, according to CDC rankings. (Arizona is 17th with 39 deaths per 100,000.)
But Arizona has become its own kind of ground zero given its proximity to Mexico, where most U.S. fentanyl is cooked.
Both News Nation and Fox News report that Arizona is the hub of fentanyl smuggling in the United States, with more than 51% of the drug passing through our state.
With numbers like that, it is no surprise that Arizona would see absurd examples of social breakdown that shook West Virginia and the nation.
On Friday we learned a bystander found Mesa Police Officer Christopher Jenkins unconscious in his patrol car and apparently suffering a seizure.
Jenkins’ car was in the middle of the street, as reported by The Arizona Republic’s Ellie Willard. His doors were locked and his foot was on the brake with the engine idling.
Mesa officer had 3 drugs in his system
Jenkins’ fellow officers arrived and had to bust through the window to get to him. They administered CPR and Narcan, an opioid overdose antidote, until they were finally able to bring him back to consciousness, Willard reported.
At first, Mesa Police feared Jenkins had been exposed to fentanyl confiscated in a bust that same day. Jenkins had placed some of the fentanyl from the arrest into evidence but still had powdered fentanyl in the passenger compartment in his car, Willard reported.
Eventually, hospital tests revealed Jenkins had not only fentanyl, but cocaine and marijuana in his system. Soon he was under investigation.
All of this happened in May.
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Not long after, Jenkins was charged with two felonies and two misdemeanors and made his first court appearance.
Mesa P.D. reassigned him on May 25, and he formally resigned from the police force on June 1.
“Officer Jenkins’ actions are shocking and in direct conflict with the morals, ethics and integrity expected from members of the Mesa Police Department,” wrote Mesa Police Cmdr. Anthony Abalos.
Not even police can escape its snare
Jenkins is a symbol of an opioid epidemic that is threatening the lives of thousands in this state and killing nearly five Arizonans every day, according to data from the Arizona Department of Health Services.
Already this year, some 850 Arizonans have lost their lives to opioid addiction, DHS reports.
New Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has made fentanyl a priority.
“We need to throw everything we can at this crisis — new technology at the border, enhanced and strengthened partnerships, and access to more funding,” she said. “I stand ready to work with anyone committed to solving this.”
In July, U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema held a tele-town hall with 5,000 people, in which she discussed the fentanyl epidemic and explained two bipartisan bills she has introduced to try to stop the flow of fentanyl into Arizona.
Over the past two decades calamities have come and gone. The Great Recession is in our past. COVID-19 is a shadow. But the opioid crisis grinds on.
Now an epidemic largely centered on fentanyl, it is “the deadliest threat facing our country today,” added DEA’s Milgram.
And even police officers can’t escape its snare.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Mesa police officer overdoses on duty. Arizona's opioid crisis remains
