Following the major drug bust that took place Thursday morning in Lubbock and Lubbock County–Local Hospitals and Recovery Centers are seeing a growing problem with Fentanyl addiction, whether it’s pharmaceutical or the synthetic street drug version. George Comiskey, the Associate Director at the TTU Center For Recovery said they currently have students who are recovering from Fentanyl.
“Many of our students opiates and pain killers were a huge part of their story and if you get into that world you are going to come across Fentanyl at some point,” said Comiskey. “It’s very accessible, its part of the health care world and its part of the drug world.”
One of his students, Melissa Silva is currently studying in the program and hoping to counsel other drug addicts out there who are going through what she went through. Silva said she was prescribed the drug after she had endometriosis and found herself addicted. She was given lollipops and patches for pain. Working at The Dove Tree Ranch, she said a lot of their clients are struggling with Fentanyl.
“From the start when they gave me the first hit of medication through the IV it was my high so I didn’t want that to go away,” said Silva. “I would go in and say ‘I have chronic pain.. you need to help me here.'”
A group of Nurses at U-M-C created the acronym N.E.I.D.S : Nurses Educating In Synthetics. Nurse, Vern Pharr said they have encountered people as young as seven years old having encounters with synthetic drugs in Lubbock. They travel from school to school across Lubbock to warn about the dangers of Fentanyl and other drugs.
“3.2 millograms is a fatal lethal dose of this fentanyl that we cannot reverse,” said Pharr. “All of our efforts to reverse an overdose of fentanyl doesn’t work.. people are dying.”
