Sen. Amy Klobuchar visits Rochester to discuss the fentanyl crisis

Feb. 17—ROCHESTER — U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar visited the Rochester Police Department on Saturday, Feb. 17, 2024, to discuss the fentanyl crisis in Minnesota.

Klobuchar met with Rochester Police Chief Jim Franklin, accompanied by Vice President of the Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, Craig Anderson, Captain Casey Moilanen and director of Dodge-Olmsted County Corrections, Nikki Niles.

"Fentanyl is now involved in 92% of all opioid deaths in our state," Klobuchar said.

Deaths by fentanyl is a state and national issue that Klobuchar has taken upon herself to help eliminate, but there are many things the Rochester community is doing to eliminate overdoses involving fentanyl.

"One of the main messages that I wanted to send to everyone in the southern Minnesota region is 'one pill kills,'" said Klobuchar. "It's actually something kids can remember, because sometimes they unknowingly think they're getting a Percocet or something else, from a friend or off the internet. They don't know what's in it. And increasingly, we're seeing pills laced with fentanyl that are killing kids in this community."

A few things that Franklin is working on implementing include stationing more Narcan in the community to help treat potential overdoses, providing education and help to community members who need it, and attacking the issues from the source, drug dealers.

"If you dissect the problem, the Rochester Police Department is going to very aggressively proactively go after the supply side of this equation," said Franklin. "The drug dealers doing harm in this community, we're also going to support and try to reduce the demand side of the equation by supporting people that want to get into treatment through our police assisted recovery program, through our drug alcohol response team within this community, all which are very innovative and kind of cutting-edge philosophies that we are proud of for this organization."

Getting law enforcement back into schools to provide youth with education on drugs is very important to Klobuchar and the RPD. The department has embedded social workers from the Olmsted County Community Outreach Team to assist people involved in reported overdoses. The newly-formed Drug & Alcohol Response Team (DART) is dedicated to drug prevention and treatment. They offer programs for adults to get more education, resources and help.

"Half of the community outreach team also works with adults," Franklin said. "You can reach out to that team by calling the non-emergency number and asking for that Drug and Alcohol Response Team. In addition to educating the youth, we will do community outreach events. We've partnered with the city at Safe City Nights and events with event tables there to provide those pro-social activities.

"Olmsted County Public Health has social workers and school nurses in the schools as well. And so yeah, just reaching out to that team to come out and being at local community events to serve the entire spectrum of youth all the way through."

Officials said that taking fentanyl presents a dangerous gamble: Not every single thing laced with fentanyl proves deadly.

"It's roulette with these pills," said Moilanen. "Look at this huge bag of pills, I don't know which ones have failed or not. Six out of 10 of them have a potential for being failed. That is a scary, scary statistic. So there's a huge educational piece of how dangerous this actually is and so it's quite frankly something that we're trying to get the message out. That's why the one pill kills message makes perfect sense and it's easy to remember."

On a national level, Klobuchar is also working with others in Congress to tackle the fentanyl crisis. There are three major things Klobuchar and her associates are working towards specifically.

"Number one is to ... stem the flow of fentanyl from coming on our shores," she said. "You start at the border. One of the things we just passed last week in that package with the Ukraine funding was measures to make it easier for federal authorities to sanction these drug cartels internationally, and all of the other entities that do business with them, and then use that money, of course, to fund law enforcement here in the U.S."

Klobuchar is worried about both the Mexico and the Canada borders. Drug paraphernalia and fentanyl are coming in through both borders.

"Second thing that we can do is fund technology at the border," said Klobuchar. "There's all kinds of cutting-edge technology that should be able to be used to detect fentanyl, whether it's in cars, whether it's coming off of planes, whether it's in mail, you'd be surprised at the number of ways people use different delivery services to deliver fentanyl."

Unfortunately the technology part of the bill was cut despite Klobuchar's support. Still there is another bill that addresses technological needs at the border coming next month, according to Klobuchar.

The third thing that Klobuchar would like to see on a national level is the decrease of drug sales through social media. One way to do this is to hold individuals accountable.

"About one-third of the people that take fentanyl get exposed to it on social media on various platforms like Snapchat, Facebook and TikTok," said Klobuchar. "We recently had a major hearing and I focused very much on the fentanyl bill that would make the social media companies give the information to law enforcement when they know that one of these cartels or anyone is trying to sell fentanyl which is clearly illegal. I also would go a step further and actually make them liable for this."