Word on the street: more fentanyl showing up in illegal drugs on First Coast

“I’ll be dead soon.”

Those were the parting words from a woman we’d just met walking on Blanding Boulevard, a woman who looked to be no older than mid-20s, a woman who showed the fading bruise on her arm from a heroin trip just last week, one that had her hauled away by an ambulance.

The woman didn’t want to speak on camera, but she validated what some say is a worsening crisis on the First Coast. She said the synthetic opioid fentanyl is being used more and more to lace drugs sold to addicts on the streets.

On the one hand, it’s an age-old problem.

“Honestly, it’s something that we respond to every day,” Jacksonville Firefighters Association president Randy Wyse told First Coast News on Thursday. A veteran of more than three decades as a first responder, Wyse said it’s often difficult to discern the type, quantity, or potency of drug a person has taken when EMTs and paramedics get the call.

“Sometimes we don’t know what’s in the stuff that individuals are taking,” he said.

But we couldn’t find anyone who said the problem is leveling, let alone easing.

“We’ve got a lot of junkies, so to speak, that walk up and down Blanding Boulevard, 103rd Street, Beaver Street, San Juan – they’re all over,” business owner Tim Johnson said.

Johnson has owned T&J Automotive & Custom Audio on Blanding Boulevard for some 15 years. He assured that the problem is indeed worsening. But while he’s accustomed to seeing ‘junkies,’ he’s not used to close encounters like the one he had the afternoon of Wednesday, June 5th.

“A customer came in, he wanted a quote on some car audio and installation,” Johnson began.

After Johnson gave the customer the information, the man went outside to his truck, parked on Johnson’s property, just outside his door.

“He was fiddling around with his arm,” Johnson said, clarifying that the man could have been injecting a drug.

He jumped back out of the truck and he was, like, woozing on one of the vehicles I had parked on the side.

Eventually the man got back in his truck – a scene Johnson captured with his phone camera while shouting to the man, “Are you okay, sir?!”

The video depicts the man hunched over in the passenger seat, not acknowledging shouts from Johnson and another bystander, just feet away.

“[He was] slobbering out the mouth and nodding,” Johnson recalled, “and, you know, he just wasn’t really responsive.”

That’s when Johnson called first responders.“They were upset and they said (to the man) you can’t be doing that at a business, and you’re going to kill yourself driving.

“But they let him drive off,” Johnson concluded with a bewildered shoulder shrug.

Wyse said he and his colleagues very often have to treat repeat abusers.

“That has been consistently the responses that firefighters have been making for a long time,” Wyse said, “is the continual response to same, either houses or individuals.”

Wyse pointed out that there’s no protocol limit to the number of instances responders can administer opioid antidotes such as Narcan to the same person.

 Which might be a blessing. While Wyse stopped short of confirming or denying any specific recent statistics, he made an observation that would seem to corroborate the claim of more fentanyl, made by the same woman who foreboded her own imminent death.

 “You will see upticks in where [victims] become either unconscious or not breathing, what we call full cardiac arrest,” Wyse said.