CAMDEN – Joe Wysocki, deputy chief of the Camden County Police Department, had just told a very harrowing story:

A woman traveled from Boothwyn, Pennsylvania to Camden to buy heroin on Saturday. She injected it in the parking lot of a Family Dollar store.

A short time later, a Camden County police officer was flagged down at a gas station on Mount Ephraim Avenue. The woman had overdosed, and had to be revived with naloxone. 

Her 21-month-old son was in the car the whole time, strapped into his car seat in the back of the vehicle. She was taken to Cooper University Hospital, treated and released. She was charged with endangering the welfare of a child and with driving under the influence; her father, grateful she survived, took custody of his grandchild.

Someone remarked about the shocking nature of the story.

“We have a story like that probably every week, every day,” he replied.

Such is the devastation wrought by fentanyl. Since the powerful synthetic opioid was introduced to American streets, people addicted to heroin and other opiates are overdosing at an alarming rate.

And many of them are losing their lives.

U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez came to the Camden Waterfront Monday to announce new, bipartisan legislation aimed at stemming the flow of fentanyl, which experts say is 50 times more potent than heroin, into U.S. ports. The deadly synthetic and its analogs comes into the country from laboratories in China, Mexico and other countries through legitimate trade channels, Menendez said.

It’s then used to cut heroin, increasing its potency and its profitability, but at the cost of human lives.

According to data provided by county medical examiners to the NJ Dept. of Health, there were 2,750 drug-related deaths in 2017, the last year for which figures are available; of those, 1,379 victims had fentanyl or an analog in their system.

In South Jersey, that broke down as follows (note: Camden, Gloucester and Salem counties share a medical examiner): 

• Burlington County: 150 deaths, 87 with fentanyl or an analog present;
• Camden County: 308 deaths, an estimated 60 percent of which had fentanyl or an analog present, according to law enforcement officials;
• Cumberland County: 76 deaths, 54 with fentanyl or an analog present; 
• Gloucester County: 123 deaths; no data on fentanyl reported;
• Salem County: 20 deaths; no data on fentanyl reported;
• Atlantic County: 168 deaths; 111 with fentanyl or an analog present;
• Cape May County: 59 deaths; 32 with fentanyl or an analog present.

Statewide, drug-related deaths in which fentanyl or its analogs were found to be present went from 142 in 2014 to 417 in 2014, and to 818 in 2016.

The number of deaths in which fentanyl is a factor has risen dramatically in South Jersey, according to data from the state.

• In Burlington County, fentanyl-related deaths rose from 13 in 2014 to 38 in 2015, before declining to 23 in 2016.
• In Camden County, 2014 saw 12 fentanyl-related deaths; there were 53 in 2015 and 82 in 2016.
• In Cumberland County, 1 person died from a fentanyl-related overdose in 2014; 10 died in 2015 and 24 died in 2016.
• In Gloucester County, there were 3 fentanyl-related overdose deaths in 2014; that number rose to 17 in 2015 and to 38 in 2016.
• In Atlantic County, there were 9 fentanyl-related deaths in 2014; 23 in 2015 and 64 in 2016.

Dr. Lynda Bascelli, chief medical officer for Project HOPE in Camden, said Monday that her nonprofit, which offers healthcare to the poor and homeless in the region, has for many years seen people with long-term addiction to heroin.

Something has changed, though, recently, she noted: Patients who survived their addiction into middle age and beyond began seeking treatment.

She wondered: What compelled them to get treatment after living with the disease of addiction for decades in some cases?

The answer was simple.

“It’s not heroin out there anymore,” they would tell her. “It’s death.”

The legislation Menendez touted in Camden Monday has bipartisan support; co-sponsors include Democrats Chuck Schumer of New York, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Menende, along with Republicans Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Marco Rubio of Florida and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.

Menendez, ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Monday that sanctions targeting Chinese companies manufacturing fentanyl would be an effective deterrent.

The Fentanyl Sanctions Act, he added, would prohibit companies that manufacture fentanyl from working with any U.S. financial, banking or real estate entity, effectively locking them out of international finance. 

“The denial of access to our financial institutions is one of the most powerful sanctions we can levy … Virtually every transaction in the world ends up happening in dollars or coming to a U.S. institution.”

The act would also direct up to $150 million to the departments of Treasury, State and Defense to combat foreign opioid trafficking in the United States, and establish a Commission on Synthetic Opioid Trafficking to monitor and report on efforts to stem the flow of illicit opioids from China, Mexico and elsewhere.

The bipartisan support for the measure speaks to the urgency of the problem presented by fentanyl, Menendez added.

“Our Republican colleagues who’ve joined this bill are some of the most conservative when it comes to spending, and I think the mere fact that they signed on to it is a very powerful statement.”

“We need to get to the source of the poison that’s coming into the United States,” he said. “That doesn’t speak to Democrats or Republicans, that’s an American challenge.”

Phaedra Trethan: @CP_Phaedra; 856-486-2417; ptrethan@gannettnj.com

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