Special Agent in Charge Eric Jackson of the FBI’s Kansas City field office says opiate addiction in America has reached a level where “we can’t arrest our way out of the problem.”
In a new effort to stem the problem at its earliest stages, the FBI and the DEA have created a documentary called Chasing the Dragon. The film targets late middle school through high school students and will be distributed to school districts across the country.
It features what FBI Director James Comey says are “unscripted” interviews with opiate addicts or parents of opiate addicts. The movie makes connections between prescription opioid drug use leading to heroin addiction. Both language and imagery in the film are graphic in nature.
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The statistics presented
- 46,000 drug overdose deaths/year in U.S. More than gun violence or traffic related deaths combined. Half are related to opioid abuse.
- One in five high school students report misusing prescription drugs at least once.
- More than 10 million people 12 years old and older in the U.S. reported nonmedical use of prescription opioids in 2014.
- 1.4 million abused a prescription pain killer for the first time in 2014.
- In the 1960s, more than 80 percent of opioid abusers got hooked on heroin first. In the 2000s, 75 percent of opioid abusers started with prescription opioids.
Throughout the film, the interviews paint a dark, desperate and bleak picture of what life with opioid addiction looks like. Through the diverse group of addicts, Chasing the Dragon shows addiction reaches across all demographics, including a straight-A student, a Boy Scout and a mother of a newborn.
In one interview, a woman identified as Melissa says she had “a staff infection so my leg was four times its normal size. When the doctors cut my leg open to clean it out, I had maggots in my leg. They were eating the rot, the infection. That wasn’t enough for me to quit.”
Many of the addicts say their heroin addiction started with oxycodone, a prescription-based pain killer.
A doctor in the film tells the viewer addiction can begin after just one try.
In Kansas City
Kansas City police say 61 people have died from drug overdoses in Kansas City from 2014 to Feb. 17, 2016. Three of those deaths occurred in 2016 and two people so far this year were saved from an overdose using Naloxone, an emergency injection. Roughly 27 KCFD pumper trucks carry the drug onboard.
The FBI plans to shop Chasing the Dragon to local school districts beginning in April.
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Brian Abel can be reached at brian.abel@kshb.com.
